Eight Lectures on Experimental Music
Page 11
QUESTION
The piece for flute and prerecorded flutes evoked the idea of a number of lines in a weave and also the idea of a sort of concerto in that there is a soloist visually performing before us whose timbre is somewhat different than what we hear on the recording. And the ambiance of the occasion is somewhat like that of a flute quartet, somewhat like that of a concerto, and somewhat like that of a recording studio in which somebody is laying down the last track. Do you have ideas about the nature of the performance event in relation to those different interpretations of it?
STEVE REICH
Primarily, Vermont Counterpoint was written for a flute soloist as a very different kind of recital piece. They would be playing solo flute music, or perhaps flute and piano, and then Vermont Counterpoint would be quite a change of pace. You do accurately note the kinds of associations one might have by watching and listening to a performance. However, none of those associations were on my mind when I wrote the piece. I just wrote for the flute, alto flute, and piccolo soloist and the prerecorded tracks. Perhaps the association you mention might make experiencing a live performance more interesting. I never try to anticipate what a listener will think while listening. My sole criterion is: if I love it, perhaps you will. You might also find it quite different if you saw and heard a completely live performance of this piece by eleven flutists; that happens fairly often, particularly at music conservatories where there are so many flute students. Vermont Counterpoint for flute is the first of a series of counterpoint pieces: New York Counterpoint for clarinet and bass clarinet and tape for Richard Stoltzman and Electric Counterpoint for electric guitars, electric basses and tape for Pat Metheny. The basic idea of writing an unusual and highly effective recital piece for a soloist was the main focus. In all these cases there have been all live performances here and abroad, particularly at music schools. My feeling is—whatever works. All the things that you suggested are true. There’s the concerto aspect, the recording studio, and please add the communal, “Let’s get together and play eleven flutes.” Your associations would be quite different, I suspect, if you were at one of these performances with no prerecording whatsoever.
QUESTION
I have a question about your essay on Schoenberg. You use a few key examples of folk melodies and folk dance forms to call Bach, Beethoven, and even Stravinsky populist composers and place your music in this history of Western music that remains almost entirely intact except for the exclusion of the Second Viennese School. And you confine them to what you call a dark little corner, presumably hiding away from the sort of populist, what you call the comfortably new light of populist minimalist music …
STEVE REICH
I never used the word populist. I talked about the folk roots of music. Populist is one of those journalistic words like minimalism that I don’t like to use. I leave that to journalists and academics. Also, I said “dark corner,” not “little dark corner.” Time will tell, but I would suggest that when Schoenberg said that in fifty years the postman would be whistling his melodies, he was extremely out of touch with musical reality. It’s over one hundred years, and I don’t think there’s a qualifying postman in sight. I believe Schoenberg was a great composer, and my personal favorites are “Farben” from Opus 16; Opus 11; and Opus 19. I can’t name any of the twelve-tone works I want to hear again. But it’s up to you.
QUESTION
Point well taken, but I’m wondering why you go so far out of your way to exclude Schoenberg and his students from this lineage of Western music that you consider yourself such an important part of.
STEVE REICH
I don’t exclude them at all. I believe that Schoenberg chose one possible and well-founded response to Wagner’s extreme tonal ambiguity. He felt the need, after his own even more chromatic and, I believe, often highly successful pieces, to find a way of dropping harmony entirely as his structural tool and turned to the twelve-tone row. I’m just guessing that, if you were to go through all the orchestral program booklets of the world’s orchestras in the last fifteen years and look under the name Schoenberg, you’re going to find that Opus 16, Five Pieces for Orchestra, is done now and then. And if you look under chamber music programs, you will find Pierrot Lunaire, and if you look at piano music, you will find Maurizio Pollini and other pianists playing Opus 11 and Opus 19 and the Suite for Piano, Opus 25. You will find less of his other pieces. I love Webern. He’s a unique genius. But because of the language that he and Berg and Schoenberg chose, because of the way musical theory in Germany went in this curious direction, it created a barrier for most listeners. Dropping harmony was a huge decision and it seems the twelve-tone row may not have been an adequate substitute. It’s not a condemnation; it’s an explanation. Most important, note that Debussy, also faced with the enormous influence of Wagner, chose to create a new harmonic language using new scales and modes. This in turn had an effect on Stravinsky, and even Bartók, and, eventually, via Nadia Boulanger, on Aaron Copland and other Americans of his generation. It is from this “French connection” that what you call minimalism derives.
ALVIN LUCIER
Thank you for being here. It was a pleasure.
7
MEREDITH MONK
December 7, 1999
ALVIN LUCIER
I first heard Meredith Monk in 1975 in the Merce Cunningham dance studio in New York. In those days, Merce used to program Events, mixes of various dances he had made. He would invite musicians to come in and do anything they wanted.
