Oral Traditions: what's in the score?

I recently got inspired about the idea of plugging back in to the big picture of music history which consumed my life for many years during school. 

For awhile, I've been eyeing Richard Taruskin’s The Oxford History of Western Music, but I was short $650 and 2 square feet of backpack space.  By the miracle of advancing technology it came out on the Kindle, so I could digest it for a reasonable price during my endless plane, train, and automobile journeys. 

I started at the beginning, where his vivid descriptions and detailed arguments grabbed me immediately. I thought it would be satisfying to write about how some of these long-ago and far-away issues might relate to what I am doing today.

Going Way Back 

Taruskin points out that it can be tricky to construct history from documents (even though that's usually all we've got to work with). The tendency is to assume that the documents tell the whole story.  The further back you go, the more trouble this assumption gets you into. 

His discussion of the origins of Gregorian plainchant got my juices flowing, even though I knew the outlines of it already: 

But Roman church chant was only one of many musical repertories that coexisted in Europe a thousand years ago. It is the first repertory that, thanks to notation, we can study in detail, and so our story must inevitably begin with it. And yet we know from literary and pictorial sources that there was plenty of secular and instrumental music at the time, as well as non-Christian worship music, and that these repertories had long histories going back long before the beginnings of Christian worship. We have every reason to assume, moreover, that much of the music sung and played in Europe had for centuries been polyphonic—that is, employing some sort of harmony or counterpoint or accompanied melody.

Taruskin, Richard (2009-07-27). Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century : The Oxford History of Western Music (pp. 26-27). Oxford University Press, USA. Kindle Edition.

So we could view early chant either as the Big Bang of music history, or as one of many different types of music that were going on at the time, and that for whatever reason it was expedient to write it down. 

Taruskin gives a reason:

With the establishing of the Roman pope as spiritual patron of the Carolingian Empire, the liturgical unification of the whole broad realm according to the practices of the Roman See became imperative. It would symbolize the eternal order that undergirded the temporal authority of the Carolingian rulers and established their divine mandate. This meant suppressing the so-called Gallican rite, the indigenous liturgy of the northern churches, and replacing it with Roman liturgical texts and tunes. 

Taruskin, Richard (2009-07-27). Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century : The Oxford History of Western Music (pp. 31-32). Oxford University Press, USA. Kindle Edition.

The origins of a common notation in western culture had very little to do with qualitative judgments or any desire to establish a “literate” musical culture.  They were politically efficient tools for homogenizing worship, and therefore strengthening the church’s control over its outlying parishes. 

The monks of the time had a generally common style with regional differences, which was passed from teacher to disciple. Notation was a memory aid and a unifying tool, but not “the work itself” in any way like we’d think of it now. 

This subject interests me because, as a performer in a diverse musical landscape, I  am called upon to make, recall, and interpret music in many different ways.  I read detailed notation, devise shorthand, and frequently remember information that was explained or demonstrated to me. 

There is also the matter of interpretation:  even the most classical of performers has learned how to play from somebody who had to show them.  Many pianists trace their pedagogical lineage back to a particular artist or composer, and claim a special authority in interpreting a composer’s music based on oral tradition that was handed down to them. 

Finally, as a percussionist I am hyper-aware of  - though not particularly trained in – fabulously rich traditions of music-making that don’t rely on a corpus of written texts for their foundation. 

It got me thinking both about the extent to which I participate in,  and pass on, oral traditions, as well as what role the written score actually plays in bringing a piece of music to life. 

John Cage - Third Construction (1941)

John Cage’s centenary in 2012 offers an opportunity to reflect on his legacy.  It also represents the furthest I get from the source of the music we play in So: I was 13 years old when he died, and encounter his work only as legacy.  My experience is mediated by teachers, readings and the scores themselves. 

One of the elements of performance practice that is peculiar and unique to percussion is instrument choice. Third Construction offers a lot of room for interpretation within instrument descriptions (tin-cans, toms, cowbell, shaker).  Because the piece was written in 1941 and the composer is deceased, we have to decide how we’d like to balance our own ideas with established performance tradition.

For example:  it is widely known that Cage’s toms were Chinese drums that have a wonderful warm sound.  Many interpreters prefer using these drums, and some might even insist that Cage would have too.  But the score just says “toms,” and there are so many different kinds.  Do we have a responsibility to follow this tradition, to add our layer of practice firmly on top of those that have sprouted up in the last 70 years? 

I think for So, the answer is “it’s complicated,” especially where Cage is concerned.  It's always good to know more about the music that you are playing.  In this sense, the fact that Cage was partial to drums that have a warm sound and melodic quality certainly sheds light on the composition. 

But the idea of establishing an orthodoxy regarding a wildly experimental artist like Cage doesn’t sit well with me.  Of course, there are instructions that must be obeyed:  all of the notes and rhythms in the score have to be realized for it to be Third Construction, and the sounds should be reasonably within the realm of "toms," "shakers," etc.  But voicing the score by choosing instruments –  scrounging around your own collection as he did – is an extremely satisfying interpretive process. 

Even if you decide to stick with a particular type of instrument that you feel Cage would have liked, he gives absolutely no indication of register or hierarchy:  the toms and tin cans can be voiced SATB, they can all be the exact same type of instrument, etc.  These decisions affect the outcome dramatically. 

