Eight Lectures on Experimental Music

by Alvin Lucier

  It’s first of all partly a question of circumstances, as with the related notion of “new music.” That is, it’s a sliding notion. The earliest new music I know about appeared at the end of the fifth century before Christ in Athens (people complained at the time that it undermined the traditional modes or “harmonies”; that it misused, by extending them, instrumental techniques; that it was directionless—zigzagging about like ants—and rhythmically unstable; that it obscured the words of texts which it set; that it corrupted the young). In the early fourteenth century, a “new art,” ars nova, of music (or, more precisely, of musical notation) was identified. And so forth down the centuries. And evidently by the beginning of the twentieth century, the beginnings of “our” new music emerged, most characteristically, it seemed, around the figure of Schoenberg. By the mid-1950s, one of Schoenberg’s greatest apologists, Theodor W. Adorno, wrote about the “aging new (modern) music,” a powerful essay in which he claimed that this aging was due to the fact that “the young no longer dared to be young.” By the late ’60s (shortly before his death), he wrote, more generally, and perhaps more suggestively, that “the new [in art] is the longing for the new, not the new itself.”

  Adorno follows up this observation by remarking that modern art (or twentieth-century music), identifying itself as new, assumes a notion of progress, assumes that the new constitutes an improvement on the old. Yet, he also observes, the world around us doesn’t seem to be improving; it is, in fact, in a state of extraordinary crisis—the gap between rich and poor, violence, the use of torture, the abuse of the environment are reaching unprecedented proportions (I update his examples somewhat). If, then, Adorno argues, art would be linked with progress, it must represent a utopian impulse, an expression or image of, or desire for, a better world. But such a representation, insofar as “social reality increasingly impedes Utopia,” will implicate art in the fostering of delusion and false comfort, will make it a lie.

  There are, of course, more familiar notions of the new. Bach, you remember, had to provide a new cantata every Sunday—which recalls that the idea of performing old music, of musical reruns, is relatively recent (and as it happened, Bach was one of its first beneficiaries). Nowadays when you use the term new music, it can mean what is currently on the pop charts or refer to groups just emerging on the scene, whatever their musical style or sound happens to be. Here the new is associated with novelty, with what is fashionable, up-to-date, not yet passé, an association easily connected to marketing strategies looking to extend and expand consumption.

  There is a beautiful moment early in Homer’s Odyssey (we are back in the early eighth century before Christ) in which Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, asks the singer who is entertaining unwelcome guests in her house not to sing the heartbreaking song of her husband’s absence. Her son, Telemachus, however, checks her, saying, “Why, my mother, do you begrudge this excellent singer / his pleasing himself as the thought drives him? It is not the singers / who are to blame, it must be Zeus [the all-powerful of the gods] is to blame, who gives out / to men who eat bread, to each and all, the way he wills it. / There is nothing wrong in his singing the sad return of the Danaans [the Greeks, including Odysseus]. / People, surely, always give more applause to that song / which is the latest to circulate among the listeners.” And he continues, “So let your heart and let your spirit be hardened to listen. Odysseus is not the only one who lost his homecoming / day at Troy. There were many others who perished, besides him.” The passage is beautiful in part because of its intricacies: we (the audience) know, in fact, that Odysseus has not lost his homecoming but is on his way, and the song from which this passage is taken, the “Odyssey,” is the song of that homecoming, which will complete, or continue, the new but in fact not-yet-completed song, which is so painful to Penelope and which Telemachus defends on the grounds of its newness. He also defends the new song on the grounds of the singer’s inspiration, or need to sing what he sings; on the grounds that the song represents reality (what Zeus has dispensed), which affects a far larger group than just Odysseus—though, as said, Telemachus misapprehends some of that reality; and on the grounds that the present company (however unwelcome and threatening they happen to be) has a claim on the song’s newness that outweighs consideration of the private grief it causes Penelope.

  We might mention in passing that the performance of orally transmitted and of improvised musics, which are in many cases traditional musics, is always, strictly speaking, new. Such performance, one could say, exists only for the present, albeit in some cases as a kind of foreground on that particular music’s traditional background.

  When all is said and done, we need and want, in some sense that matters, what is new. What will it be? How will it be determined?

  Before continuing with those questions, I’d like to suggest a schematic outline of how one might see the need for what is new. Under one general heading of subjective or personal there is (1) an appetite for novelty somehow in each of us; and (2) another way of seeing that appetite, as at once the ineluctable fact of our individual, continual changing, becoming always new, growing and decaying, and our individual desire, variously and activated, to grow, change, renovate, change our skins—it is a matter of reminding ourselves that we are alive. The second general heading I would label objective or social and locate there; (3) the capitalist market economy, driven by the need for continuing and increasing profits and intent, with all the resources of mass communication, on exciting in us unending desires for its products and services; and (4) the larger condition of the world and its crises (some of whose manifestations were mentioned earlier), crying out for change and transformation. All four of these elements interpenetrate; all of them are either changeable or capable of instigating change.

