Notes on a Collaboration - Steve Mackey's "It Is Time"

Notes on a Collaboration:  The Making of Steve Mackey’s It Is Time This article originally appeared in Avue Magazine, a new publication of Adams Percussion Instruments.  They asked us to write about an artistically gratifying and interesting experience.  I have been wanting for some time to document the creation of Steve Mackey's fantastic percussion quartet It Is Time, one of the most satisfying artistic collaborations we've ever had.   The series will run in four parts, where each member of So details the process of developing the unique sound world and techniques of this piece: first Eric, then Josh, Adam, and Jason.   Here is a link to the full video of It Is Time online, if you want to see what we're talking about in action.   Part I   Time sits Time stands Time is time… from Isaac Maliya’s, Time is Time

Several years ago So Percussion had the honor of commissioning Steven Mackey for a new percussion quartet.  Steve – Professor of Composition and Chair of the Music Department at Princeton University – is one of the most omnivorous and brilliant composers in America today. 

            At our first meeting about the project, Steve explained over barbecue chicken that he wanted to try something different for Sō.  He told us that although he admires works that demand uniformity of timbre and interpretation like Reich’s Drumming, Xenakis’ Pleiades, or Lang’s the so-called laws of nature, he was interested in doing something different for us. 

His first question to each of us was “what instrument do you want to play?”  It only makes sense to ask this of a percussionist, because if you are a violinist or a pianist, you’ve already answered it.  But the world of a percussionist – even four percussionists who studied in the same program – is diverse, and we each provided our own answer:  “drum set, steel drums, marimba, multiple percussion.” 

            During the course of the next year and a half, we worked closely with Steve to craft a new piece that highlights each of us as performers and interpreters.  We found the end result to be astonishing in its innovation and conceptual power. 

            Over this series of four articles, we’ll dissect each movement through the eyes of the individual members of the group: Eric, Josh, Adam, and Jason.  We’ll also talk about working with Steve to unlock the potential in each of these instruments. 

            This article focuses on Eric Beach and his one-man-band of sounds and timbres. 

First, Steve’s own description of It Is Time: 

“It Is Time marshals the virtuosity of the individual members of So ̄ Percussion to speed, slow, warp, celebrate and mourn our perceptions of time. Each of the four sections of the piece is a mini-concerto for one of the players. First Eric Beach leads the music in a multi-percussion set up composed of metronome with delay, pump organ, bells, china cymbal on hi-hat stand and a few other assorted toys. Josh Quillen follows on steel drums, Adam Sliwinski on marimba, and Jason Treuting on drumset.

It Is Time was inspired by my young son Jasper (now 30 months old). As an older father (now 664 months old) I felt, for the first time in my life, saddened by the immutability of time and the finite limits to how much of It I will be able to spend with my young family. It Is Time fantasizes that we might have agency with respect to time.”

Now Eric describes his process of working with Mackey: 

Working with Steve on It Is Time was a big challenge for me, and it was really helpful that Steve was so cool about being collaborative.  I really didn’t have a strong idea going into the project about what specific instrument(s) I wanted to play, and I was worried that he wouldn’t be inspired to do something wonderful if I didn’t already have an idea for him.  But the discussion with Steve about what exactly to write for turned into an incredible conversation, and I think it inspired Steve in a different way than would have been possible otherwise.

.

I still have the list of instruments that I suggested to Steve.  For each one I wrote a little description and recorded myself playing it for about a minute.  He used almost all of them:  glass bottle, china cymbal/hi hat, Estey child’s organ, frame drum, metronome, noah bells, and small bells.  I also recorded a little concertina, some other drums, and a stack of poker chips – those three things were the only instruments I sent him that didn’t end up in the piece.

