Eight Lectures on Experimental Music
Page 2
Now, this also threw some new light on the historical viewpoint that I was talking about in relation to the evolution of harmony in the nineteenth century and the impasse that was reached in 1910 but by way of another insight, or perhaps a hypothesis. I’ll put it to you as that. I think our ears interpret intervals of any kind as though they were the nearest simple interval in this kind of harmonic series relationship. That is, we even hear even intervals that are out of tune as more or less distorted versions of simple intervals. By simple, I should say also “natural,” as they occur in the harmonic series. By the way, if we have any part of nature that we can pick to use in our music, that’s it. Everything else is culture, style, and psychology. The harmonic series is physics.
Anyway, my hypothesis is that whatever intervals we hear, we interpret them, more or less, as distorted versions of a certain set of relatively simple intervals. This is the way tempered tuning systems are acceptable to us. It becomes important to understand what the twelve-tone temperament, which we have been living with for so long, is. It was a fairly good approximation of a set of important natural intervals. The deviations, the distortions, were considered to be acceptable and worth the price that one had to pay to achieve certain things like endless modulation and so forth, the ability to repeat the same melodic idea in another key region and not move into impossible regions. The impasse that was reached in 1910 was determined precisely by the fact that the twelve-tone temperament was designed to approximate a certain limited set of harmonic relations. Music had been based on those relations for a couple hundred years, and the evolution of harmony couldn’t go any further with that tuning system. This implies that if we want to keep going, we have to start looking at other tuning systems.
One of the things that was done around that time was the subdivision of the twelve tones into quarter tones or sixth tones. This didn’t get very far, however, because quarter tones don’t really get any closer to those important harmonic relations than semitones do. They didn’t help much. I think what needs to be done is experimenting with a variety of different tuning systems, and if what we’re interested in is harmony, we have to design them to have harmonic effects.
A recent work of mine makes use of another temperament containing equal divisions of the octave into not twelve but seventy-two parts, so that the smallest interval is one-sixth of a semitone. For those of you who know acoustical terminology, about seventeen cents is the smallest interval one can hear. It is for acoustic instruments. The way I did this, if you can believe it, was to get six harps together. (It’s a beautiful sight on one stage.) Within each harp, the tuning is the normal tempered tuning, but the harps are tuned a sixth of a semitone apart. The piece was written as though for one enormous superharp. It’s extremely difficult because everyone is playing just one-sixth of the whole part. But it worked out. The reason I chose that one is that that subdivision gives extremely good approximations to all of the natural intervals that I was interested in. It does an awfully good job of approximating them. The work is called Changes. It is a series of short studies for six harps, based on a number of lines that make up a hexagram in the I Ching. I used a computer in the composition process. The textures are stochastically generated and controlled. Each of the pieces is named after one of the hexagrams of the I Ching. I am going to play just three of them for you. Each of them is about two minutes long. The first is called “Holding Together,” the second, “Duration,” and the third, “Difficulty at the Beginning.”
One of the implications of our use of any tempered system or any approximation of those simpler, what I’m calling “natural,” intervals we find in the harmonic series is that the ear must have a certain tolerance range for those approximations. If we interpret a given interval as something slightly different, then there must be a range in which this interpretation is possible. And that notion of tolerance is an extremely important one that has to be brought into any debate about the use of just intervals, just tuning systems, and so forth. Too often the people who have arguments about that seem, on the one side, to imply that any mistuning at all is unacceptable. But, in fact, we live in a world where we never get anything perfect. As far as I am concerned, these tiles in the floor are perfectly square. But, if we get down there with calipers and measure them very precisely, we discover that they are all slightly different. So, the twelve-tone tempered system is a useful one for certain kinds of music and for certain kinds of harmony.
Now, I am going to claim that the five-tone Pelog scale in Javanese music is also useful for a certain kind of harmony. I don’t think there is much precedent for that in the literature. I’m assuming—well, I’d better be careful now, I’m surrounded by musicologists. Don’t take whatever I say as a musicological hypothesis, but as a composer’s working assumption. I am going to tell you about the piece that you are going to hear tonight. My assumption here was that the Pelog tuning, which for those of you that are not familiar with it, let me let you hear it on one of these instruments. [Plays.] We hear, first of all, three pitches separated by small intervals, then a larger interval, another small interval, then a large one.
That set of pitches can be approximated by a series of small intervals by a circle of small fifths. What do I mean by small fifths? In the twelve-tone temperament, our fifths are small but only by a fiftieth of a semitone. They’re two cents smaller than the natural interval. If we use a smaller interval of 667 cents, a third of a semitone small, and try to make a circle of these, it will in fact make a circle that will repeat itself after nine pitches. It’s a nine-tone equal division of the octave. But if you take the first five of them, they create a configuration that is extremely close to the Pelog scale.