Steve Reich - Drumming (1971)

When So Percussion first started out, Steve Reich’s Drumming was one of only a few truly monumental works for percussion.  At that time - about ten years ago - the piece existed almost entirely as oral tradition:  everybody who knew it had been taught by somebody who had been taught by somebody who learned it from Reich’s original percussionists. 

The score certainly existed, but it was easier to explain the elements – such as phasing, setup, ways of feeling time – than it was to read them off of the page.   In our group, Doug Perkins learned it from the Percussion Group Cincinnati as a student.  Doug taught it to Jason, Todd, and Tim.  When I joined, he and Jason taught it to me.  Jason and I taught it to Lawson, Josh, and Eric. Since then, we have played it with Reich and many of his original percussionists (Bob Becker, Garry Kvistad, Russel Hartenberger).  

There's a point at which you just have to be in the room with somebody and drum with them to absorb the essence of the piece. 

As a composer, Reich is very clear about what he wants. But as a living composer, he is also open for input, available for us to throw out ideas and creative solutions.  We have been delighted at how willing he is to engage with our ideas.  

This is on my mind partially because Boosey and Hawkes just published a wonderful and definitive new score.  It lays out performance practice and all of Reich’s preferences for how the piece should be interpreted.  It is now a master text that future generations will reference and cite, assuming that it continues to be performed.

For those to whom this legacy matters, I will in some small way provide a living link back to the composer and the origins of the piece.  This prospect is exciting, and yet a part of me guesses that I’ll always be passing along my own idiosyncrasies and preferences, not necessarily referencing - though not inconsistent with - the definitive score, published 4o years after the performance practice first came to life.    

Jason Treuting - Amid the noise (2006)

Jason Treuting and I have just finished editing the first volume of his amid the noise for publication.  In contrast with Third Construction  and Drumming, I was a first-hand witness to the creation of the music.

Some people expressed interest in performing it, so we set about trying to notate it.  Actually, I became involved precisely because I was there when so much of the music was created through a fluid process of note-taking, sketching, and throwing out spontaneous ideas. It was conceived first as a recording, and later reverse-engineered for live performance. 

When So first started performing amid the noise, those of us who had made the recording simply started adapting from the many layers on the album.  If  Jason expressed a preference for something, he could explain or notate it in shorthand, and we already had most of the context we needed to fill in the blanks.  When new members joined the group, we initiated them into a process of understanding the parameters and assumptions of the musical style. 

As Jason and I set about codifying amid the noise on paper, he wanted to strike just the right balance:  the interpreters would be given many of their own decisions to make, and different performances of the music would vary wildly.  Still, there were some ideas and musical decisions that we had to codify for the integrity of the score to remain intact.  Our greatest challenge was to find this balance in a way that felt good for Jason. 

Below is an excerpt from the completed score, which has just been published by Good Child Music.  We wrote a lot of prose explanation, notating harmonies, melodies, and rhythms as needed. 

june

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power;

We have guided missiles and misguided men. –MLK, Jr.

Instrumentation: Rhythmic noise element; sustaining chord element; optional ambient or chance noise element; drone.

Harmony/Melody:  Sustaining instrument performs the chords, using the length of each word in the quote as a guide for length of sustain.  Each letter represents 1”, so that the first chord will sustain for 3” (our), the second 10” (scientific), etc.  The first group of 4 chords must be used exclusively for the first line of text (Our...power).  The second group of 2 chords may be mixed in for the second line (We...men). Chords may be chosen freely, but only the top or bottom voice may change from one to the next, not both.  

This may seem like a strange route to take:  isn’t the composer’s job to make these very decisions, to filter out what sounds the best and then convey these preferences to the interpreter to execute? 

The only real answer is that the composer must notate what he or she wants to control.  The outer boundary of this concept is embodied in Cage’s 4’33”, in which the composer controls none of the sounds contained within the performance. Somewhere between the most meticulously described scores and 4’33” lies each composer’s style; between what is theirs, what is the performer’s, and what may be allowed to happen in time and aural space.  

The Experimental

Recently I gave a talk and facilitated discussion between two terrific artists: my buddy Josh Quillen from So Percussion (functioning in this capacity as composer), and the choreographer Adele Myers, with whom he had worked on a new project. It was part of a residency series organized and sponsored by the Vermont Performance Lab, which is doing incredibly vital and amazing work.

The talk was about experimental and pop music and dance.

Really, my talk was about experimental and pop music only, and I asked Adele (who teaches dance history and theory) a lot of questions about dance.

My questions for the talk were as follows: are either of these terms meaningful? Do they describe a mode of operation, or do they imply actual musical styles? Can one operate on the other?

It is not clear to me whether the answers to these questions are meaningful for creative work. As usual, there is probably a fertile middle ground where these concepts intermingle in art. But I became aware of the fact that my usage of the word experimental with reference to my ensemble So Percussion was unexamined. I use it to encompass our diverse activities for marketing purposes, and I will probably continue to do that – strong short labels are necessary in a crowded marketplace – but I want to have a better personal sense of what I mean by it.

So I suppose this essay (an attempt) is only a process of self-examination.