I was really excited about the way that Steve latched on to the metronome as a building block for creating elements of the piece.  I had already bought one of those little analog metronomes – tick, tock -  for a piece I wrote, because I liked the way it looked, and that it could be started by the performer carefully pushing the weight at just the right moment.  When I first got it and took it out of the box, I was amazed at how cool the metronome sounded.  I actually wound it up and just let it click for an hour while cooking dinner.  The sound was fascinating, so I recorded it and sent it to Steve.  I also told him about a Mauricio Kagel piece where the pianist places a metronome on a little stand that can turn on its side so that the metronome ticks unevenly.  I had never actually heard the piece at the time (I found out later that it was a piece called ‘MM.51’), but it seemed like an interesting idea.  I don’t know whether Steve had already been thinking specifically about ‘warping’ time before that conversation, but something about placing the metronome on its side seemed to strike a nerve.  He even bought me an extra metronome so that I could take it apart and dissect the way that the sound was being created.  Two big sections of the piece ended up grappling with this idea of defying the inevitability of the metronome.

Another great part of the collaboration was the China Cymbal/Hi-Hat.  I came up with the idea for this instrument while I was studying in Freiburg, Germany and my professor assigned me to write a piece for only two metallic instruments.  At the time I wanted to figure out a way to get the greatest number of different sounds from a single instrument, and I came up with the idea to put a china cymbal on a hi-hat stand with a mute underneath in place of a bottom cymbal.  I wrote a long, slow “process” piece for this china cymbal and large almglocken.  When I was recording the new cymbal-contraption for Steve, I realized that the proximity of the microphone to the cymbal made a huge difference in the sound –  the bass frequencies were only audible if the microphone was right next to the cymbal.  I imagined that it could be a functional instrument for big gong-type notes in the piece.  I had no idea that Steve would take that instrument and utilize it for one of the fastest and most virtuosic sections!  It was one of the best examples of how something new came out of the collaboration at every step, something we never would have achieved independently. 

Other instruments yielded interesting moments, too:  The frame drum sound turned out radically different with microphone placement, so using close microphones became an important part of the piece.  Steve was fascinated by the way that the foot pedals of the Estey organ made the volume swell and fade in a rhythmic way, and that inspired a section of the piece where the organ pumps rhythmically while alternating with the china cymbal.  The tuned wine bottle sound I sent him turned into a short gesture based on the Doppler effect - the acoustic phenomenon where a sound changes based on the perspective of the listener, such as the way a siren lowers in pitch as a fire truck goes by on the street.

The “musical saw” was the one complete instrument that Steve asked me to learn how to play from scratch.  He toyed with the idea of a Theremin as well, but his first inspiration was the saw and I agreed to learn how to play it.  I had never played saw before at all, and when I looked into getting some lessons they were a lot more expensive than I could afford.  So I bought a cheap instrument and committed myself to practicing at least 10-15 minutes every day.  At first I just tried to get any sound at all, then I started to find pitches, and then I tried playing along with whatever music I was listening to.  I distinctly remember that one day I could suddenly play along with a bunch of Beatles songs. That’s when I realized that I was starting to get it.  In fact I only had to learn a short melody for the piece, and I’m still far from qualifying as a professional musical saw player.  But it was a great experience, and since then I’ve incorporated the instrument into several other projects.

A brief description of the instruments used in my setup:

Estey Organ: This is a bellows reed organ that used to be made by the Estey Organ company in Brattleboro, Vermont.  The one I play in It Is Time is actually a children’s version – it’s a miniature that is only three octaves.  Before electric keyboards, middle class families in the United States used to buy these organs to teach children music if they couldn’t afford a piano at home.  When Sō got one through a project we did in Vermont, we became obsessed with the sound and have included it in all kinds of projects.

China Cymbal / Hi-Hat: This is a simple setup of a hi-hat made up of a china cymbal on top and a mute on the bottom – in this case, the mute is actually a smaller cymbal that I’ve wrapped in a few towels.  When the pedal is down, the outer edge of the china cymbal still vibrates and the only way to completely dampen it is with your hand, so there are three playing positions: open, closed, and closed with hand dampening.  Steve also asked me to tape a small coin to my pinky finger so that when I dampen the cymbal with my hand it provides an extra click.  The cymbal is amplified with a microphone that is placed as close to the cymbal as possible.

Frame Drum: This is a standard frame drum mounted on a snare drum stand so that I can play it with one hand.  It is also amplified with a microphone as close as possible to the drumhead, which brings out the huge range of overtones coming off of the head.  We experimented with different frame drum skins and found that natural hide had a much richer sound.  I play on the head and the rim, and also bend the pitch by pressing on the head.