Whether there is any genetic relationship there I have no way of knowing. I decided to tune the piano to a nine-tone equal division and then adjust the piano’s actual absolute frequency level so that it could best fit with the pitches of the gamelan. The gamelan ensemble can only play a set of five tones at that level of the piano; however, the same scale structure can be reproduced at each of the nine pitches. What I just played is very close to this. What happens in the piece is that there is a continual modulation, in fact, just similar to what we might find in Western tonal music—modulation by descending small fifths. So, the music as a whole is moving around that circle of fifths that has nine steps to it. In the whole twenty minutes of the piece that circle is gone through six times. At the beginning, only the piano can play all the five pitches in the Pelog, based on the initial basic tone. The gamelan can only play one of them. So, you’ll hear the gamelan every once in a while, punctuating the piano sounds with these same pitches. Then another one comes in when the piano begins to modulate. Eventually, the piano will have gone through that series to a point where its five pitches correspond precisely to the five pitches that can be played by the gamelan. So it becomes kind of a concerto form, in a way, with more activity in the piano and waves of activity on the gamelan.
Originally, the first idea about this piece had to do with just the timbre. It’s remarkable that preparing a piano string in certain ways reminds lots of people of the sounds of the metallophones in the gamelan. I was commissioned to write a piece for a small gamelan group in Toronto, which will help explain the rather pathetic underuse of this magnificent set of instruments that you see before you. I’ve only got six players up here. More than half of the resources on that stage are being wasted, which I regret considerably because I would think it would be an absolutely magnificent sound if I used every one of them.
The piece was composed using a computer in the composition process. I’m always very careful to put it that way because I don’t want anybody to think that my computer composed the piece. I composed it, but my computer was a very useful tool in working out various aspects of it. The process is something that I call stochastic. I’m using that term in a slightly different way than Xenakis did. Very simply it means “a constrained, random process.” Constrained by various kinds of shape functions
that direct it. It’s never completely free. And that’s it. Are all the players here? If they are ready, I’m ready.
2
CHRISTIAN WOLFF
April 24, 1990
ALVIN LUCIER
I first met Christian Wolff in the late 1950s in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At that time he was a tutor in classics at Harvard. From time to time he organized concerts of new music at Kirkland House, all-day affairs that included works of John Cage, David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, Frederic Rzewski, myself, and others, as well as films by Tony Conrad.
In 1965, when I invited John Cage to perform a concert in the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, where I was teaching at the time, John suggested that we include a work of Christian’s. I was delighted to do so. In that concert, John, Christian, and I performed his for 1, 2 or 3 people, an early signature piece that used cuing as a way to produce indeterminate results. Many of you know this work; I include it in Music 109, Introduction to Experimental Music. It is a democratic idea—a player not having to be a prodigious performer but one who requires an acutely aware social attitude toward performance. Amateurs as well as professionals share the stage. I have often thought of Christian’s works for small ensembles as a perfect form of chamber music; each player depends on the playing of the others. Following Christian’s lecture, three of our graduate students will perform this work as a surprise gift to Christian.
Artists and composers, as well as scientists and engineers, often stumble upon great new ideas. I have often thought that innovative or shocking ideas in art—cubism in painting, for example—do not come about through deep analytical thought on the part of the artist but come about by accident, in the actual or whimsical process of working on a painting or musical composition. One story goes that Picasso was so upset with his then mistress that he drew a distorted picture of her by moving her nose to one side. Christian’s breakthrough technique of cuing among players came about as he was working on a piece for two pianists. He was running out of time and needed to finish the piece for an upcoming performance, so he developed this shorthand notation. This solution to a practical problem became a philosophical idea in his subsequent music.
By the early ’70s, Christian decided to write in a more traditional style, in order to make his music more accessible to everyday musicians. For several years I have struggled to figure out where his earlier ideas of indeterminate processes might be lurking in his more traditional notation. Perhaps one answer lies in the quirkiness of the narrative, the syntax and grammar of the flow of his pieces. Often one phrase doesn’t seem to follow logically from what came just before; it seems totally unrelated. The choice of instruments in many of his works is free and sometimes produces strange bedfellows. During visits to art colleges in England in the ’70s, he made a series of prose scores for nonmusicians. Students in Music 109 are well acquainted with Stones, which we perform in class every year. “Make sounds with stones, draw sounds out of stones, using a number of sizes and kinds …”
Christian’s approach to political works is direct and gentle. He often uses texts and workers’ songs, sometimes hidden in the texture of a work, similar to the use of folk music by other American composers, including Aaron Copland. Many are about women (Rosa Parks, Rosa Luxemburg, Harriet Tubman, the female workers in a shirt factory in Lowell, Massachusetts). He quotes from songs of Holly Near.
When European composers visit Wesleyan, they often ask to go to three places in New England: Union Cemetery in nearby Killingworth, to visit Hermann Broch’s grave; Concord, Massachusetts, to visit Henry Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond; and Hanover, New Hampshire, to visit Christian Wolff, who currently teaches music and classics at Dartmouth College. Tonight, he is here in Middletown, Connecticut, to talk to you in person. The title of his lecture is “What Is Our Work?”