For a fuller treatment of the Anglo-American Experimental Music movement, Michael Nyman’s 1974 book Experimental Music is still a powerhouse reference. He flushes out a brilliant definition of experimental music, and aptly captures the scene that coalesced in the 50's and 60's.

First to John Cage:

“What is the nature of an experimental action? It is simply an action the outcome of which is not foreseen.”

from Silence, 1961

This quote immediately presents problems for me, because almost every aspect of music-making could meet this condition: an improvisation, the vagaries of live performance, even Milli Vanilli’s tape-skipping (am I dating myself too much here? Ok, Ashlee Simpson).

So let’s stick to one parameter: the act of creation or composition. If you play a Beethoven piano sonata correctly, you will play the same notes every time, and they will be the notes that the composer intended you to play. So the results – at least with regard to content – were intended and foreseen by Beethoven.

If you toss coins (physically or electronically) to generate the structure for John Cage’s Child of Tree, you will have before you a composition in which the composer does not control what is played, or in what sequence -- although Cage, ever enigmatic, is careful to specify that the piece is 8 minutes long, in a satisfyingly divided combination of minutes.

In 4’33”, you have a piece in which the content is impossible for the composer or even the performer to control (I suppose you could shoot the birds near an outdoor venue, stop traffic around the concert hall, only invite friends who promise not to cough, and therefore exert some control).

So Cage - mostly - fulfills his own definition of an experimental action: the content in performance is unforeseen by the composer, therefore he has written a kind of experimental music.

Here is an excerpt from one realization of Cage’s Fontana Mix, which as Cage indicates is “indeterminate with respect to its performance.” If you are not familiar with Fontana Mix, here are some notes about it (I'm pretty sure they are Cage's):

“This is a composition indeterminate of its performance. It is derived from notation CC from Concert for Piano and Orchestra. The score consists of 10 sheets of paper and 12 transparencies. The sheets of paper have drawings of 6 differentiated (in thickness and texture) curved lines. 10 of the transparencies have randomly distributed points (the amounts of points on the transparencies are 7, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 22, 26, 29 and 30). Another transparency has a grid, measuring two by ten inches, and the last one contains a straight line (10¾ inch).

By superimposition the performer creates a structure from which a performance score can be made: One of the transparencies with dots is placed over one of the sheets with curved lines. Over this one places the grid. A point enclosed in the grid is connected with a point outside, using the straight line transparency. Horizontal and vertical measurements of intersections of the straight line with the grid and the curved line, create a time-bracket and actions to be made.”



This work pretty well represents what Richard Taruskin called the “Scary Purity” of Cage. The experiment does not ripen into a smorgasbord of resources to “compose” new kinds of music: the music is the experiment, the experiment the music.

Of course, if you wander outside of the theoretical parameter of composition, it is difficult to say what outcomes can be controlled or not.

But I have a feeling that for many people, experimental means something more.

I wonder if the term itself falls prey to a simultaneous vagueness/specificity. Perhaps it is often meant to identify music that does not conform to a mainstream expectation, one which tinkers with styles and formulas, or which at least provides a product that a broad audience cannot immediately classify. The problem here is that you could be describing so much music.

It becomes another form of the alternative. An alternative to what? What is our baseline reference for which an alternative is being provided?

I’m not really sure how to get anywhere with this: my experience has given me too much information to dismiss most of our canonical composers as somehow “non-experimental” just because I feel that later people were more radical, or closer aesthetically to where I am personally. Check out Beethoven’s late music, Franz Liszt’s Nuages Gris, The Well Tempered-Clavier, Tallis’ Spem in Alium… the list is too long to be meaningful.

I’m strangely comforted by Cage’s definition of the experimental, because it is something we can evaluate piece-by-piece.

Pop!

And so on to a brief consideration of pop. My thinking – and experience – is on much less sure footing here. I have always felt pop, known it when I heard it. I’m not sure how to locate it or define it. Does it have to do with popularity?

Is it ‘accessibility?’ Yikes, that's a minefield: music is accessible when somebody has context for understanding what is being presented to them, which varies with each person, performance, place, etc.

Maybe it just refers to something that can or has gained traction with a broad swath of people. That at least can be measured to some degree: record sales, ticket sales to live performances, etc.

It helps me to work backwards: is Judy Garland a pop icon? Duh. Why? Because her image, voice, and work penetrate the experience and consciousness of people who otherwise don’t necessarily share anything else in common: professional connection, socio-economic status, geographical location. John Cage is quite well known, but in my experience it’s by people who are especially interested in a particular music, dance, art, etc. I believe very strongly that his ideas have penetrated our culture, but I know from experience that you can’t mention him to a diverse audience the same way you could Judy Garland and expect the same recognition.

Perhaps we could also say that pop extends to music that is made with some calculation toward achieving what I outlined above.

In the end, I don’t think I have anything to latch onto: there are too many examples of classical music that have achieved the same ubiquity of a Judy Garland, and yet we would never call them pop.

It may be that we would have to dig much deeper into pop music’s commercial past, and simultaneously the different versions of the avant garde who self-consciously opposed it. (I’m reminded even of Jack Black’s character in the movie High Fidelity, who was so self-assured in his taste and opposition to pop: “Do you even know your daughter? There’s no way she likes that song!”).