Metronome: This is an analog Wittner metronome that I amplify with a contact microphone and run through a digital delay pedal.  Steve figured out the exact delay setting to get a specific rhythm that much of the opening of the piece is based on.  Also, later in the piece I put the metronome on a piece of wood that is set at a specific angle such that when the metronome swings back and forth it clicks in two uneven beats with a 2:3 relationship.  So the meter that results is close to 5/16.

Noah Bells: These are simple copper bells that traditionally come from India or Pakistan.  I found out about them for the first time while playing Toru Takemitsu’s beautiful piece From Me Flows What You Call Time.  I only had two of them, and Steve wrote for them in a way that was very different from what I imagined.

Wine Bottle: This is a wine bottle filled with an amount of water that tunes the bottle to a specific pitch.  One of the interesting things I discovered through this process is that the pitch created by the water in the bottle is different depending on whether the bottle is standing upright or turned on its side.

Small Bells: These are traditional celebration bells from India.  They come on a string that includes many different sized bells, and I simply lay them out on a table so that they can be played from low to high.

Percussion: The Future of Music: Credo

As this is really not a blog - more of a forum for putting my thoughts down whenever I feel like it - and I'm super busy with touring season right now, I thought it would be nice to copy this terrific essay by percussionist and Cage scholar Paul Cox.  It uses all of the Cage music appearing on our "Cage 100 Bootleg Series" to tell the story of Cage's life and work.  Enjoy!

-Adam 

Percussion: The Future of Music: Credo 

By Paul Cox, Ph.D.

“Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of 19th century music.” John Cage’s words, written in a 1939 Dance Observer article, carry a special Mosaic resonance for percussionists stuck sitting in the back of the orchestra, where they stare at the word “tacet” or count hundreds of measures of rests before playing a cymbal crash at the climax of a Mahler symphony. Restless, unloved, bored and underemployed, percussionists were long ready for liberation in the 1930s, though they desperately needed a repertoire of their own beyond Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation (1931). Of course, Cage did not set out to liberate percussionists per se, but rather the sounds (and noises) they are responsible for playing.

In many ways, Cage was building on the goals of his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, by extending Schonberg’s notion of the emancipation dissonance to all sounds, even those considered “unmusical.”

Cage’s sound liberation movement fueled the expansion of the percussion repertoire between 1935 and 1942. After Cage’s studies with Schoenberg in Los Angeles, he moved up to Seattle where he began composing works and collecting instruments and new scores for his own “West Coast” percussion ensemble. In these recordings, Sō Percussion, a liberated group of drummers who fully comprehend the importance of Cage’s legacy on their own existence, present a cross-section of Cage’s percussion works composed between 1939 and 1985.

Cage’s three works using the title “Constructions” make up the core canon of his percussion output. These works delicately blend mathematically calculated structure with timbral nuance and instrumental variety. Using instruments found in junkyards, railway depots and the dance studio at the Cornish School in Seattle where Cage worked as a composer and dance accompanist, the “Constructions” were originally performed by a group of talented amateurs that included Cage’s wife Xenia and Merce Cunningham--then a dance student at Cornish. To buy additional instruments, Cage solicited funds from family and friends; the author John Steinbeck donated $25.00 (a $400.00 gift in today’s dollars). Cage quickly amassed a multicultural mélange of over 150 instruments ranging from Chinese tom toms, gongs and tam tams to Native American rattles, Turkish cymbals, Japanese temple gongs, as well as claves and maracas from South America—not to mention the discarded brake drums, coffee cans, anvils and various pieces of sheet metal (a.k.a. “thundersheets”).

