Eight Lectures on Experimental Music
Page 1
Eight Lectures on Experimental Music
Eight Lectures on Experimental Music
Edited by Alvin Lucier
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Middletown, Connecticut
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
© 2018 Wesleyan University Press
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Christian Wolff’s lecture is to be published in his forthcoming book, Occasional Pieces (Oxford University Press, 2017). The lecture has been reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press. It was also published in Christian Wolff, Cues: Writings & Conversations (Cologne: MusikTexte, 1998).
Parts of Steve Reich’s lecture were printed in his book Writings on Music, 1965–2000 (Oxford University Press, 2002). Reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press.
Part of Steve Reich’s lecture originally appeared in the Kurt Weill Newsletter (Fall 1992): 10 (2).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
NAMES: Lucier, Alvin editor.
TITLE: Eight lectures on experimental music / edited by Alvin Lucier.
DESCRIPTION: Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, [2017] |
IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2017019112 (print) | LCCN 2017021187 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819577641 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819577634 (cloth: alk. paper)
SUBJECTS: LCSH: Music—20th century—History and criticism.
CLASSIFICATION: LCC ML197 (ebook) | LCC ML197 .E33 2017 (print) | DDC 780.9/04—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019112
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Cover illustration: String Noise duo at the Paula Cooper Gallery, in front of Sol LeWitt wall drawing, by Mimi Johnson. Sol LeWitt wall drawing courtesy of Artists Rights Society.
To
RICHARD K. WINSLOW,
who, with the calm of a deep sea diver,
changed the teaching of music at
Wesleyan and in the world
Contents
INTRODUCTION
ix
1 JAMES TENNEY
1
2 CHRISTIAN WOLFF
12
3 ROBERT ASHLEY
31
4 MARYANNE AMACHER
45
5 LA MONTE YOUNG
59
6 STEVE REICH
80
7 MEREDITH MONK
104
8 PHILIP GLASS
120
Introduction
One of the benefits of being the John Spencer Camp Professor of Music at Wesleyan is that each year you have a discretionary fund that you may use to enrich programs of your choice within the Music Department. Between 1989 and 2002, I invited eight composers whose music I featured in my lecture course, Music 109, Introduction to Experimental Music, to come to campus to talk about their work. The lectures were presented in the World Music Hall in the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan. Each was recorded and transcribed by a Music Department graduate student, then lightly edited by me. I made sure to keep the flavor of each composer’s speaking style while making necessary corrections in grammar and punctuation in order to give the reader the clearest version of the composer’s ideas. Each lecture was then sent to the composer for acceptance, verification, corrections, and additions. They appear in this book in the order in which they were given. Whenever possible, a lecture included a live performance of the lecturer’s work, sometimes as a surprise gift.
In my many years of teaching, I have never felt inclined to be inclusive or to survey the entire field of experimental music; rather, I have concentrated on those composers whose music I have loved and admired and who I have felt have broken new ground in defining what music is now or may be in the future. The work of the composers included in this book falls into two broad categories: first, that which more directly follows the spirit and tradition of American experimentalism, from Ives to Cage, and, second, that which takes inspiration from the music of non-Western cultures, particularly West Africa, Indonesia, and India. Often these two categories overlap.
As the eight composers talked about their work, it became clear that the subjects they talked about, while related to their own music, included an astonishing variety of ideas: the exploration of acoustic phenomena, music of very long duration, talking as music, repetition, pulse, the threshold of audibility, return to tonality, opera for television, the placement and propagation of sound in architectural spaces, song, heterophony, politics, music for the theater, music’s place in society and its relationship to popular and world music, the reuse of traditional compositional techniques.
I realize that the term “experimental” is problematic. Many composers hate the term. Edgard Varèse said: “I do not write experimental music. My experimenting is done before I make the music. Afterwards, it is the listener who must experiment.”* John Cage, however, describes it as music in which the outcome is uncertain. Works using chance operations or open forms or that set in motion procedures that are neutral in intent may be good examples of the experimental. Some works even resemble experiments in the scientific sense, in that something is discovered during the course of the performance rather than that a preconceived idea or form is brought into being by the will or skill of the composer.
The terms new or contemporary are too general and may refer to any music of the present. And while it may be radical and even experimental in some way, avant-garde refers to a music that merely updates that which precedes it. So, for want of a better word, let us simply accept the term experimental.
John Spencer Camp graduated from Wesleyan in 1878, received a master’s degree in 1881, and spent most of his life as a church organist in Hartford, Connecticut. One would think that church organists are conservative by nature, until one remembers that they in fact have to invent and mix their own sounds by choosing from a wide variety of stops, often on extremely large and complex instruments. They are composers, in a way, or at least orchestrators of every piece they play. For that reason, I like to think that while Mr. Camp may not have understood this music entirely, he would have had to admire the skills of the composers in creating their own sounds and putting them together in their works. In 1921, he became CEO of the Austin Organ Company. John Spencer Camp died in 1946.
