Category: Analysis

Acoustic Ecology and the Experimental Music Tradition



David Dunn
Photo by Naomi Milne

A recent composition of mine, Five Micro-Worlds, includes the strident scratching of ants communicating deep in their underground nest, the quiet wheezing and buzzing noises of underwater invertebrates in freshwater ponds, the eerie ultrasonic echolocation bursts and singing of many different species of bats reflecting back from rock crevices at night—pitch-shifted into our human-hearing range—and the insistent chirping and scraping of tiny beetles chewing through the inner bark of pine trees. These are all sounds that are not audible to humans without the aid of special recording devices, and this is one of the things that I do as a composer: bring forth the sonic presence of these worlds for human contemplation of their inherent aesthetic beauty and to show the amazing continuity of life, with its capacity for infinite variation in audible communication.

Every so often over the past decade, I have had a recurrent experience where upon being invited to lecture and present this kind of work at an institution, I find myself advertised as an “acoustic ecologist.” While I never argue with this characterization—I’m usually unsure of the specific rationale for its use—I have never applied the original meaning of the term Acoustic Ecology to myself, been affiliated with its originators, nor used it to describe what I do (with one notable exception where it was used to highlight some of the issues addressed by this essay). All the while, I remain deeply sympathetic to it. Perhaps there is some confusion afoot in the worlds of art and music about what the term means, but there’s also a vague intuition of its appropriateness for describing a much more expansive domain of intellectual activity than would have ever been claimed by its original practitioners. This essay is an attempt to put some of these conflicting assumptions into perspective while also clarifying some of my own insights into related issues.


R. Murray Schafer

The history of the collective of ideas generally associated with the term Acoustic Ecology is usually written from a perspective that locates it as an academic trademark. There is certainly validity in this approach, especially for the practitioners of its most specific usage to define distinct boundaries for a movement that began in the early 1970s in western Canada. However, the term’s scientific ring has beckoned a younger generation to its broader implications and many of these newly interested adherents come to it with more of an environmental conservation and media art/science background than a historically focused knowledge of the ideas of composer R. Murray Schafer—who, most likely, first formally coined the term. While I plan to give due attention to his generative role, I wish to place an understanding of that role into a larger context that has evolved somewhat consciously from its original intentions but, as importantly, from activities that developed independently, in parallel to, or in reaction against it. Current usage of the term can now be found to describe any or all of these sometimes contradictory positions.

While Schafer’s ideas are rich and unquestionably profound, some are also sufficiently general as to be readily summarized:

  1. Our modern 20th-century culture—but by no means all human cultures whether extant or extinct—tends to privilege our understanding of reality through our sense of sight; and this preference for visual experience also becomes manifest through our predominant use of language metaphors based upon these visual experiences. Aural experience is largely pushed further into a background perception, and we pay for this diminishment with a loss of sensitivity and awareness towards certain aspects of our environment.
  2. The framing of the concept of “the soundscape” as a defining metaphor for perceptually pulling forth the auditory characteristics of an environment into foreground attention and insisting that these sonic attributes be regarded as a consistent organizing factor—not only for how the environment is defined and experienced, but as an essential feature for defining the historical and ongoing social relationship of humans to that environment.
  3. The necessity to heighten awareness of the negative consequences of certain historical developments in human societies that have resulted in the loss of traditional knowledge conveyed through sound or, similarly, the increase of industrial “noise” that has both a disintegrating social impact and psycho-physiological destructive aspect. This concern has often been simplified into issues of “noise pollution” and confounded with the more direct agenda of environmental acoustics.

The evolution of Schafer’s ideas can be traced through his sequence of extraordinary writings, starting with many of the general concepts, moving through curriculum outlines and listening exercises, and eventually to the defining of a lexicon of formal language for framing all of these ideas towards heuristic application and research. During the expansion of these concepts, there formed a larger collective of colleagues that became known as the World Soundscape Project. Books and recordings were published that demonstrated many of the group’s core concerns and a standard arsenal of tools and strategies for increasing listening sensitivity to the environment were codified: soundscape recording, list making, oral history recording, various forms of sound mapping, amplitude and spectral charting of auditory spatial locations, sound walks, and many other types of listening exercises that were especially geared for educational uses with children. Overall the group produced a combination of activities drawn from both the emphasis on experiential education that was burgeoning at the time and a form of quantifiable communication theory that is more characteristic of the social sciences than of musicology. Diaries and field observations of specific geographic locations (Vancouver and several European villages) resembling ethnographic field notes were made and data collected to subsequently create ingenious charts and maps showing correlations between sonic landmarks and patterns of social organization and history.