Cage’s First Construction (In Metal) first performed in Seattle opens with an explosive Joycean thunderclap of four “thundersheets” struck in unison. To organize the sextet, Cage used his “micro-macrocosmic” rhythmic structure, a form he invented to insure that the smallest parts (phrases) of a work were proportionally related to the largest (sections) by using a single governing number. Sixteen sub-divided into the series 4/3/2/3/4 determines the lengths of phrases, phrase structure, and the First Construction’s overall length (16 x 16 measures long = 256 bars; though Cage adds a nine-bar coda). Sixteen also governs the material and instrumentation: there are sixteen rhythmic motives and sixteen sounds available for each player in the “orchestra.” For example, player four’s sixteen sounds include a thundersheet, four brake drums, eight cowbells, and three Japanese temple gongs.

While Cage’s detailed mathematical design is notable, it is the way he uses texture and timbre to articulate the work’s structure that captures our attention. In the opening we hear a “string” piano (a piano in which the strings inside are muted with the hand) play four motives accompanied by four thundersheets for four measures. This is followed by a duet for oxen bells and string piano playing three motives for three measures. The next phrase features a dramatic change in texture with the glockenspiel, brake drums, and Turkish cymbals softly playing four successive half notes in unison over two bars. Cage’s motives are static and repeated in different combinations like carefully crafted building blocks of sonic material. As such, the work exemplifies its title as a construction—a work of architecture in sound—to riff on Schelling’s observation of architecture as “music in space.”

Audiences may notice a rather peculiar siren-like sound emanating from the piano. They may also notice a person inside the piano doing rather mysterious things to the string in order to achieve those sounds. This special “assistant” used in the First Construction often is tasked with rubbing a metal bar on the strings while the pianist trills on the keyboard with the sustain pedal depressed in order to produce the eerie siren sounds. The assistant is also responsible for creating a wide-rage of sound effects by muting, strumming and rubbing the strings with fingers, mallets and other metallic objects. Cage learned these “string” piano techniques from his teacher Henry Cowell. A year later, he would greatly expanded on the piano’s sonic possibilities with the invention of the prepared piano in 1940 with Bacchanale, a dance score composed for Sylvia Fort at Cornish. Cage found that placing various screws, screws + bolts, weather stripping, erasers and other material between the strings of the piano produced a seemingly infinite array of percussive sounds ranging from gong-like low tones to high-pitched rattles.

The percussion quartet Third Construction (1941) debuted on a concert produced jointly by Cage and Lou Harrison at the California Club in San Francisco. Some of the more unusual instruments used include the teponaxtle, a small two-toned log drum from Mexico and the quijades, the lower jawbone of a donkey or horse, which, when struck, makes a rattle-like sound as the dried teeth vibrate in bony sockets. Cage’s instrumentation is also more multicultural than any of his other percussion works, requiring Native American rattles from the Pacific Northwest, a Polynesian conch shell, Chinese tom toms, Turkish cymbals, a sistrum (an ancient rattle depicted in ancient Babylonian bas reliefs) and claves from South America, along with a lion’s roar (a friction instrument that sounds like its name), woodblocks, cowbells, tin cans, ratchet, and a cricket caller (sticks made of split bamboo). The work is highly virtuosic and frequently includes periods where multiple cross-rhythms are played simultaneously. Structurally more complex than the previous “constructions,” the Third is based on the number 24 (24 phrase groups x 24 measures each=576 measures). Also, rather than applying the phrase series (8-2-4-5-3-2) to each part, each player is assigned a different permutation of the series (e.g. player two is 5-3-2-8-2-4 while player three follows 3-2-8-2-4-5, etc.). As a result, while all the players still end the phrases together after twenty-four measures, in the midst of each phrase unit there is an increased density and variety of rhythmic activity. Finally, the Third has another quality that stands out. When the conch shell enters in the final section, the work takes on a distinctly ritual quality, perhaps recalling a dance on a remote Polynesian island. While Cage’s never associated his music deliberately with non-Western cultures, the tenor at the end of the Third may have been inspired by his time as Cowell’s teaching assistant for the ethnomusicology course titled “Primitive and Folk Origins of Music” at the New School in 1934.

Cage makes two points about his compositional process in his early writings: First, composing for dance influenced how he structured his music and provided a valuable source of commissions for his early percussion, prepared piano and electro-acoustic works. Second, he regarded percussion as a gateway to a larger sonic universe of electronic sounds. He declared his interest in such electronic sounds in his 1940 manifesto, “The Future of Music: Credo,” in which he called for the creation of musical laboratories to promote the discovery of new sounds. Cage found an ideal incubator for his interest in such sounds at the Cornish School in Seattle, where he had access to a small radio studio.