The Blondie Experiment

All of these speculations were spurred by considering the work that Josh and Adele are making together. Josh’s style is very familiar to me, although it is developing in many exciting directions at once. He loves to sample, pulling sounds from all over the place, but the samples are usually obscured, muffled. They don’t often engage the original source as content, but rather as a sonic resource only.

Adele has a strong connection to pop music, both as choreographer and also in life. She has often used it in her work. For this project, she wanted to use Blondie’s Heart of Glass as the final number for the show, which is entitled Theater in the Head. She proposed throwing the original up on the speakers, and letting her ebullient dance unfold. For Josh, this presented something akin to a crisis of conscience: as a composer he would never do that without commenting upon it in some very strong way.

Although their collaboration has been very fruitful and synchronous, this remained a sticking point. Adele knew she liked it, but Josh felt that it would necessarily be interpreted as an integral part of the musical score, a decision that he would be unlikely to make on his own.

The compromise they arrived at fascinated me. Since the soundtrack was being assembled and mixed at Guilford Studios (which is associated with the Vermont Performance Lab project), Josh asked if it would be alright to have a bunch of regular people come into the booth and sing whatever part of the song they wanted to over the original track. Along the way, he established a few rules: they should emphasize fun over accuracy, and he and the engineer were not allowed to fix any “mistakes” or errant sounds and comments. Each singer had only one take…if they forgot some words or missed a chord change, so be it.

Here’s what resulted. It bears a resemblance to Gavin Bryars’ Portsmouth Sinfonia from the 1970’s, in which he asked people who had no training on a particlar instrument to play familiar classics.



Josh's Blondie track:



Is this a pop song? I haven’t established a rigorous criteria, but I think it’s safe to say yes. Is it experimental according to Cage’s stringent definition? Well, yes actually. After Josh set the process in motion, he had no control over whether people would sing in-tune, make stray comments, or even sing the song at all. Although the recording became fixed once it was on tape, it was only one realization of a very conceptual piece, much of which was “indeterminate with respect to its performance."

My question, especially for any American who has grown up deluged by pop: Do you think this sounds like experimental music?

?

In the end, this is mostly an intellectual game. I've only chosen to address certain pre-compositional parameters, and that's quite limiting (as many comments below reinforce).

Art is probably too big. But that's a good thing.

Other Voices

I asked some friends and colleagues to tell me what experimental means to them.

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Steven Schick

"I've always been bothered by the term experimental music, and especially bothered by Cage's definition, which feels like a rare example of his being facile at the expense of being honest. After all, wouldn't two performances of a Haydn Sonata by say Brendl and Gould be very different, producing in essence unforeseen results? If two performances of the most standard classical repertoire produce unforeseen results then what meaning does experimental have at least along these lines? Cage might have responded that the granularity and scale of "the unforeseen" are small in Haydn. But aren't there serious problems with a definition that rests on questions of scale -- that you need X amount of unforeseen in order to be experimental. And if we go down this pathway, how do we determine the minimum amount of unforeseen-ness necessary to qualify as experimental?

The scientific definition of experiment also seems wrong. In a scientific experiment all parameters except one are controlled so that the unforeseen results of the experiment can clearly be assigned to test the theorem in question. But musical parameters flow together combining fluently in such a way that a "controlled experiment" seems impossible even to imagine.

Experimentalism to some is a genre, in other words, it's music that sounds like Lucier or like Braxton. But wasn't even a conventional composer like Brahms also an experimentalist? The way he handles the abbreviated return of the exposition in the 4th symphony is a radical and progressive reformulation of form. Schoenberg was right in his essay "Brahms the Progressive." So experimentalism often seems like a tribal marking these days, intended as much to exclude outsiders as shed light on the insiders.

Every time I consider this question I end up disqualifying all of the most obvious definitions for experimentalism, but does that mean it doesn't exist? It seems to me that any musical act is an experiment, in sonic, cultural, social and historical terms. I just have trouble deciding which pieces of music are more experimental than others. This is basically the same answer that Ferneyhough gave when someone asked him what "complex" music was. "Show me music that is not complex and I'll accept the term," he responded. The changing dimensions of the creative act and the unknowability of the interface with perception means that experimentalism is the pervasive ether of any genuine musical experience, of any style or genre. I think Cage was engaging in some gamesmanship with his definition, poking at people whose methodologies he did not admire. I wish he had simply told them that their music was crap -- after all not all experiments are successful."

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Paul Lansky

"On one hand I think most of what we call 'concert' music is experimental in that it takes an intersubjective assessment to figure out whether it works or not. That is, a composer writes a piece, thinks it may or may not work but withholds judgment until performers and listeners have had a go at it. There are undoubtedly some composers who can write a piece and know before anyone lays a hand or ear on it that it will work. I, for one, do not know anyone like this. Every composer undoubtedly has a rough sense about the success of a piece but it has to see some action before it can really be evaluated.

On another hand I'd refine Cage's definition somewhat and say that there is a brand of experimental music that arises from a postulate. You have some abstract or general idea about how a piece of music can go and try to realize it. Ravel has a notion to hold a repeated Bb all the way through the 2nd movement of Gaspard; Messiaen uses only the notes of a symmetrical scale etc. They then do their best to make music out of it and because they're really great musicians, something resembling music emerges.