While the principal metaphor that Schafer used to formulate his concept of Acoustic Ecology and the World Soundscape Project was the value of listening to the soundscape as if it were a musical composition—and even participating in how that soundscape gets “composed”—there also seemed to be a dramatic schism between his interests as a composer and the maintenance of the WSP as a somewhat abstract—and didactic—research project. The two always seemed separate in his mind and creative output. Acoustic Ecology may have been inspired by music but never became music and, conversely, some of his music may have been influenced by Acoustic Ecology but never became “Acoustic Ecology” except in the most rudimentary and academic of cases.

In recent years this has somewhat shifted. As composer Warren Burt has reminded me, Schafer has been staging a series of ritualistic operas in the remote Canadian wilderness called Patria. Warren has made the excellent point that these events require a real commitment on the part of the audience—sometimes several days of hiking to, and living in, the performance locale—and therefore represent a serious attempt at a renewal of the social function of music, one that moves much closer to reconciling Schafer’s earlier music and his Acoustic Ecology concerns.

In many ways the current expansion of the term Acoustic Ecology—which otherwise seems historically appropriate—is reinforced by a largely conservative musical establishment—especially in academia—interested in placing experimental musical activity into a zone of non-musical status. The term provides for a convenient outlying conceptual domain where much sound-based art that otherwise is threatening to traditional musical values can, from that perspective, be exiled without uncomfortable argument. This can also be said about the split that has taken place between “concert music” and “sound art,” where the latter has often been a forced categorization for certain kinds of experimental practice that aesthetically conflict with more conservative musical assumptions: if it doesn’t conform to certain preconceptions about music, then call it something else so those assumptions won’t be seriously challenged.

As a composer, Schafer has essentially been a Romantic Modernist (by no means meant as a pejorative) here defined as an interest in expanding the expressive palette of music while maintaining an essentially 19th-century aesthetic concept of what the social role and purpose of music should be. As such he could not accommodate his insights about environmental sound into his music, and the logical way open to him was to define a new intellectual discipline. I believe that Romantic Modernism is still the dominant aesthetic paradigm of 20th-century music—both popular and classical—but that there are other parallel paradigms that have existed and continue to thrive in the world today. One of the most important of these is an experimental tradition that bifurcated away from the predominantly European 19th-century belief that music must express “self” and “emotion.” It is also a tradition concerned with achieving many of Schafer’s Acoustic Ecology concerns but through active creative strategies that emphasize the materiality of sound, listening, environment, perception, and socio-political engagement.

Rather than focusing upon the special talents of a composer at “expressing” self through a dramatic structure and highlighting their compositional training and skill at doing so, this is a tradition that is more interested in making a form of music that draws attention to the structure of auditory perception itself and/or issues of sound as an organizing factor in both human and non-human living systems. While it is convenient in this context to pose these paradigms as dichotomous in nature, it is readily apparent that the two can also be compatible. There are a large number of creative musicians who not only move back and forth between these sonic worlds, but also manage to combine them in extraordinary ways.


David Behrman
Photo by Terri Hanlon

For example, Larry Polansky has often managed to keep one foot firmly planted in each of these worlds, integrating musically expressive concerns with an exploration of new mathematical and psychoacoustic concepts. His compositions often simultaneously succeed on two different levels. Similar statements can be made about the aforementioned Warren Burt. He constantly moves in and out of a diverse array of musical sound worlds, sometimes purposefully confounding our preconceptions about both experimental process and traditional musical expression. David Behrman’s live computer works harvest leading-edge technologies and perceptual theories to create a highly sensuous concert experience. Annea Lockwood has created works that are classics within the Acoustic Ecology tradition, but also highly expressive instrumental works. We can also see how some of the most highly recognized composers of our time (Philip Glass and Steve Reich) began their careers in one of these modes of interest, experimenting with the perceptual effects of entrained repetition, and then moved into being almost exclusively concerned with quite conventional forms of musical expression.