  Of course we have deep needs for stability and gentle continuity. Change is work and can be scary as well as exhilarating. And there are always those who have, or imagine themselves to have, some advantage of power or privilege and who will resist change by every means, including in the extreme case, their own destruction. In fact, stability is not a given, not a choice as such. It, too, has constantly to be re-created through the processes of change. As for the notion that there is nothing new under the sun, while sobering, it seems to me useless, all too conducive to inertia and passive resignation.

  Now, what about music? It seems to me that everything said so far about the new and about change points to experimental music. Not, of course, that music as such will somehow save us. Obviously there are enormous gaps between social and musical problems. But they are also linked, a linking that at the very least urges us to take our musical problems seriously.

  What is experimental? In some ways it is, as said before, a variable notion, differently realized at different times or by different works. The word suggests something that you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. It can have an apologetic sound to it—“this is only an experiment”—implying a displacement of the real thing, or that one is only on the way, more or less groping, toward the real thing, that the point is to establish something else, more important, on a firm foundation: to prove it. From this I would eliminate the apologetic tone but retain the suggestion of exploration. I would also put on hold the notion that there is something out there that we can ultimately prove. Experiment implies working amidst the unknown. It acknowledges the unknown, respects it, but is not frightened by it. Experiment should be such as to involve genuine risk, that is, truly acknowledging the unknown in which it operates, and so establish its seriousness.

  One way to consider the experimental character of music is to notice its effect on listeners (though I don’t want to stress this point: as a composer, I’m more concerned with production than reception; though of course I’m not indifferent to the latter, but consideration of it doesn’t enter into the actual processes of making my work, except to the extent that it might allow listeners to be free to do their own listening). Effects such as surprise, shock, astonishment, irritation,
boredom, bemusement, I find this very difficult to talk about, but I thought it should be mentioned. One of the most encouraging things I have heard said about my work was that although this person didn’t really like what she was hearing, the performance of the music made her feel that she wanted to be a musician. David Behrman once said after a concert that he liked the music because it was honest and it was funny (humorous).

  I would like to think of bemusement as a good result of this music, bemusement at what was heard, mixed in with, variously, pleasure, perhaps exhilaration, and bemusement in the mind, waking it up also to the social world around it. Of course music—experimental music—may be allowed a variety of functions. Henry Brant thinks of music as “medicine for the spirit.”

  Let me give you an example of how context can affect the experimental character of a piece of music. In 1975, I was asked to provide music for a Merce Cunningham Company “event,” one of those evening-long performances put together out of material from various dances. As usual, no specifications were indicated about the music except for the total length of time within which it could take place. No information was provided about the character of the dance. Merce Cunningham’s work is of course experimental, and part of that experimentalism is to allow the music that accompanies the dance to be itself rather than an accompaniment. The music that I provided included a new piece that used material from a song, originally a popular song of the 1920s (I think) called “Redwing,” which was later (in 1940) adapted by Woodie Guthrie to make a political song called “Union Maid.” We—the musicians (there were four of us altogether)—decided to include in the performance a singing of “Union Maid.” Not, I may say, without some previous anxious deliberation. At any rate, the song, roughly sung (none of us were polished singers), coming at a point in the dance—unpredictably—where Merce Cunningham was performing one of his beautiful solos, was shocking (I even remember hearing the odd gasp from the audience). An ordinary, perky tune was shocking in a context that routinely absorbed musics like John Cage’s, David Tudor’s, Pauline Oliveros’s, Alvin Lucier’s, and, for that matter, my own. My sense of what might constitute an experimental music performance has never been the same.

  The usual view is that experimental music is distinguished by the presence of new sound or (and) new ways of arranging sound and (or), we might add, new contexts (which might well be social) for sounds. (As another example of the latter, consider the performance by some of New York’s best players, members of the Philharmonic, et cetera, of Mozart’s woodwind quintet at a concert sponsored by the Musicians’ Action Collective, a politically oriented organization, as a benefit for the Farm Workers’ Union, a concert including political folk music, jazz, and new music and attended by an audience including the various followers of these musics, most of whom were also supporters of the farm workers’ cause. Mozart’s piece in this context became a political piece in, I would claim, a new, experimental way.)

  Something of the feeling of this newness is also suggested by John Cage’s remark that “the trick is suddenly to appear in a place without apparent means of transport.” More explicitly, Cage has also insisted that the essential meaning of experimental is unpredictability. He urges work of such a kind that its realization (sometimes as a musical composition, sometimes as a performance, sometimes both) will surprise the one who made it, in some cases the one(s) who perform it, and, in a rather different way, those who listen. In the case of those who listen, the sense of hearing something surprising is different because they don’t really know the conditions of the experiment—the experimental conditions of a particular work. If a certain sound has been arrived at by chance (either in the composition process or the performing), how can you tell just from hearing it? To be sure, if the sound is unlike any you have heard before, you will appreciate its experimental character; but you do so in the context of all your experience of listening to music; and if you should hear this sound again, it will, in this view, cease to be experimental. Well, perhaps. The example of the single sound is a bit overly simple. The experimental character of a piece, as it involves unpredictability (and not necessarily just new sounds), is more likely to be found in the way the piece makes its own context: the piece as a whole may or may not seem new or surprising, but it will create a setting within which its surprises take place. You could think of background (the piece as a whole) and foreground (the things that affect you as surprise). It may also be that foreground and background—surprisingly—change into one another.