Meredith was sitting at an electric piano (organ, I guess) and began to sing. It sounded like every woman in the world singing at the same time. That’s the way I think of it now, maybe that’s a little embarrassing. Then she’d sing another song in another voice, and it still sounded like every woman singing. It was fractal. One voice didn’t mean only one thing, they all were exemplifying women’s singing. This was before we got interested in world singing styles. It was amazing. I thought to myself, “What is this?” I’d never heard anything like this before in my life. It was one of those amazing shocks you get when you experience something new and wonderful for the first time. You are very lucky if you have that experience once in your lifetime.
Over the years, as I have attended many of Meredith’s events and watched her films, I have tried to get a handle on what she was doing with the various arts. Could her work be categorized as multimedia or mixed media? It was very different from anyone else. Merce Cunningham and John Cage would keep dance, music, and decor completely separate. Martha Graham would choreograph to the music of Aaron Copland, for example. With Meredith’s work, it seemed that parts of the work that belonged to one art were being composed with the rules and principles of another. In the theater work, Education of the Girlchild, an actor would pick up a cup of tea, then put it down, and then do it again several times. It looked like a visual representation of a Mozart symphony, the way the event repeated. I could talk all night, which, of course, I know you would be delighted to hear, but I’ll stop now. Here is Meredith Monk.
MEREDITH MONK
First, I’d like so much to thank Alvin Lucier, who is not only my old friend but one of the most inspiring composers in the world and of all time. I’m very touched. Thank you for saying those things, Alvin. And I’m very happy to be here, back at Wesleyan again. I was here about ten years ago.
I thought that what I would do is give you a little bit of background, talk a little bit, and then spend some time singing. After that, I’d be very happy to answer any questions.
So, I’m going to go back to my mom. Thank you, Mom, for having me. I came from a very musical family. My great-grandfather was a cantor in Russia. His son, Joseph Zellman, first came to the New York area but ended up founding and directing a music conservatory in Meriden, Connecticut. He was a Russian bass baritone, came to America on a music scholarship, ended up staying here, concertizing in New York with a contralto in places like the Brooklyn Academy and Carnegie Hall. He founded a music conserv
atory up in Washington Heights. He married an American pianist, Rose Kornicker. They performed on some of the early Thomas Edison cylinder recordings for voice and piano. I remember his voice very well—a deep, beautiful Russian bass baritone. My mother sang popular music on the radio and also sang jingles. She was the original Muriel Cigar and sang for Blue Bonnet Margarine, Schaefer Beer, Chiquita Banana, Royal Pudding, Robert Hall Clothes, and others.
Basically, my childhood was very much like Woody Allen’s Radio Days. I would often come with her for jobs. At that time, we were living in Queens. In those days, everything was performed live; there wasn’t any tape. Her main job was the DUZ Does Everything commercial every day at one o’clock. It was a commercial for a soap opera called The Road of Life. Sometimes I would sit on the organist’s lap and watch the actors with their scripts, playing their characters; sometimes I would be in the control room drawing on the back of scripts.
So music was definitely a part of my childhood. It was taken for granted. I’ve been told that I sang before I talked and read music before I read words. Our house had a very aural kind of atmosphere. We sang while washing the dishes and as part of daily life. My mother, my sister, and I sang songs in three-part harmony in the car.
I started piano at a young age and played pretty much through childhood. Although I was never a great pianist, I could sight-read quickly. Because I have a visual challenge called strabismus, where I cannot fuse two images out of my two eyes, I had a kind of left-right lack of coordination. When I was three, my mother heard about classes at Steinway Hall taught by two Polish sisters, the Rohms, in Dalcroze Eurhythmics. Eurhythmic is a technique invented by Jaques-Dalcroze, a Swiss composer and teacher in the late nineteenth century, to teach music and rhythm through body movement. His method was comprised of three components: rhythmic movement exercises in space, solfège, and improvisation. Many conductors have studied it so that they can learn to conduct one rhythm with one hand and another one with the other. He once said that all musical truth can be found in the body.
Most of the children in the class learned the music through the rhythmic movement, but for me, it was more of a way of learning physical coordination and body movement through music, something that I felt [was] very comfortable and familiar. I loved it. In a way it was really the beginning of something that I always take for granted, which is that sound is in space and that the voice and the body are one thing. You might learn a scale, but you would do it with your arms as well as hearing it. You might see what it looked like as notes, then you might sing it and clap or dance to it—all the senses working together. That principle has been something that has been at the heart of what I do. I always think that my voice dances and my body sings and that there’s really no separation between the two.
That was the beginning of my movement background. I took ballet when I was ten. I was never really a great technical dancer, but I loved to move. At Sarah Lawrence I created what came to be called a combined performing arts program. In the voice department, I studied classical technique, lieder, vocal chamber music, and opera workshop. At the same time, I was composing short pieces for piano. In the dance department, I was studying dance composition and technique. I started working on pieces while I was still at school, where I began to have glimpses of how to put some of these elements together, how to weave voice and movement together and include visual images, objects, and light. For me it was [a] kind of emotional integration. How do you put all these aspects or layers into one form?