Then on the "third" hand there is the experimental composer like Cage, or even Schoenberg or Babbitt, who bet the farm on an idea and push it through to a conclusion. Performers may balk and listeners run for the exits but the 'validity' or success of the piece is not at issue. The experiment can't be said to succeed or fail. It's simply a new genetic mutation in the course of music and may or may not lead to something. (survival of the grooviest?) I generally find myself in the 2nd category, sometimes in the first, and never in the third."

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David Lang

"I think the first question you have to ask about experimental music is "experimental to whom?" Is it experimental to an audience? I don't think so - to an audience that has never heard it before, all classical music must sound pretty weird, for example.

The answer I am most interested in has to do with what is experimental to each composer, in each piece - has the composer set something in motion or made some pre-compositional decision about what might happen in a piece, so that he or she doesn't completely know beforehand where such a decision will lead? Philip glass's 'two pages' is an experimental piece while the violin concerto isn't - both are really good pieces but 'two pages' combines patterns and counts them and builds up a structure from numbers in a way that was not well explored when he wrote it, while the violin concerto is Phil's translation of some of his ideas into a more recognizably tradition-based idiom.

It is much harder to be an 'experimental composer' than to write a single piece of 'experimental music.' I suppose you can say that Cage spent a lot of energy across an entire lifetime trying to imagine newer and odder and more abstract ways to think about music; even Cage, however, wrote a bunch of pieces towards the end that were just new versions of things he already knew how to do really well. I wouldn't consider them experimental, even though they sound great."

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Josh Quillen

"…as far as experimental music is concerned, I think that's what all music has been, is now, and will always be. I, as a musician who performs quite often, have NEVER been sure of what the results or outcomes of the performance were going to be, regardless of the composer's music I was playing or whether I was wearing a tuxedo or jeans and a workman's shirt on stage. Therefore, I propose--music can only exist in performance.

Performance exists with an audience(large or small). Audiences are unknown variables. Performance cannot take place without unknown variables. Therefore, music=experimental at its very core. John Cage's 4'33'' and Steve Reich's Four Organs both had unforseen results, both of which had one constant--the audience. Reich's music, however, was codified and written down, Cage's was too, but in the broadest sense possible. Neither one of them could control what people would think. Was the Rite of Spring experimental music? I think it was. Is it still? I think it is. Dan Deacon actually uses the unknowns that audiences bring to the table by harnessing them for group expression and catharsis."

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Bobby Previte

"Personally I don't like the word experimental. First of all, it sounds way too uncommitted a frame for the performer. Like, 'I am going to try this out, if it doesn't work, well, I'll just try something else, because it's just an experiment.' Perhaps that's what we are really doing in the end, but calling it experimental allows you to put in place a firewall between you and it. I am all about ownership of everything you do. Without the full commitment, the feeling of being fully committed, I think what will emerge will be weak and aimless. Now, aimless music can be great..if you're committed to aimlessness - see?

Secondly, it begs the question - to whom or to what is it experimental? A scientific experiment has a goal, a set of results that one is seeking. Are we seeking a set of concrete results? An experiment supposes that one has a thesis to prove. Do we? Or is this exactly why music/art is so powerful, because it does not answer any questions?

Lastly, and most importantly, it creates an imbalance between the "one making the art" and the "one consuming the art." If you have an experiment, then who decides if the experiment is successful or not? I think the answer is very clear. Ask yourself this question: if you performed music you considered "experimental" for a thousand people and they all went wild with admiration and approbation, would you still consider the music experimental? Ha ha. I think not. And, in the opposite case, if they threw tomatoes, you might very well abandon your music because your experiment "failed." When people use this term, I think beneath it all it must be understood that the final arbiter is the outside world. The problem is, this takes the life of the work out of the hands of the creator and puts it into those of the end user, where it does not belong, and where, even though everything in our modern life pulls it in that direction (that in itself is another essay), both the creator and the consumer are ultimately ill served."

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Allen Otte

"I have always loved/found so useful the phrase/thought from Cage’s very-much-contemporary-traveler-Modernist Herbert Brün [though Herbert wouldn’t much like the bed-fellows implication] -- “what if this were thought to be music?”

If Beethoven’s late quartets were experimental in their time and place, and denounced as not being music, then the question to have been asked is: well, what if it were music? What would it say about art and ideas and society and time and place and reflection-upon/reflective-input-to if indeed we did call such-and-such composition [experiment], from any given time and place, “music”, and what could that tell us about ourselves and what-next?"

Bobby Previte's "Ten Thoughts About Improvisation"

10 thoughts about improvisation:

1) Do no harm.

2) If you aren't feeling anything to add, either shut up or do something you never could have imagined yourself doing in that situation. Be bold - change the music, or don't.

3) Whatever you do, do it forcefully. Fully commit to every gesture you make.

4) Note about #3 - forcefully does not necessarily mean loudly. If you stop playing altogether that can be the most aggressive act imaginable. It all depends on context and intent.

5) When you are playing, cultivate a total disregard for what others might think of what you are playing. In fact, disregard what you might think about it. Later on, if at all, is the time for such thoughts.

6) Think like a composer: own all the music, not only what you play but what others play. Do not separate what is "yours" based on something so trivial as who is physically playing it. If you are improvising, you are playing all the music.