A person is fortunate to have one good idea in his or her lifetime. Richard K. Winslow, longtime chair of the Wesleyan Music Department and second John Spencer Camp Professor of Music had, in fact, two good ideas. First, along with ethnomusicologist David McAllester, he founded the World Music Department at Wesleyan, an act that changed the teaching of music throughout the world. Wesleyan was the first university music department in which world music was an integral part of the curriculum. Second, very early on, Winslow recognized the genius of John Cage. In 1960, he invited Cage to spend a year at Wesleyan’s Center for Advanced Studies and was responsible for the publication of Cage’s germinal book, Silence, by Wesleyan University Press. Experimental music at Wesleyan (and these lectures) would not have come into existence without Richard Winslow’s vision.
*Edgard Varèse, The Varèse Album (LP), New York: Columbia Masterworks, 1972.
Eight Lectures on Experimental Music
1
JAMES TENNEY
April 12, 1989
ALVIN LUCIER
I first came across James Tenney in New York in the 1960s. He, along with Malcolm Goldstein and Philip Corner, had organized the Tone Roads Ensemble (Tone Roads is the title of a set of pieces by Charles Ives) that gave concerts of new music. It wa
s wonderful to go to New York and hear the music of John Cage, Edgard Varèse, Henry Cowell, and Morton Feldman. It was the first time we heard this music. Jim played the piano and conducted the ensemble.
Tenney had already made several electronic pieces when he was still in college. One was called Blue Suede, a tape collage of the Elvis Presley song. In the early ’60s, Jim worked as a resident artist at Bell Labs, in New Jersey, using their computers and making electronic pieces on tape.
In 1967, he gave an influential FORTRAN workshop for a group of composers and Fluxus artists that included Steve Reich, Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, Phil Corner, Alison Knowles, and Max Neuhaus. Among his important writings are the seminal Meta (+) Hodos, one of earliest applications of gestalt theory and cognitive science to music, as well as John Cage and the Theory of Harmony. Nearly a quarter of a 657-page volume of the academic journal Perspectives of New Music was devoted to Tenney’s music. He also wrote the in-depth liner notes to the Wergo edition of Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano. (Nancarrow, as a favor, punched the roll for Tenney’s Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow.) Jim has taught at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and York University in Toronto. He currently teaches at CalArts.
Following the talk, there will be a performance of James Tenney’s The Road to Ubud for Javanese gamelan and prepared piano. Both Jim and I deeply appreciate the cooperation of my colleagues Mel Strauss, who is going to conduct; John Barlow, who spent hours preparing the piano and discussing the tunings; Sumarsam, director of the Wesleyan gamelan, who helped us examine the tuning of the gamelan; and also all of the students who have so generously given their time. I am delighted to introduce James Tenney, the first John Spencer Camp lecturer in music.
JAMES TENNEY
When I was asked a month or so ago what I would talk about, I couldn’t come to any clear decision. I thought I might just talk about recent works. But I think that what I would like to do is talk about harmony, using a few examples from pieces of mine as a kind of elaborate preparation for hearing my piece for gamelan and prepared piano.
When I say harmony, I don’t mean what you may think I mean. I don’t mean triadic, diatonic, common-practice harmony, although I would like to think that that could be a subset of what harmony might eventually come to mean for us. That would be one particular manifestation of it. I have felt for some time, in fact, I guess for almost twenty years, that a concern for harmony has been important in the music that I was writing in a variety of different ways, and I’ve also tried to deal with these questions theoretically. Now, it remains to be seen, and we won’t know for some time whether I’ve accomplished anything in this respect, but I have some ideas that I would like to talk with you about before you hear this piece.
One is a view of what’s happened in music in the twentieth century, a sort of historical viewpoint. It seems to me that harmony as a functional part of music was evolving, changing quite noticeably in Western music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From one period to another, we can hear changes in this respect, and I think the notion of an evolution is not unrealistic. But by the end of the nineteenth century, and certainly by about 1910, the first decade of the twentieth century, something strange seems to have happened. It’s as though the more progressive composers got to a point where they felt that the evolution of harmony had reached an impasse, a dead end where, for some reason, it couldn’t evolve any further. Now, being irrepressible, creative musicians weren’t about to stop making music, so what happened is they went off into a number of different directions investigating other aspects of music: rhythm, tone quality, texture, form, even the social function and aesthetics of music. All of these different aspects began to be investigated in a way that has resulted in an incredible body of beautiful exciting music. The legacy of this century is as rich as any previous century in Western history. But, harmony as such, it has seemed to me for a long time, never got beyond the point it had reached in about 1910.