The antecedents for the experimental view also extend back through the 20th century. In fact, much of the project of modernism can be seen as attempts to focus human consciousness towards the reality of the street and the forest. How music has participated in this process was summarized by Australian media theorist Sean Cubitt at the Seventh International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA 96): “Music and information dominate the hearing of the twentieth century, and their dialectic has only recently begun to evolve a third mode of hearing, the soundscape. Music from Russolo to Cage strips itself of inessentials—melody, harmony, counterpoint—to encompass all hearing, transferring the musician’s mode of listening to the sounds of the world.”

Clearly Schafer’s desire to hear and compose the soundscape as a piece of music was earlier expressed by Cage—within a more philosophical wrapping—who insisted that his activity was always essentially musical in nature. Starting at least a full decade before Schafer began to articulate the basic assumptions of Acoustic Ecology, John Cage, and the musicians closest to him (David Tudor and Morton Feldman), had transferred creative emphasis away from acts of self-expression towards perceptual acts of listening to non-semantically organized sounds as a strategy for focusing awareness to the reality around us. At the same time, two other associates of Cage, Christian Wolff and Earle Brown, and another composer who was not part of Cage’s New York circle, Herbert Brun, applied similar aesthetic breakthroughs to explorations of music as a model for social interaction.

During the two decades (1960s and 1970s) that Schafer was first formulating Acoustic Ecology, other musicians set out to achieve similar goals through different means. The concern for achieving a deeper understanding of how sound and our sensory modality of hearing are unique organizing forces within human society, and our physical/ecological environment, was coming into foreground attention, especially within the North American avant-garde.

Out of the plethora of sound-based activities from that period, I will merely discuss an emblematic handful. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pauline Oliveros began her lifetime concern with exploring the links between sound and meditative processes, forging techniques that expanded upon the ancient world traditions of music as contemplative practice. James Tenney, under the aesthetic influence of Cage and other prior American experimentalists, focused upon formal (non-dramatic) perceptual processes for musical organization that largely influenced his contemporary colleagues towards the rise of early minimalism. Annea Lockwood began her river sound archive and use of recorded natural soundscapes as compositional material. La Monte Young, Max Neuhaus, and Alvin Lucier all began to explore—in individual ways—the idea of organized and composed sound as environment itself. I also began my early experiments in interactive, wilderness based, site-specific sound works and interspecies communication, more influenced by the land art of the period than Schafer’s thinking. It would still be a few years before I would hear of Acoustic Ecology. Essential to all of these composers, and Cage and Tudor, was an embrace of the creative potential of the ever-expanding electronic sound arsenal.

A comprehensive list of creative musicians working in similar fashion at that time would be absurdly long and an inclusive list that includes today’s active soundscape recordists, noise composers, installation sound artists, phonographers, microphonists, audificationists, and sonification researchers—or whatever new genre is put forth to define intellectual autonomy within an ever-burgeoning field of practitioners influenced by both the experimental music tradition and that of Acoustic Ecology—would be even longer by an exponential factor. In the face of such creative diversity, old distinctions become progressively problematic to maintain and, in many ways, all of these activities are now being referenced by different observers as facets of a current usage of the term Acoustic Ecology.

Here is a list of 20 such diverse practitioners just off the top of my head:


Andrea Polli
  • Richard Lerman—media artist and virtuoso microphonist
  • Steve Peters—installation sound artist
  • Francisco Lopez—composer, entomologist, and radical listener
  • Michael Prime—composer of bioelectrical fields and fungi sonifications
  • Douglas Quin—soundscape recordist and composer
  • Andrea Polli—sonification artist
  • Gustavo Matamoros—sound artist and community designer
  • Norman Lowrey—mask maker and river sound composer
  • Maryanne Amacher—electroaocustic/soundscape composer
  • David Lumsdaine—soundscape recordist
  • Phil Dadson—media artist, composer, and soundscape explorer
  • Peter Cusack—composer and soundscape recordist
  • Hildegard Westerkamp—soundscape composer and acoustic ecologist
  • Mamoru Fujieda—composer of plant-life sonifications
  • Yolande Harris—composer of map and navigation sonifications
  • Steven Miller—electroacoustic/soundscape composer
  • Yannick Dauby—soundscape recordist and phonographer
  • John Bullitt—soundscape recordist and seismic sonifications
  • Eric La Casa—soundscape recordist and composer
  • Chris Mercer—composer of primate vocalizations

