Eight Lectures on Experimental Music
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Behind these differences in the more recent work (actually, the work of about the last seventeen years) is the technical—and more-than-technical—fact that the music in many cases draws its material from songs, most of them not my own but a variety of political songs or folk songs or black spirituals, which have had or have acquired association with political or social issues: for instance, in Bowery Preludes use is made of the spirituals “Mary, Don’t You Weep,” “Oh, Freedom,” and “Set Down, Servant,” all songs originally expressing, under religious guise, the Southern slaves’ aspirations to freedom and then taken up again during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s (I first heard “Mary, Don’t You Weep” on a highly political Staple Singers album in the early ’70s). Also used are a black prison song, “Ain’t No Mo’ Cane on Dis Brazos,” first sung by slaves in the cane fields on the Brazos River in Texas and apparently still sung by the mostly black prison population hired out to this day to work in those same fields, and a contemporary British women’s “Picket Line Song,” written during an equal-pay strike in London in 1976. I should mention that one part of Bowery Preludes uses no such song material and is notated in such a way as to focus the players entirely on dynamics and sonority.
The way the song material may be used varies, but mostly the pitch intervals and the rhythms are variously represented, transformed, augmented, diminished, extended by additive processes, and so forth. The song is rarely quoted directly. (There are affinities here with Ives, for instance, and the English keyboard music of the turn of the seventeenth century.) The songs—which I choose not just for their political content but also because I really like them as songs—also provide a kind of guiding spirit to the composing. It’s not that I set out to express in the music the content of the song (the words would then, in any case, be necessary). Rather, as, for example, in the trombone and piccolo duet in Bowery Preludes, the partly humorous militancy of the “Picket Line Song” is both in the musical material in my hands, so to speak, being variously modified, and in my head as I work, as a kind of wider-structure or scaffolding of feeling, which is not really the same thing as setting out to make a piece intended to express humorous militancy (about, incidentally, a quite serious issue).
Now, what has happened to the notion of experimental as a way of working that is free of specific or directed expressive intentions? Perhaps not so much. Generally speaking, of course, I believe my earlier and later music sound different (though there is still sometimes that thread of noise running between them). But in each—earlier underlying, later perhaps more on the surface, earlier in the way the sounds are made, later more in what the sounds refer to—there is a concern about freedom. I don’t want to make any easy metaphorical jump from musical to political or even personal freedom; but if we believe that our music is part of our larger social existence, then some such connection, however flickering, may be there. It is also the case that every work, no matter how indeterminate or experimental, has its particular expressive horizons, even when what is expressed is the freedom of sounds to be just sounds: that freedom is a signified meaning made by us, not by the sounds. The expressive possibilities of, say, Pairs are delimited—only a certain range of expression or meaning could imaginably be found in them, experienced because of them, a range that can be identified, though you may not be able to put it into words. (These remarks are, of course, in no way value judgments.) Every piece, I think, has—in addition to the abstract arrangement of its sounds or simply the existence of its sounds and their possible relation to whatever other sounds are going on around them—what I would call a content, something that it suggests, which is not the same as its sounds, though such a content may deeply affect those sounds, how they are arranged and how they appear to us. For example, in Cage, that content has often to do with nature, stars, the seasons, plants, or the words of Thoreau. All this affects how we hear the sounds in his music, how their horizon of expressiveness is indicated. In Pairs, the content could be said to have something to do with working together, two by two. In my more recent work that content often relates to a political mood: assertive, resistant, commemorative, celebrative, for instance. The connection may be fairly tenuous or subterranean; it is often discontinuous. As for indeterminacy, it will always exist in some form; it’s our destiny, because we’re mortal. The trick is not to forget it. In the recent music I’ve been speaking about, one could say that that indeterminacy is most interestingly active in the ways the sound of a piece and its content interconnect or interfere with one another, which will happen, in the always-changing conditions of performance and listening—unpredictably.
Before concluding, I would like to mention two more ideas, which I think are important but not exclusively so.
Both these ideas have to do with renunciation or restriction, a kind of ascetic minimalism (it’s a nice paradox that much of the music labeled minimalist, say, the earlier Philip Glass and Steve Reich, was basically good time music). One is the notion of musical poverty, of an avoidance of rhetoric, of the presence of silence or spaciousness, of sparseness of the irreducibility of material. One might think of music of Satie, Webern, Feldman, Lucier, Cage, for examples. The other notion is of what Adorno refers to as “the ideal of darkness,” which does not simply match what he feels to be the darkness of the times, of social reality, but “does no more and no less than postulate that art properly understood finds happiness in nothing except its ability to stand its ground. This happiness,” he continues, “illuminates the sensuous phenomenon from the inside.… blackness [darkness]—the antithesis of the fraudulent sensuality of culture’s façade—has a sensual appeal.” These notions, of poverty and darkness, would function, so to speak, to keep us honest; and Adorno adds the point that in that very function their music achieves its particular beauty. As I said, I find these ideas of critical importance but not exclusively so: necessary but not sufficient conditions for our work.
So what is our work? It is, I still believe, experimental music.