  To return to John Cage just once more, he has a reason for stressing the notion of unpredictability. It’s to allow you, the listener, but also himself and the players to be more alert and attentive in this way: the unpredictability is a result or symptom of compositional techniques (in his case the use of chance in the process of composing and sometimes in the overlaying of independent individual performers’ parts or of several independently made compositions for a given performance), techniques intended to free up the music from extramusical pressures, such as the desire to express a feeling or idea or image or whatever, even the desire to be beautiful. This is not to say that such expressions might not appear or be felt by listeners to appear, but the point is that they would appear without specific intention: they would take you by surprise, innocently and without compulsion. Allowing each of us individually to be free in this way is the utopian element in such a view of experimental music. (It has also a kind of practical realism about it, insofar as there is almost inevitably—especially in times so culturally heterogeneous as ours—a gap between the expressive intention behind a work and how its listeners (variously) understand it. The absence of specific expressive intent would preclude misunderstanding about such an intent, or, to put it in another way, such an absence allows a work expressive flexibility.

  When I began composing, I had the notion—I don’t really know where it came from, perhaps an adolescent impulse—that I should make a music unlike any other. I was encouraged too by hearing for the first time, after a long immersion in the older Western classical music (roughly from Bach to Brahms), the string quartet music of Bartók, Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern. (This was in 1949, when opportunities for hearing this music even in New York were very rare and no recordings were available.) The music, especially in its sonorities, the kinds of noise it made, its continuities, its dissonances, felt extraordinarily bracing and like nothing I had encountered before and, by virtue of this, liberating. I wanted, in my way, to do the same. And for the next twenty or so years, this is what I tried to do, making a music that whatever else might be said about it, could be called experimental in the senses of that word suggested so far. But in the early ’70s, something caught up with me. Like many people at that time—and they included a number of musicians with whom I worked—I was (to make a longer story short and simple) politicized, and for the first time I thought about the connections between my emerging political concerns and my musical work (earlier involvement with pacifism and civil rights activity had had no such effect). My previous work now seemed to me too esoteric and, because of its performance requirements—involving the players in a kind of exclusive, intense concentration on each other’s sounds—too introverted: the gap between the performers’ involvement with a piece’s sound and the listeners’ seemed too large. What I was doing musically seemed mostly inaccessible to people (including good friends) who were, generally speaking, music lovers.

  My first response was to attach to my music texts that were political in character or implication. As I said earlier, social arrangements find, in one form or another, representation in music (as in any kind of human activity), either implicitly or unconsciously or explicitly or consciously. It could be said that my work shifted from an implicit expression of the politics of a kind of democratic libertarianism akin to anarchism to an explicit politics of, roughly speaking, democratic socialism. And, in the music, I tried to make my work less introverted, less sparse, more of a response to what a larger number of people might recogniz
e as music.

  What, now, has happened to the notion of experiment?

  The combinations of sounds (not quite the sounds themselves) may have something new about them, but the way they are put together also draws on more familiar procedures. In the earlier Pairs (1969), for instance, there is hardly a trace of usual musical techniques, at most a variant of hocketing (sharing out a melody line, mostly note by note, between two or more players) but without fixed rhythmic definition; perhaps something like counterpoint in the overlaying of paired players but without any specific motivic relationships—fragments of melody. No system is used in the note-to-note procedure of composing. Perhaps most important (though of course everything is important), the composing involved working out the conditions under which something I would regard as musical, a process, would be able to take place, conditions allowing a high degree of variability in timing and in density of sound.

  John Cage used to remark that he found my work musical (this was not a value judgment); after a rehearsal of Bowery Preludes, Garrett List said to me, “Don’t get this wrong, I really like these pieces: they’re so unmusical.” Morton Feldman was heard to say that the writing was idiomatic and unidiomatic. The making of Pairs could be said to have spun itself out of itself (but I also think there is something of Webern in the background, though not in any of the technical procedures). Bowery Preludes from 1987 uses counterpoint—the piccolo and trombone duet, for instance, is a kind of two-part invention; there is identifiable melodic hocketing; there are longer patches of clear rhythmic articulation (as far as pitch is concerned, the earlier work starts with the assumption of complete chromaticism but has plenty of room for the appearance of diatonic moments, while the later starts with diatonic material, which easily shifts in and out of chromaticism; noise is always a possibility in both cases; I’m tempted to say that the nondecorative presence of noise is one of the clearest identifying features of experimental music—and I’d be willing to extend the notion of noise to the way sound appears in, say, Nancarrow or Lucier or even Feldman).