The radio studio served as de facto music laboratory where Cage created and broadcast the Imaginary Landscape No. 1, considered one of the first electro-acoustic works composed in America. Cage’s score calls for muted piano, a large Chinese cymbal and two variable-speed turntables playing Victor frequency records, one of sliding tones and the other of single pitch tones.

Imaginary Landscape No. 1 was composed for a dance by Bonnie Bird and debuted on Cornish’s "Hilarious Dance Concert" in March 1939. What is striking about the first performance is that the music was performed in the Cornish radio studio, then broadcast to the theatre next door, where it was used to accompany a rather curious dance on the theme of dismembered body parts. The nineteen-year-old Merce Cunningham was part of the troupe of dancers that moved among and hid behind large, mobile black shapes set against a black backdrop to, in part, create the illusion of floating body parts. Bird explained: “I discovered I could do things like create a body that covered the whole stage. . . . You would see a head, Merce’s head, way up, and then sliding down the side while two sets of legs walked down the stage. It was fascinating. And I would have the rectangle interrupt the two, and they'd skitter away. Or you'd see only hands moving in space.”

Cage’s electro-acoustic score served as an ideal backdrop for Bird’s experiment in movement. By broadcasting his mix of electronic and acoustic sounds, Cage created his own disembodied soundscape replete with unconventional piano sounds made by muting and stroking the strings inside the piano to create knocking sounds and ethereal glissandi effects. These were juxtaposed with recorded sliding tones and eerie cymbal drones—perfect for the macabre (yet humorous) theme of the dance.

Cunningham and Cage’s first professional collaboration came in 1942 with Credo in Us, a score composed for a dance made by both Cunningham and Jean Erdman (then members of the Martha Graham Dance Company). Credo was premiered on a program of works by young choreographers at the Bennington School of Dance in August 1942, and subsequently performed in New York City and Chicago. As a dance-drama, a genre popularized by Graham during the 1930s that combined narration with dance, Credo departed from Graham’s tidy narratives based on myths and patriotic themes. Inspired instead by James Joyce, Dada, surrealism, and popular radio dramas, their work explored the nuances and shadowy recesses of everyday life.

The drama’s setting is “Westward Ho!” and takes place over “three generations.” It is a satire on the sterile conventions of American middle-class life told through the perspective of a feuding married couple, the doubly named “Wife/Ghoul’s Rage” and “Husband/Shadow.” Erdman recalled that the names served as a point of departure for the dance and signified the characters’ public and psychological personas. This duality is also present in the title, which Cage described in an interview meaning both (“Credo”) I believe in the U.S. (United States) and I believe in us (you and me). For all three collaborators, Credo was meant as a serious critique of bourgeois prudishness and, more broadly, the American myths of manifest destiny and dependence on European models of culture (e.g. Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, etc.).

Cunningham’s scenario and script are full of puns and faux-French constructions. He claimed that the script was drawn from the Surrealist journal Minotaure, though Erdman later revealed that Cunningham himself was the author. The final line of the script, handwritten into Cage’s manuscript score, captures the satiric tone, “But Credo in US was Ghoul’s Rage Motto And la vie bid them well to use it.”

Cage’s score for piano (sometimes muted), tin cans, buzzer, muted gongs, radio and phonograph juxtaposes diverse musical genres, including a cowboy song, an “Indian” tom-tom rhythm, and a boogie-woogie for piano, as well as an ostinato figure drawn from sacrificial dance section of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. In addition, random radio sounds and samples of “classical” recordings, “Dvorak, Beethoven, Sibelius or Shostakovich,” played on a phonograph add to the work’s satiric tone.

Credo comes at the beginning of what Cage would later refer to as his “expressive” phase. Several works from the early-1940s are inflected with a mood of loneliness and angst caused in part by World War Two, as he described in his “Lecture on Nothing:” “Half-intellectually and half sentimentally, when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society. But quiet sounds were like loneliness, or love or friendship.” Compounding Cage’s mood was the fact that his marriage to Xenia was coming to an end.