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ROBERT ASHLEY
April 7, 1992
ALVIN LUCIER
I’ve known Bob Ashley since the early 1960s. I first met him in New York. He had driven from Ann Arbor to attend a concert in Town Hall in which I participated. At that time, I was director of the Brandeis Chamber Chorus devoted to the performance of contemporary music. We had been invited to perform a couple of works of Morton Feldman and Earle Brown in Town Hall. A couple of carloads of people drove down from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to hear that concert. Ashley had founded, with Gordon Mumma, one of the first independent electronic studios in the United States. It was a place that anyone could come and work. This was before studios really started to proliferate in all the universities in the country. At the same time, Bob was the director of the Once Group, a group of musicians, visual artists, and architects in Ann Arbor that, along with Anna Halprin in California, created the first intermedia works. Under Bob’s leadership, the Once Group created the most amazing performances in such unlikely places as parking structures, automobiles, trucks, hearses, and other alternative venues. He wrote numerous works for conventional instruments as well. I guess you could say that he was one of the first inventors of graphic notation, too. After his talk, I. M. Harjito and Sumarsam (rebabs), Subramanian (South Indian violin), and Roy Wiseman (double bass) will present a performance of one of his graphic scores, In Memoriam: Esteban Gomez (Quartet).
The most astonishing thing about Bob’s work is his discovery that human speech is music. Once, as accompaniment to a Merce Cunningham dance performance in New York, Bob gathered some of his old Ann Arbor friends for an unrehearsed conversation. All they did was talk. That’s all it was. It was compelling. It was music.
She Was a Visitor is a work for speaking chorus in which all the phonemes contained in the title sentence are detached and sustained for long breaths, revealing hidden meanings and images: “sh” (hush); “oo” (delight); “ah” (surprise); ’“er” (hesitation), and so forth.
Wolfman was the loudest musical work one ever heard at that time. It was also the most ironic. Contrary to popular belief, the performer makes extremely soft vocal sounds. The loudness is produced by enormous amplifier gain, the feedback stopped only by the barely audible input from the vocalist.
Ashley does astonishing things with time in String Quartet Describing the Motions of Large Real Bodies. First he asks the players to bow slackened strings so slowly (one bow length up to ten minutes) and with such pressure that no continuous sound is produced, only pops and clicks. He then routes these signals through a series of delays of from five to 250 milliseconds (slow for computers, fast for humans), causing subtle shifts in timbre. These extremes of scale give the listener the uncanny feeling of slow and fast at the same time, as when a Boeing 747 barely moves, hovering, while landing.
For the last fifteen years, Ashley has devoted himself to creating a new genre of work: opera for television. I don’t mean opera simply put on television, but opera for the medium itself. These wonderful pieces exist on video and can also be performed live. I am delighted that he is here to talk you in person.
ROBERT ASHLEY
I said I would talk about technique, and it’s hard to start because Alvin stole some of my lines. Against all the wisdom of watching television, it occurred to me that because I was interested in music and words—without knowing anything more about it than that, and because I was working with people who were, lucky for me, great with words, I mean great, great talkers and willing and not afraid to do things with their voices—I got caught up with the idea of narrative music. All of you will have this experience. I went through a period of about ten or twelve years where everything was quite wonderful for me, working in concert not stage; then suddenly for political reasons everything was not quite wonderful, and I didn’t do anything for four or five years. It occurred to me that, because of my peculiar obsession with words, television was the place that I should try to get into.
So I started working with the idea that I would make music for television. So far, not very much of it has been seen on television, not in the United States at least. But I have nothing to complain about. I started making pieces in which speaking was a form of music, and I got great composer-performers who were also great speakers to participate in my pieces. Then one thing led to another, and I found myself able to work on this idea that had been somewhat of an obsession with me—to just let the words be the music. That’s pretty much what I’ve been working on for the past ten or twelve years.
I’m about at the end of it now. I have written forty half hours for television. It is like a series. When and if I finish producing them, I will retire. That’s enough work to do in one person’s lifetime. Probably it will take the rest of my life just to get them produced. So far, I have only eight of them produced, so I have thirty-two more of them to go. I have performed a lot of them in concert, however.
Basically, I take the smallest core ensemble for a particular opera, that is to say, the people who sing all the principal characters and the people who add to whatever music we bring with us. In that way, the singers are able to develop the characters, and I’m able to see what each piece needs, how it needs to grow. This is an introduction to an anecdote about technique. Right now I’m working on the last four so-called operas of this set. Each one is in an eighty-eight-minute format. Four parts of twenty-two minutes each, direct sequels to a piece I produced about twelve years ago that some of you might have seen parts of, called Perfect Lives. I produced that for British television. Typically, it hasn’t been broadcast in the United States.
One of the ideas of the last four futuristic pieces is to make a map of our mental history as Americans, where we came from and where we’re going. Naturally, we start in the ancient past and go into the future. Since I’m working on the last four right now, I’ve been dealing with the idea of how you show and dramatize a cultural technique. The gamelan ensemble you see behind me is obviously a dramatic version of a cultural technique, and we all presume that that technique can be articulated; that one person can tell another person how to do it brings with it the cultural technique. In other words, if you know how to do it and tell me how to do it, by virtue of me learning how to do it, I become part of it.