7) Never ever (almost never ever) imitate - it's the cheapest form of communication. If you must respond, respond on a parallel plane. Remember, "interaction" is overrated.

8) Don't try too hard. Don't try to make things "work." We aren't trying to make chairs. Human beings are complicated, and so is their art. They, and it, often don't "work." Especially don't try and play music. If it sounds like music, it probably isn't.

9) Don't practice something on your own and then insert it into an improvisation - this means you almost certainly have not been listening.

10) Beware of "strategies." Strategies are for golfers and hedge fund managers and are useless if you want to get to something authentic. Because what, in the end, are you trying to do, other than take what is in your insides and compare it with and connect it to all the other insides? Strategies, techniques, etc are all false choices. You might get oohs and ahhs, but you will not have an epiphany. Trust me, the epiphany lasts a lot longer.

and one more, the most important:

11) In the heat of battle, ignore 1-10.

-Bobby Previte

www.bobbyprevite.com

Listening to Drumming

By which I mean not how you should listen, but how you could.

I hope that soon it will not be a novelty to play music that is mostly for percussion instruments. We’re getting to a point where we evaluate content.

The first gesture of Drumming seems blatant, but it is the first ambiguity.

Phasing is a machine-age method, but its results are ancient: canon.

All of Drumming is melodic and harmonic.

After the first phase has occurred, there are now millions of motivic possibilities. Reich allows it to loop so you have time to hear some of them.

The drummers, singers, whistler, and piccolo player suggest a few musical phrases that exist within that texture. You may also hear some that they do not play.

Any division of 12 can be heard as the correct pulse.

Any part of the rhythm is a valid downbeat. Once phases have occurred, any part of any player’s rhythm is also a valid downbeat.

There are no downbeats.

Large-scale organization is by timbre and register, not by inherited forms.

In Drumming, the human voice should emulate the percussion instruments as closely as possible.

for Paul: the creation of Threads

The title of this entry is taken from a piece that Jason Treuting wrote a few years ago.  It reflects the lasting influence that Paul Lansky's work has had on all of us in So Percussion.  Although the following article is mostly about his wonderful percussion quartet Threads, as composers we have all been profoundly affected by Paul's unique mix of head and heart, rigorous thought with emotional content.

My first exposure to any of Paul's music was unwitting, as I'm sure it has been for many people:  the gnarly, distorted portion of Mild und Leise that Jonny Greenwood found in the back of a record shop and pasted into Idioteque.  I was astounded to learn years after Kid A came out that this loop was actually the tiniest passing chunk of an 18-minute long computer piece from 1973 based on Richard Wagner's Tristan chord (and making reference to one of his most famous arias):

Mild und Leise:  

To talk to Paul about the evolution of computer music is to hear its entire history: when he was working at Princeton and Bell Labs in the 1960's, the computers were "as big as this room and less powerful than your cell phone" (as he told an audience of our Summer Institute students last year who were sitting in a very large room).  

I highly recommend reading Paul's keynote speech from a recent ICMC (International Computer Music Conference) here.  For a younger person or percussionist who only knows Lansky through his acoustic compositions, this speech will give you a powerful sense of where he is coming from and his place in the last 50 years of music history.  If you ever meet him, you shouldn't let his unassuming manner fool you: his is a powerful, probing intellect and musical consciousness.  

Paul wrote Threads for us in 2005.  When So searches for composers to write percussion music, we consider many factors, but the most powerful is our desire to find a voice that speaks naturally through percussion instruments.   As a result, we sometimes find ourselves off the beaten path of contemporary chamber music.  There are many wonderful composers out there, but percussion has a special voice. 

We approached him after a concert of student pieces that So performed at Princeton in 2004.  He was hesitant at first, saying that he "had never actually written for percussion before."  We protested that three decades of computer pieces said otherwise.  Here's a portion of Table's Clear:

Table's Clear: 


In fact, many of our favorite percussion composers were heavily involved in electronic media (Cage, Reich, Xenakis).   We thought that Paul's work with algorithms and computer processing might yield fascinating results.  The conversation went something like "you write interesting music on four lines, we'll help you figure out what instruments to put it on."  

Paul came out to our studio the next year with a series of 10 etudes in hand, exploring toys, melodic instruments, and drums.  We talked about timbres, limitations, all of the issues inherent in playing acoustic instruments with human hands.  He was a voracious student of the medium.  Interestingly, he carried none of the baggage that a life-long percussionist has... to us, sleigh bells meant Leroy Anderson, while to him they sounded quirky and interesting.  

Astonishingly soon after this workshop I travelled down to Princeton to see what he had come up with.  I sat mesmerized in his studio as he played a continuous 30-minute, ten movement piece for me.  He kept looking up as if to ask "is this any good?" I was spellbound.  

Threads quickly became a staple of our touring repertoire.  In my opinion, it stands toe-to-toe with pieces like Cage's Third Construction in defining what percussion chamber music can be.   