It is in this context that Cage composed the meditative first movement of She is Asleep for twelve-tom toms. A still and monochromatic work, the dynamics waver between p and ppp. Gradations in texture result from Cage’s stipulation that the drums are to be struck on the very edge or center of the head with fingers, brushes or soft mallets.

In both Credo and She is Asleep we note a change in Cage’s compositional process away from the mathematical procedures used in the three “Constructions” and Imaginary Landscape No. 1. Instead, the collage-textures of Credo with its inclusion of sounds drawn from everyday life (e.g. doorbell and radio) and the nuanced treatment of quiet sounds in She is Asleep signal a transition toward the development of an open process that allowed for a greater range of sonic possibilities and outcomes determined using chance procedures. While these open processes were not yet used in the composition of Credo, Cage does cede a level of compositional control by allowing the performer to select random radio and record samples, a process that effectively guarantees that the work can never be heard the same way twice in live performance. By the early-1950s, Cage had developed a chance-based system using the I Ching that allowed for randomness to enter the compositional process. Cage had another motivation for adopting such chance procedures. After his study of Zen Buddhism with D.T. Suzuki, he embraced the goal of removing his own ego and personal expression from the work.

The remaining works on the program were created using such chance or indeterminate procedures—indeterminate meaning that Cage’s score is not intended to control the outcome of the performance. In fact, the performer is given ultimate authority for realizing Cage’s score. In the case of Cartridge Music, a work using contact mics (from phonograph cartridges) attached to various instruments or objects, the score looks like a work of abstract art. It is made up twenty transparencies each containing from one to twenty irregular shapes (each shape corresponding to a specific contract mic). In addition, Cage includes a transparency of solid points, transparency of circles, a transparency with a stopwatch, and a transparency of a snake-like dotted line with a circle at one end to be overlayed with each other to create a set of patterns to be deciphered as a score. What do these patterns mean? Solid points signify sound events and circles reflect changes in volume or change in material. The undulating line determines the sequence of events and the stopwatch the length of each event. Cage specifies that “undesirable” sounds like feedback and humming amplifiers are acceptable and that speakers may be set up around or within the audience. The Duet for Cymbal uses the same “score” as Cartridge Music. In this version, when the graphic score indicates a change of material, Cage stipulates that the amplified cymbal may be slowly submerged in water or placed on piano strings or on a soft mat to alter the sound.

0’0” (1962) consists of a single instruction: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action."

Child of Tree (Improvisation II) is a solo percussion piece. Cage’s indeterminate score consists of directions to aid the performer’s realization, including notes on how to select the ten instruments made from plant material (e.g. cacti, a pod rattle from a Mexican Poinciana tree, branches, leaves, bark, etc.) and determine the sequence and duration of the various sonic events. The performer then improvises the work using a stopwatch to remain within the designated time frame. Child of Tree was first used to accompany Merce Cunningham’s Solo (1975)--a dance infused with undulating animal-like movements. Though Cage and Cunningham professed to keep the creation of score and choreography separate until the dress rehearsal, the correspondences between the pointillistic cacti sounds and Cunningham’s slithering movements make for an uncanny and visceral link between dance and sound.

45’ for a speaker was made for a lecture at the Composers’ Concourse in London in October 1954. Cage created a collage text using his own writings along with various sound effects and music drawn from 34’46.776” for Two Pianists, which Cage and David Tudor were performing at the time. For the London lecture, Cage replaced his part of the piano duet with the lecture. Unfortunately, his lecture turned out to be impossible to speak within the piano part’s specified duration of 39’. After further experimentation, Cage settled on 45’, or roughly two-minutes per line of text, as an acceptable amount of time for the work, however you may notice that certain portions of the text are read at near super-human speeds.