What we know about what we think are our roots in European music is almost exclusively embodied in techniques. Even though we are in Middletown, Connecticut, which is quite close to the Atlantic coast, for all sorts of bizarre reasons we pretty much have forgotten what our belief roots are. We haven’t forgotten as much as if we lived in California. We operate with respect to European techniques pretty much the same way we operate with respect to the gamelan. We take a young person from Omaha, and we teach that young person to play Chopin. How bizarre. And what Alvin and I went through—especially what people of my generation went through—was that the notion of music composition became exclusively a matter of the organization of techniques. You’ve probably heard of Arnold Schoenberg. He had a technique. And you’ve probably heard of other people in the Viennese school who had techniques, something that you measure out and that you can talk about and learn how to do if you paid enough attention to it. In other words, you could learn Webern exactly the same way as you could learn the Macintosh. You would actually feel as if you were Webern.
After all, what is music about? You want to go back to that wonderful time when things were less complicated than they are now. Everybody would want to be Webern, and everybody would want to study Webern. So what Alvin and I went through—and a lot of other people—was that we were exposed to the notion of technique. At the same time, we heard—this is like a history—we heard rumors of American techniques. Chauvinistic considerations apart, it was an idea that there were different techniques. Instead of wanting to be Viennese, you would want to be whatever the other thing was. You would want to be Californian or you would want to be something else.
Throughout my life, I have been surrounded by techniques, all of which have almost no cultural value except as they appeared as packaged. If I adapted myself to the package, then presumably I could be … Charles Ives. There’s a technique. It’s a hundred years old. I mean, who’s interested in Charles Ives? Nobody is interested in Charles Ives because it’s too old. But, we all know about all of the techniques.
Having gotten to a certain age, I realized it was about time for me to produce a technique. I’m almost ready to go away, and I don’t even have a technique to my credit yet. The other day, I had to give a lecture at a critic’s conference. I asked for a show of hands. “Raise your hand if you’ve done a profound analysis of Morton Feldman, if you have taken a Morton Feldman piece to a place where you know where every note comes from.” No hands. “How about Alvin Lucier?” No hands. “John Cage?” One guy’s hand went halfway up. He had probably read Silence. “Phil Glass?” No hands. “Maggi Payne?” No hands. I asked, “How could one be a critic if you don’t know facts?” Then I realized afterward that this was unfair of me because I was actually talking about techniques.
I’ve been trying to figure out what my technique is. This is a serious problem for me. It may not be a serious problem for you. We may be entering a cultural era where there are no techniques. Maybe we are all out of fashion, that there is some other thing going on. It may be that something is replacing technique. I don’t know about this.
Now, to go back to the story of the opera. Just a couple of days ago, I was in New Mexico. I decided that I would make a collaboration between my idea and the ideas of a large community of Spanish Americans who modify cars. They call themselves lowriders. They take old American cars and transform them. They don’t make them go faster. They don’t make them go slower. They don’t actually do much to the cars that could be considered different from the cars as they come from the factories in Detroit. Probably some of you know about these cars. One thing they do is to put a hydraulic system on the four wheels, either independently or in pairs so that they can make the car jump up and down. They
can actually make the car jump off the ground or they can make the car go right to the ground and just drive along scraping the ground. Or, they can make the front wheels go down and then drive sideways, scraping the front wheel. They do things with the mufflers like most American kids have done since the beginning of cars, because they make beautiful sounds. The engine is still connected to the transmission. The wheels turn and move. And they make the sound in the car louder than most American cars, but everything is superficial. The cars are extraordinary. When you are in the presence of one of them, you feel as if you’re in the presence of a piece of art. Actually, it only occurred to me, finally, after I had been out there for a few times, that it was like being in the presence of quilts in the Amish country.
When you see one lowrider car, it’s just a paint job. Or, if it jumps, it’s just weird. And if a guy turns on the hi-fi very loud, you say, “That’s just a hi-fi.” It’s odd in the same way that Watts Towers is odd, and all the other things that are our accumulations of American culture are odd. But when you see a hundred lowrider cars all in one parking lot, it’s actually beyond my ability to speak of it. So I thought that I would ask these guys about their technique. I mean, how stupid could I be? I thought it would be clever and interesting if I could have them describe their technique, and I could put their descriptions in my piece, and then I could put that piece on television. That was my idea, among a bunch of other ideas. It was like I would ask a composer, “How do you write music?” And I would put that description of how you write music on television. How clever. Of course, none of them can describe their technique. I can actually talk more about their technique than they can. They would say, “Well, you know, me and my brother we just cut the springs in half and put it down and we put this …” And I would say, “When you cut the springs in half that makes it quite low, you know, and you don’t have any shocks.” He says, “Well, yah, you just take this piece of rubber out of a truck”—there’s a piece of heavy-duty rubber that comes with a truck suspension—“and you put that underneath the bumper so that when the thing, like, hits the ground in a big bump it doesn’t break the A-frame.” Right? That’s interesting, but he could say it in actually just half a sentence. He would just shrug and say, “You know … the rubber.”