In addition to the artistic activities that were evolving parallel to those of Acoustic Ecology, many developments were taking place in scientific fields concerned with the relationship of sound to the environment. Most notable among these were advances made in the discipline of bioacoustics, largely due to technical innovations and refinements to both field and analytical methodologies. This period also saw the initial formulation of theoretical ideas that were later realized by the emergent discipline of data sonification, the aural equivalent to computer visualization techniques through which streams of data are made more direct and experiential to researchers and the general public. The intervening years have also seen the emergence of a new research area known as bio-musicology as an attempt to formalize thinking about the biological origins of music.

While all of these events have to some extent more precisely advanced issues originally put forth by Acoustic Ecology, further blurring its original meaning and intellectual focus, Acoustic Ecology has itself influenced other disciplines beyond music and the arts. In several articles since his original fieldwork in Papua, New Guinea, anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Steven Feld has acknowledged Schafer’s influence upon his thinking about the role of sound perception as a unique organizing force within culture. He has even gone on to further innovate the methodological assumptions of his disciplines by pursuing a form of creative soundscape composition that is firmly grounded in the ideas of Acoustic Ecology.

Taken together, all of these developments, whether originally based within the arts or the sciences, have blurred former distinctions while attempting to delineate new ones. While some of the emerging genre categories seem arbitrary—and in some cases as rather transparent attempts by individuals to stake out turf boundaries—others may stick for some time and even stabilize into fully-fledged research or aesthetic domains. It is obvious that some commentators within the traditional music world have seen the development of these new events and genres as directly hostile to traditional musical values. Meanwhile, many “sound artists” have seemed eager to part from the music world’s aesthetic and educational expectations. They often reinvent concepts that the experimental music community has always embraced but can now be retrofitted into the art market gallery system. My position is that many of these new fields are a logical evolution in musical practice rather than a break with it. If music in any way reflects the evolving human condition, then this is what we should have expected music to become in the 21st century.

As a parallel way of thinking to the visually dominant metaphors of human speech and written symbols, music is also a kind of conserving strategy for ways of communicating that are closer to how other forms of life may communicate. Even though it has been a means to organize and perceive communicative sonic patterns, it is only remotely related to human linguistic structures. From an environmental viewpoint, music may have been a means through which humans structurally coupled to the larger systems of mind that comprise our natural and social environments. Beyond the cultural richness and entertainment that recent uses for music afford us, assumptions about musical authorship, communicative intention, emotional expression, and musical genius may—in evolutionary terms—be short-term phenomena and even distractions from a more profound significance.

Failed attempts to identify objective content of expression within the musical object are as numerous as those that have tried to assign the phenomena of mind to a specific locus. As a distributed network of signification, musical semantics emerge from an infinite set of superabundant associations and uses that cannot be fixed except through somewhat arbitrary and geographically limited cultural agreements. The continued dominance of 19th-century assumptions about musical value being determined by our belief in its capacity to convey self-expression and emotional content arises from this condition. The cliché that music is a universal language is a chimera.

While there may be certain physiological constants that contribute to stable perceptual factors that we associate with musical experiences—the fact that we have yet to discover a human society without it seems particularly significant, as do discoveries about the ability of music-making to alter the hardwiring of brain development—we are only beginning to scratch that particular research surface. We currently know very little, and too much of the psychoacoustic research tends to grind an ideological axe from aesthetic biases or is fooled by simplistic semantics and false distinctions. For example, composer Kenneth Gaburo told me about a telling conversation he once had with a prominent psychologist, who—in attempting to discuss musical phenomena in the context of current theories concerning hemispheric lateralization and localization of brain functions—had assigned melody to the left hemisphere of the brain (as a supposedly linear perceptual function) and chord to the right hemisphere (as a supposedly non-linear perceptual function). Kenneth pointed out how, in the process of composition, one often conceived of a chord as verticalized melody and a melody as a horizontalized chord. Therefore—given this potential for a creative shift in functional understanding—could such a simplistic hemispheric assignment be made? The psychologist responded by accusing Kenneth of being an Aristotelian.

