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