Early on I also realized that—because the world that we live in is so complex—that to separate art forms seems to not be really reflective of that world. Western European traditions are the only art that separates these elements. Music is over here, movement is over here, whereas there are so many other forms (as a lot of you students know), Asian theater and African forms, where these elements of music, movement, and theater are combined. No one in those societies really thinks that’s such an unusual thing. I find, as time goes by, that actually now it seems to be even more difficult to get past this category thing. It’s as if the walls have gotten higher, but I think my big struggle over the years has been to explain that these elements are all part of perception, that, as human beings, we have an incredible, rich perceptual palette that includes all the senses, thought, feeling—everything and anything. And so, to be able to attest to the richness of human beings as performers and also as audience members is something, to me, very affirmative and reflective of the complexity of life. Early on, I realized that this inclusiveness as a philosophical basis for making work was something that was very essential.
I came to New York in the fall of 1964 and first made solo pieces in galleries, churches, alternative spaces. There were a lot of wonderful performance spaces opening up at that time. I would say that my early works were gestural pieces, with cinematic structures—as in what Alvin said, taking principles that might be in another art form and transforming them. How would you make a piece of movement or gesture with the kind of cuts or washes or dissolves that you can work with in film, taking that syntax and seeing what that would be in another form? My soundtracks were on tape that I played live. At that time, we didn’t have multitrack tape recorders, but I had a two-track machine and with that I could add different generations of sound by recording on that machine, overlaying more tracks or another one, and even more back on my original one.
At a certain point, after having been in New York for about a year, I started missing singing. I somehow always knew that I wasn’t going to be a classical singer because something about it made me feel limited; it just didn’t feel right. I had been a folk singer in junior high and high school in Stamford, Connecticut. (One of my friends from second grade in Stamford is in the audience tonight. We sang “Bye Bye Love” together in junior high school.) I partially earned my way through Sarah Lawrence by singing and playing guitar at children’s birthday parties.
Because I missed singing so much, I began sitting at a piano and working on regular classical vocal exercises. This was around the mid-1960s, long before most of you were born. One day I started vocalizing, and suddenly I had a revelation that the voice could have the flexibility of the spine, it could have the articulation of a hand. It could have within it male and female, all ages. It could delineate landscapes and characters and have within it limitless colors and timbres, ways of producing sound, range, kinetic impulses. It didn’t need words. It was an eloquent language in itself. So basically I started working with myself as a guinea pig and, in some ways—because I had done choreography where I was using my own body—making my material on my own body. I knew how to explore and work with my voice. In some ways, I was lucky that I didn’t have physical facility because I had to invent my own style of movement. I could easily transfer that method to working with my voice. And because of my family background, I had a wide range and a strong flexible instrument to start out with. So basically I worked with my own voice and kept on exploring it deeply from that point on.
And that has been very much the center and the heart of what I do. I always say that my work is like a tree with two main branches. One is working and writing music for the voice, for myself and for my ensemble, doing concerts and making CDs. The other branch consists of multidisciplined composite forms, including musical theater pieces and films. Now I’ve also become interested in making installations that include music and video.
Those are forms that combine sight and sound, that either weave together these elements or maybe put them in counterpoint with each other. I work very much like a mosaicist. I work on one aspect, say the “red” tiles first; then I might discover the “blue” tiles, then “yellow.” How does this balance out? How does this make a form or a whole? How does the eye balance out the ear? How do these things work together? Sometimes I’ll have an idea for something then wait a long time to figure out what would be the most eloquent form. I like to work in film from time to time because of the flexibility of time and space that you cannot a
chieve in a live performance. You can really fly from one place to another, or you imply simultaneous time by intercutting. Actually, in live performance you can literally have simultaneous events, and that is something you can’t do in film unless you divide the screen into parts.
I believe very deeply in live performance. It’s something that I’ve been fighting for in the world of computers. There’s something about a live performance that you just can’t get anywhere else. It’s the vulnerability of the person. The performer’s on a tightrope and could fall off at any time. He or she can make a mistake. It’s that figure eight of energy that goes between the performer and the audience that’s so special and the communal aspect of a large group of people together and a time and place to be able to let go of that “yack yack” constant narration of experience that we have in our minds. Live performance offers the possibility of having a little silence and space to experience something directly and deeply. That’s very healing to people and the world that we’re living in. And in that way, I feel that art is very healing.
Let me tell you a little bit about one or two other ideas before I talk about some other things that I have been working on. After a few years of being in New York, I started getting tired of the basic proscenium stage situation. I started making pieces outdoors or using large groups of people in architectural spaces. I made a piece called Juice. The first part of it was in the Guggenheim Museum. I had a choir of about eighty singers—singer-movers—that were performing on the ramps in the building, with the audience looking up. It had a cathedral-like quality and used the resonance of that room, which has a very long decay.