A few years ago, I decided to go back and see if there were some way that we could take that sense of an evolutionary impasse in harmony as a challenge and move with it without simply regressing to some earlier stage. I don’t mean anything “neo” by this, but I am concerned with “can we move on, forward” with this? And I hope I have also made it clear that this is in no way a criticism of music that I would maintain was not doing anything with harmony. All right?
One thing that occurred to me was that maybe our very understanding of the word harmony was problematic. It’s very interesting to think about what the word had come to mean and compare it to its earlier historical meaning. Facts arise from that. In early Greece, the meaning of the word that is the root of our word harmony meant something as simple and general as “a fitting together of things,” like two stones shaped to fit snugly or two pieces of wood pressed together to form a unit. The Pythagoreans adopted the term and extended it to mean things very broadly philosophical and religious, but still it meant the way things relate to one another in the cosmos. And in their application of that concept to music, it is my understanding that what they had in mind was the way in which different pitches related to each other. It had nothing to do with necessarily sounding those pitches together. In fact, there is some question that they ever considered the sounds together. In any case, that was not primarily what they were talking about. They meant the relationships between different pitches.
The Pythagoreans discovered some wonderful things: for example, that certain strings produced tones that were in simple harmonic relationships to each other. Eventually, the meaning of the word got narrowed, restricted more and more. If you look at current dictionary definitions it will be something about the vertical structure of music. It’s even more restricted than that: chords. Even more restricted than that: triads, with maybe a few added notes here and there. It got narrowed down, and to me the epitome of that process of narrowing is something that may not be completely universal terminology in the jazz world, but I have heard it. Certain instruments are melody instruments, others are rhythm instruments or harmony instruments, meaning the obvious thing: a harmony instrument is one that can play more than two pitches at a single time.
This is so restrictive, especially if this is carried even further, simply to mean triads. If we had to accept that idea, it would surely be the case that there was nowhere to go. I wouldn’t even be interested in harmony in that sense. But I don’t think it is necessary to leave it that restricted. I wouldn’t advocate going back to Pythagorean generalities either. They’re a little too broad. I think it can usefully be defined as having to do with certain types of relations between pitches.
One of the areas that I first began to investigate in my pieces was the acoustical phenomenon that had to do with the harmonic series. You probably all know something about the presence of the harmonic series in sustained tones. I did a number of pieces in which the composition itself was based more or less directly upon the harmonic series. Now I want to play a couple of tapes of short pieces that explore these phenomena. The first one is called Septet. It’s written for six electric guitars and electric bass. You will hear a gradual unfolding, or sort of extension up the harmonic series to a certain point, and then a narrowing down of the range toward the top of that series, at which point it begins to open up again in a different series. It’s all very straightforward, but it’s kind of fun when you hear it on electric guitars.
Now, with the earlier works in the 1970s, I allowed for some pretty casual tunings. But by this time, I made every effort to get precise tunings from the instruments. The fretted strings of guitars had to be adjusted to get the necessary precision. Because the harmonic series, those natural intervals, are noticeably different from tempered intervals, the open strings of the guitars were tuned in such a way that, when they played the frets needed to get those pitches, the pitches were pretty accurate. The same is the case here with the prepared piano.
&n
bsp; There’s another work that again uses the harmonic series as a basic feature. No special tuning is involved because I was able to make use of a natural musical phenomenon. It’s a piece for viola, cello, string bass, and a tape delay system. The three instruments produce what are called harmonic glissandi on the strings: simply moving the left hand, the finger touching lightly, up and down the length of the string. In the course of the piece, it’s actually a canon in three voices, you’ll hear the three voices, and if you know it’s a canon, maybe you will hear those relationships. The bass is tuned in fifths an octave below the cello. So it’s a canon at the octave using harmonic glissandi, beginning on the C strings; then moving gradually up with canonic delays to the G, D, and A strings; and then finally cascading back down. So you have that kind of very consonant sounding situation toward the beginning where everything comes from the harmonic series on C. But pretty soon that gets to be a little more complicated. This is the first movement of a longer work. The whole piece is called Glissade, and this movement is called “Shimmer.”
One can’t go on indefinitely writing pieces based on the harmonic series, but I learned a number of useful things from this work. Some of them are quite obvious. One is that the lower-order harmonics tend to be easily understood by our ears as consonant. The higher we go in the series, particularly with the prime number harmonic partials, the more complex the relationships become—and in some ways the more dissonant the relationships may be perceived to be. I also learned that when various pitches of a given harmonic series, that is, a series over a given fundamental, are heard together, the ear has a remarkable ability to fuse them into a singular, unified percept. This must be the case because virtually every sustained tone we ever hear, including vowels of the singing voice, are actually complex combinations of the individual pitches. It is because they are in this particular relationship that our ears hear them as a singular thing. And it has seemed to me, for some time, that this is an important insight because any theory of harmony, if it’s to be developed, tells us something about how we perceive. It would be a theory of harmonic perception, not of harmonic practice.