CHRISTIAN WOLFF
Thank you, Alvin.
What is our work? What I mean is, What are we—composers, producers of music—doing and, perhaps, what should we be doing? I also mean, how are we doing it?
Who are we? Well, I’ll have to speak mostly for myself, if only because I have more of the material at hand, than for anyone else. But I’ve said we and our because the musical enterprise is inevitably social or, if you will, political, in one way or another. We all need to survive materially to start with, and our work, whatever it is, will be affected by that, while our material survival obviously depends on social networks. (For example, the extraordinary character of John Cage’s work in [the] 1950s and early ’60s, the alarming and beautiful blend in it of power and danger—in addition to, almost in spite of, the music’s refusal of rhetoric—must owe something to his continuously endangered economic life at the time. Over roughly the same period, Elliott Carter, in total economic security, evolved his characteristically hypercomplex and hyperdeterminate hermetic music. Somewhere in between, a larger number of us have been employed by universities and colleges: How has that affected our work?)
Apart from this aspect of the material environment in which we work, there is the wider social one of an economy geared to mass consumption, on the one hand, and therefore to a homogenizing of our cultural experience, and, on the other hand, an economy that feeds on a privatizing technology: recordings, Walkmans, videos, VCRs, all are for individual, private use because no doubt more will be sold if everyone is persuaded that he or she must have this equipment, or, indeed, they must have it if they want any access to the main currents of the culture. In this way, the technology is antisocial and objectifies cultural products, makes them consumer items, and so suppresses the liveliness they might have in a particular social setting of audience and performer(s). Of course, technology can be useful and mind-stretching; it’s a human creation, and it’s extended extraordinarily access to both cultural products and cultural work. In music, for instance, if you can get hold of or construct or modify equipment, with some intelligence and with information that is more or less available, you can make music, and you can do it in ways that may alter notions of what music might be. Technology, too, may offer means of us for our making connections between popular and so-called art music.
I also refer to our work in the plural because, though I know rather less of other music that’s being made than I would like, I try to think about it, respond to it in some way in my own work. At times, I have worked closely with—and performed with—others, and that’s affected my work: for instance, David Tudor, John Cage, Frederic Rzewski, Cornelius Cardew, Gordon Mumma, the members of the English improvising group AMM, John Tilbury, Garrett List. Other musics have affected me all my life. Some musics I admire and don’t know what to do about it, but because they exist I have the feeling that they allow me to get on with what I am doing: for example, the music of Nancarrow, Tudor, Oliveros, Lucier, Nono, Ashley, Feldman. As for the other musics that have affected my work, I should mention that they include musics of the past, Western classical music (on much of which I was raised from an early age), going back to the medieval period; musics of other traditions—African Ba-Benzele Pygmy, for instance; and some jazz (for example, Ornette Coleman)—and I have drawn, for musical material, considerably from folk music, particularly North American and black and politically connected.
All these musics could be called “influences,” although, except for the use of tunes (from political folk music), there is no deliberate, conscious use of them, no effort to adapt or imitate. In many cases, I think of them after the fact of my own writing, as though having come away from a conversation with them (or one or more parts of them). I carry on the talk on my own, and perhaps they are listening. They can also provide a kind of corroboration and encouragement. While working on the first set of Exercises, which are mostly single- or double-pitch lines to be played by a variable number of unspecified instruments in a freely heterophonic way, for example, I happened to hear part of a performance of the thirteenth-century Cantigas de Santa Maria, which sounded to me at once various, rich, and clear; and then I found out that it was all based on
a single notated pitch line. After making the piece Stones (a prose instruction for an improvisation using stones as the basic sound source), I brought a copy of it to Cornelius Cardew, who, when he had looked at it, reached over and handed me his score-in-progress of The Great Learning, paragraph I, in which members of a chorus must make sounds with stones, according to a graphic notation based on Chinese characters. Cornelius had thought to use stones because, beautifully cut and tuned, they are often used in Chinese classical music. My piece had originally come about after a long afternoon on a stone-covered beach, discovering and trying out the range of sounds that a variety of stones are capable of producing. In the case of each of these pieces, you could say an area of community of interest was discovered and identified. With the Cantigas, initially a formal procedure—heterophony and flexible instrumental realization—was shared, but, then too, some of the conditions underlying this way of making the music: collaborative performance (nonhierarchical), the mix of popular and so-called high cultural elements (the Cantigas draw widely from folk tunes; the Exercises are full of diatonic bits; both require a more-than-simply-popular formality of performance presentation). In the case of Stones, common interests in the exploration of new (or so we thought) sound sources intersected, coming in the one case from a piece’s content—The Great Learning sets texts of Confucius—and in the other from experiment with natural objects.
I think of the contemporary musical work I have referred to and my own work as experimental. What does that mean? Or what can we suggest it usefully to mean?