In the light of insights inherited from the experimental music tradition and the broader meaning for Acoustic Ecology previously outlined, I am willing to contend that this capacity to hear the soundscape as music is simultaneously one of the most archaic ways of listening and the most modern. Music is both a conserving action for keeping alive a mode of communication similar to non-human forms of cognition and an intuition to a future communication modality that we are actively evolving.

Given the superabundance of how music as a human activity has been used, I believe that music has simultaneously been a strategy to evolve our capacity to structurally-couple with our environment through our aural perception, and a significant force for defining the boundaries of group affiliation and for the affirmation of cultural status, giving voice to an evolutionary heritage of an abundance of other coupling modes that are greater than the rational mind alone.

These admittedly controversial ideas are echoed in a recent hypothesis by paleoanthropologist Steven Mithen in his book, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (Harvard University Press, 2006). Mithen has built upon the work of linguist Alison Wray, whose “holistic” theory of proto-language evolution has challenged the mainstream of “compositional” theories to assert that early hominid proto-language was a root communication modality from which both human speech and music bifurcated. Mithen’s principal contribution to this debate has been his theory that early human proto-linguistic communication must have had attributes of both speech and music. He argues that early hominids communicated through a kind of proto-linguistic music-speech, what musicologist Stephen Brown has termed musilanguage. While music and language exhibit too many inherent distinctions for either to have evolved from the other, they also share too many features to have had completely separate evolutionary origins. This leads us to the conclusion that both have evolved from a proto-linguistic precursor, something that possessed characteristics shared by both extant language and music.

Besides how intriguing such research into the origins of language and music can be, it is directly germane to the current discussion about Acoustic Ecology and the experimental music tradition through implying that musical function can change over time. What is particularly impressive about Mithen’s discussion of music is an underlying respect for its great diversity and potential for continual evolution. If music evolved from a proto-linguistic precursor then it never has been something fixed in form or purpose but rather continually changes as a measure of what it means to be human. Like species of life on Earth, there have probably been more forms of music—both individual and cultural—that have come and gone than are currently manifest on the planet. This inheritance of musical perception from our proto-linguistic consciousness may also be a conservator of archaic ways of observing and understanding the profound spectrum of ways that we have—and still might—communicate between humans, and between humans and the non-human world.

There is one final caveat to include before concluding this discussion of the link between Acoustic Ecology and musical experimentalism. Such attempts to increase our collective awareness of environmental issues by sensitizing us to the soundscape are now four decades old. So what’s next? Undoubtedly musicians, artists, scholars, and scientists will continue to use established practices and technologies to bring issues of the natural environment into foreground awareness through sound. They will also invent new techniques and tools for this purpose. I also believe that awareness of the historical moment—signaled through extensive loss of biological diversity, global climate change, and the impacts of human over-population—will demand an even further shift in how the sonic arts move beyond purely expressive concerns, or documentary and sensory heightening strategies alone, towards participation in both scientific research and subsequent interventions in growing environmental dilemmas. This is just another stage in how music has always congruently evolved with human needs.

I want to conclude by explaining my own stance regarding the necessity for respecting the diversity of intellectual and creative opinions that make up our musical multiverse. My position is not intended to negate prior musical forms and assumptions. Such things do not disappear as long as there are those among us who understand, appreciate, and value them. As one of my mentors, Harry Partch, was fond of reminding me, one can choose to live in the little world of one idea and one reality, or the big world of many ideas and many realities. I wish to argue that music is never fixed, and that its evolution into new forms and uses is not hierarchical. The existence of one thing does not cancel out the existence of another, even if they are contradictory. Like any living ecosystem, a near infinite diversity of musical realities can coexist and be widely valued and that is the true meaning of our human heritage of music. As it becomes more and more evident how serious our environmental challenges truly are, the dual heritage of Acoustic Ecology and experimental music—in foregrounding our aural perception of the Earth—seems more urgent than ever. While no one can predict the exact outcome of the changes we bear witness to, it occurs to me that one of the best uses of our time as musicians is to find creative ways to listen to some of nature’s changing messages and pass them along to others.

References

R.M. Schafer, Ear Cleaning, BMI Canada, 1967.

—. The New Soundscape: A Handbook for the Modern Music Teacher, BMI Canada, 1969.

—. The Book of Noise, Price Milburn and Company Limited, New Zealand, 1973.