Cage recounted in Silence that he planned to assemble the lecture while crossing the Atlantic on his way to Europe. Unfortunately his ocean liner was involved in a collision and had to turn back to New York. Cage and Tudor then flew on to Amsterdam. Over the course of the tour, Cage wrote the lecture on trains and in restaurants and hotels. Cage used detailed chance techniques to make the work. These techniques were used to answer specific questions related to content and mode of delivery. Questions included: “1. Is there speech or silence? 2. And for how long? 3. New material or old material?” For old material, Cage used chance techniques to make a selection of material from a preexisting lecture or article; for new material, chance was used to choose a specific topic drawn from a list of 32 subjects, ranging from “Listening as ignorance” to “Theatre (music work of life)” “Psychology” and “Activity of performance.” The text is laid out within a timeline format, with duration running along the left hand margin, and volume indicated by typography: italics = soft; bold = loud; roman = normal. Cage’s inclusion of other sound effects like coughing, drinking water and hissing add humorous tone, though often humor by happenstance:

“The best thing to do about counterpoint is what Schoenberg did. Teach it.” (Hold up hand, gargle).”

Cage required four players for Inlets (1977): one to play long tones on a conch shell and light various pinecones on fire; and three performers to manipulate amplified conch shells filled with water to create gurgling sounds. Cunningham used the score for two dances, Inlets (1977) and Inlets 2 (1983). Dance and score, though created separately, drew on Cage and Cunningham’s mutual interest in the coastline of the Pacific Northwest. Morris Graves created the costume and set design for Inlets, which was premiered in Seattle in September 1977. Inlets represented a kind of homecoming for Cunningham and Cage. In the late-1930s, they had met at the Cornish School where Cunningham was studying drama and dance and Cage was accompanying dance classes and composing scores for his percussion ensemble. It was also in Seattle where Cage met the painter Morris Graves, who famously attended one of Cage’s percussion concerts and yelled “Jesus in the Everywhere!” Even though Graves was kicked out of Cage’s concert, they soon became friends and collaborators. It was Graves in fact who introduced Cage to an idyllic island nestled in Puget Sound from which expansive views of several inlets and waterways could be seen--no doubt an early inspiration for the Inlets project.

But what about the noise of crumpling paper which he used to do in order to paint the series of 'Papiers froisses' or tearing up paper to make 'Papiers dechires?' Arp was stimulated by water (sea, lake, and flowing waters like rivers), forests (1985) is for 3-10 performers, each following their own pulse, which is not coordinated with the others. A series of symbols on a typewriter (+, -, O) indicate when sound is to be made.

Paul Cox currently teaches European and American music history and percussion at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he is a Visiting Assistant Professor. He earned a PhD in musicology from CWRU in 2011 after the completion of his dissertation, Collaged Codes: John Cage’s Credo in Us, a study of Cage and Merce Cunningham’s first dance collaboration in 1942. He has presented academic papers at the University of Pennsylvania, Notre Dame University and McGill University and the 2010 American Musicological Society National Conference in Indianapolis and the Society of American Music Conference in Ottawa and his writings appear in American Music, Cleveland Art and the upcoming edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music. He is currently working on a book project exploring Cage and Cunningham’s early collaborations in the 1940s.

An active composer, Cox’s works have been performed in the U.S. and abroad and include commissioned works for film, dance, theater and the concert hall. CityMusic Cleveland commissioned his most recent work, Just.Are.Same for string quartet, oboe and tape, which weaves together an electronic soundscape of spoken words drawn from victims of genocide with acoustic and electronic music.

Cox’s first career was a decade-long stint as the Assistant Curator of Music (1995-2004) and Associate Director of Performing Arts (2005) at the Cleveland Museum of Art. During his tenure there, he was also the co-director of the internationally acclaimed Aki Festival of New Music (three-time winner of the CMA/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming). He continues to curate large-scale projects. This summer, he will serve as artistic advisor to the “Sitka Festival of Arts and Culture.”

Born and raised in Sitka, Alaska, Cox studied music at the Sitka Fine Arts Camp and the Interlochen National Music Camp. Thereafter he attended the Oberlin Conservatory--where he studied percussion with Michael Rosen—the Royal College of Music in London, the Aspen Music Festival, Yale’s Norfolk Festival and Rice University.

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.

---

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."

---

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."

---

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."

---

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."

---

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."

---

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
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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