When we coach young ensembles that are playing Threads, the first question we always ask is "have you heard any of Paul's computer music?"  The answer is almost invariably "no."  At which point, we ask the students to hang out for 20 minutes or so while we play excerpts of Table's Clear, NotJustMoreIdleChatter,  or The Sound of Two Hands (below)

NotJustMoreIdleChatter


The Sound of Two Hands

Why does this matter?  Well, to begin with Threads can be disarmingly transparent and elegant.  Take this opening melody:

Threads, Movement I: Prelude
>

This line is beautiful on its own terms, but I find it fascinating that it was written by a man who once spent a year composing the 18-minute Mild und Leise on a multi-million dollar computer.  And who, by his own account, spent six months in 1982  designing an I/O driver for a converter (not that I have any idea what either of those things are).  That context for such a transparent melody matters to me, because this is a composer who is clearly comfortable with handling complexity.  But his technological accomplishments never get in the way of music-making.

Here's another excerpt from Threads, the 3rd movement for all drums:

Threads, movement 3: Chorus



To me, this movement displays the best of what Lansky's style gains from his computer music.  The patterns on the drums are tweaked, layered, and manipulated in very subtle ways.  Every favorite device of percussion composers is evident here -  hocket, hemiola, and groove  - but carried off with the lightest touch.  

Edgard Varese wrote percussion music partially because he could not yet realize the electronic music he was hearing in his head.  Lansky pulls a sort of reverse-Varese move:  what might have been perfect material for synthesized sounds is now converted into bottles, ceramics, and sleigh bells in movement 5 and throughout:

Threads, movement 5: Recitative


In that session with Paul, my excitement grew with each passing moment:  it was obviously a terrific piece.  But as the last movement began, a chill ran up my spine.  There were no exotic rituals, no virtuosic displays, just rolling vibraphone harmony and a chorale for glockenspiel and metal pipes:

Threads, movement 10: Chorale Prelude


I think now that this must be what Brahms' clarinet player felt like when he opened one of the late trios: I hadn't heard my instrument do anything quite like this yet.  It was simply...beautiful.

If you play or listen to Threads without encountering Paul's computer music, you will certainly enjoy it, but it's more difficult to appreciate how hard-won those beautiful melodies are.  His journey as a young composer began in the studios of Milton Babbitt and George Perle, steeped in the intoxicating complexity of post-tonal music.  And yet that journey continues, after numerous achievements, with recitatives for glass bottles and heartfelt arias for metal pipes.  

Samples used in this article:


Many samples and excerpts can be found on Paul's homepage, including Mild und Leise: http://silvertone.princeton.edu/~paul/mymp3.html

Table's Clear and The Sound of Two Hands are from
Homebrew: Bridge Records, # 9035


NotJustMoreIdleChatter is from
More than Idle Chatter: Bridge Records, #9050


Excerpts of Threads are from:  
So Percussion: Paul Lansky Threads
Cantaloupe Music  #CA21064

Dan Deacon is awesome.

    Ok, a lot of people think Dan Deacon is awesome, so this is not such a surprising topic.  But it may not be evident why a bunch of classical percussionists would latch onto him among the many amazing compositional voices coming out of our generation.  After all, his best known work involves an incoherent faux-rant -- memorably accompanied on youtube by a crazy video  -- as well as mad dance parties where he's on the floor singing in a chipmunk voice surrounded by ecstatic fans.  We'll be playing with Dan this Thursday the 20th at Merkin Hall as part of the Ecstatic Music Festival, so I thought it would be fun to talk about why I think he's interesting.  
    I'm not going to write too much here about different musical worlds coming together.  That topic is being covered amply elsewhere, and it's a really wonderful thing.  In reality, musical trends seem destined to keep splitting apart and crashing back together (whoever first tossed secular love songs into sacred latin medieval motets was surely considered to be "genre-busting.")
    In fact, Sō Percussion usually seeks out collaborators based on what we believe we have in common.  This may actually be the larger point that folks like Bang on a Can, The Kronos Quartet, and now the Ecstatic Music Festival have been making all along.
    It's just that those commonalities are part of a more complex ecosystem, and don't fit into the narratives that mainstream culture often - though decreasingly - prescribes for them.  I was so inspired to read in Alex Ross' book "The Rest is Noise" about Charlie Parker ingeniously working in the theme from Firebird as part of his set at Birdland when he recognized Igor Stravinsky in the audience.  It occurred to me from my own life experience that people often become artists precisely because they don't give a whit about the narratives that others try to impose on their lives.
    But back to Dan.  Here's a video that I absolutely love.  It's Dan playing and singing a song called Ohio on a local morning news show in the very same state (home to 3 out of 4 members of Sō, including moi).

    In case you think Ohio has never seen anything like this before,  remember that Devo is from Akron.
  
    This is pure anti-charisma: there is no way this guy is trying to sell you anything, other than his music.  To a media-savvy generation, that weirdo authenticity is like catnip.  Dale Carnegie and Joel Osteen would be horrified.
    To boot, anybody who has made a career of performing can appreciate how difficult it is to shed this much inhibition on stage...I'll never approach it.
    All of this is reason to admire, but why take the step of wanting to work with somebody?
    Here's a song called "Big Milk" from his album Spiderman of the Rings:

    This is a straight up percussion ensemble piece.  And it's gorgeous.  As I got to know Dan's music better, I realized that many of his songs rely on samples of xylophones, glockenspiels, vibraphones and marimbas, often employed in the service of dizzying minimalist patterns.  
    The simpatico became more and more obvious.
    In 2008, Sō performed at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple on a triple-bill with Dan and the Dirty Projectors.  Although we knew that almost nobody was there primarily to see us, we were delighted to be part of  such a hip lineup.  At the end, we joined Dan and his ensemble for live realizations of those percussion samples (arranged by Rich O'Meara).  The patterns were interesting and really hard to play, and the energy in the room was unbelievable.
    At that same show, Dan got about 500 people circled up into a giant group nerd-hug in the middle of the floor.  That experience was very influential on our work Imaginary City, where Josh walks out into the audience during the climax, hugs audience members, and asks them to shout "I LOVE YOU" at the stage.
    If you haven't yet checked out the Wham City scene in Baltimore, I think you're missing out.   We brought our Summer Institute students down there for Dan's Whartscape festival this past summer.  The first thing we saw was a guy dressed up in a spaceship/ice cream cone felt costume just falling over for ten minutes.  Considering that the first trip of the Institute had been to Lincoln Center to see the complete works of Edgard Varèse, the contrast was delicious.

where (we) live

People in the drama and theater world talk all the time about process.  I never knew exactly how important that was until Sō Percussion started putting together our own evening-length productions.  We have had two big ones so far: Music for Trains, a site-specific performance in Southern Vermont's train stations, and Imaginary City, an exploration of the universal in city life.  

For our newest project - slated to premiere in fall of 2012 - process is all. Tentatively titled where (we) live, this work is in its gestation period, "in-progress" in the truest sense.  

One of the stated goals is to fling open the doors of creative possibility. 

In order to do that, we have to question our assumptions, to be ready for a "Yoda" moment (unlearn what you have learned, young Jedi).  Does a single author always create the best work?  Can improvisation freely mix with written-down music?  Can we introduce a wide variety of external inputs and still make something cohesive?  

Initially, we are interested in how where (we) live can celebrate the personal and idiosyncratic.   We've started asking our friends to make video of themselves doing something interesting and sending it to us.  The instructions are that there are no instructions.  So far, we've gotten dance improv, a man brushing his teeth, an improvisation with running water in the bathtub, and Jason's infant nephew gleefully playing with objects as they are put in front of him.  

One of our favorites so far is this video by the dancer and choreographer Emily Johnson.  She calls it a "smile dance for two."

We met Emily through Sara Coffey, who runs the wonderful Vermont Performance Lab in Southern Vermont.  Sara produced Music for Trains, and is a frequent sponsor of Emily's work as well.  

We've started putting music to all of them, sometimes setting music to the action, sometimes letting compositions just collide with the video.  In many cases, we find that the listener/observer constructs far more fascinating narratives when we do not dictate one to them.     

Below is a description of where (we) live as it currently stands:  half-baked, but full of exciting possibilities.  In order to keep our juices flowing, I came up with a series of opposite concepts, a creative "choose your own adventure" which will hopefully spark new ideas.  This list is a wholesale rip-off of Brian Eno's "Oblique Strategies," which I highly recommend to anybody who is ever feeling stuck about what to do next:


Online version of the Oblique Strategies

where (we) live

on January 6, 2011

We live not only in physical places, but also in symbolic ones.  The members of Sō Percussion identify ourselves with many different communities: North Brooklyn, where we are based; the greater New York experimental music scene; a worldwide network of percussionists; an even broader community of music lovers.  Often the values of those symbolic places become our own. 

Rooms, buildings, and ideas enclose and define those spaces, often in very personal ways.   

In our many collaborations with other artists, we have sometimes been surprised at what they have to teach us: The members of the electronic duo Matmos, for instance,  are fantastically intuitive musicians who compel us to think differently.  


For where (we) live, Sō Percussion is exploring the idea of using artists from different mediums as outside inputs to our creative process.  We will ask them to improvise, dance, make video, or whatever else they can think of, and we will attempt to both fit them into our artistic world and adjust to fit into theirs.  These artists may be a virtual "5th" performer, represented by video and audio onstage with us.  


We are currently choosing a small group of key collaborators to each inhabit his or her own space, to show us what's inside:

Martin Schmidt of Matmos takes us on a video journey of his house: a fantasia with toy instruments in the basement, a bathtub improvisation, and the minimalistic drone of his partner Drew (the other half of Matmos) brushing his teeth in the mirror.

Choreographer and Dancer Emily Johnson explores body and identity.  Her "smile dance" videos fixate on the smallest changes of expression.  Her work is extremely process-oriented, providing us with instructions to create in an entirely different way.


Our responses to this input vary from the loosest improvisations to the most rigidly structured compositions -- from narrative play-along to abstract co-existence.  Some music will bear the strong imprint of one author, some will come out of the hazy evolution of groupthink.  

We have started a list of "creative oppositions," decision points to act as yet another external input to our process.  This list is inspired by Brian Eno's "oblique strategies."

Narrative : Abstraction

Composed structure : Spontaneous structure

Theatricality  :  Self-effacement

More Sound (noise) :  Less Sound (silence)

Movement : Stasis

Vertical (harmony) : Horizontal (melody)

Control : Autonomy

Intention : Chance

Engagement : Avoidance

Organic : Technological

Intuition : Process

Homogeneous : Heterogeneous

Smooth : Angular

Regimented : Anarchic

Aware : Naïve

Group : Individual

Complexity : Simplicity 

Stable : Unstable