—. The Tuning of the World, Knopf, New York, 1977. Republished as The Soundscape, Destiny Books, Rochester, Vermont, 1994.

R. M. Schafer, ed., European Sound Diary, ARC Publications, 1977.

—. ed., The Vancouver Soundscape, ARC Publications, 1978.
Re-released as a double CD set that includes a 1996 comparative study: The Vancouver Soundscape 1973/Soundscape Vancouver 1996, Cambridge Street Records CSR-2CD 9701, 1996.

—. ed., Five Village Soundscapes, ARC Publications, 1978.

Organizations

World Forum for Acoustic Ecology

Acoustic Ecology Institute

Ear to the Earth

***
David Dunn is a composer and, maybe, an acoustic ecologist. He rarely presents concerts or installations and instead prefers to lecture and engage in site-specific interactions or research-oriented activities. Current projects include the sonification of deterministic chaotic systems, research into the bioacoustics of bark beetles and entomogenic climate change, research on ultrasonic audio phenomena in both human and non-human environments, design of inexpensive wave-guides and transducer systems for environmental sound monitoring, and the design of self-organizing autonomous sound systems for spawning interaction between artificial and natural non-human systems. In 2005 he was the recipient of the Alpert Award for Music and the Henry Cowell Award in 2007. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He can be reached at artscilab (at) comcast.net.

Juiced In It: Bob Dylan and the Consequences of Electricity

Bob Dylan is by no means a key participant in the history of electronic music. But as rock figures go, none may be more closely affiliated with the consequences of electricity. His performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, when he traded his acoustic guitar for an electric one, is widely recognized as a milestone in the evolution of rock music. Of course, to die-hard fans at the time, the act seemed traitorous, signifying an end to innocence that resonated with President John F. Kennedy’s assassination two years prior. At least rockists and folkies agreed on one thing: plugging in was transformative.

As for electronicists, the hindsight of 40-plus years provides context. We are talking about 1965: the year Robert Moog’s namesake invention became commercially available, the year Poème Électronique composer Edgard Varèse died at age 81, the year the newly formed Grateful Dead began experimenting during Acid Test shows, the year Steve Reich (graduate-school friend of the Dead’s Phil Lesh) composed his tape-loop landmark It’s Gonna Rain. Dylan’s decision was, no doubt, a watershed moment, but an anomaly of its times it was not. Electricity was in the air.

The Dylan-Newport hoopla, as with most theological debates, has long been lost on me. I have one good friend 20 years my senior, Robert Levine, a classical music critic and editor, who attended that fateful show in 1965. He was 20 years old at the time and watched everything from backstage. A Joan Baez fan, he’d also been at Newport the previous year. I once asked him about the audience’s reaction to Dylan in 1965, and he said it was “as if someone had been invited to a fancy Thanksgiving dinner and taken a dump on the table.”

Timelines of Interest

A few generations later, the goal posts have been moved. The major cultural divide is no longer between acoustic instruments and electric ones, but between conventionally recognized instruments and computerized ones. Critiques today of digitally processed music, from academic to film scores to electronica to hip-hop, can trace back their language and their cultural assumptions—the suspicion of technology, the invocation of a halcyon era, the emphasis on authenticity—to the hysteria that greeted Dylan’s decision to trade in folk music for rock’n’roll.

Last year in the pages of L.A. Weekly, the novelists Jonathan Lethem and Rick Moody, along with John Darnielle (a musician who goes by the name Mountain Goats), discussed the influence of rock on novels and vice versa, and the talk, moderated by Alec Hanley Bemis, hinged on a proposed duality: text versus texture, rock’s great wordsmith (Bob Dylan) versus its preeminent sonic inventor (Brian Eno), rock-as-literature versus music-as-atmosphere. Dylanist versus Enoid. Lethem didn’t subscribe fully to the dualism in the first place, and he distanced himself from it even further earlier this year. In an essay in the February 2007 issue of Harper’s, “The Ecstasy of Influence,” on the subject of copyright and creativity, he refers to Eno and Dylan in tandem, drawing parallels between their creative modes: “To live outside the law, you must be honest: perhaps it was this, in part, that spurred David Byrne and Brian Eno to recently launch a ‘remix’ website, where anyone can download easily disassembled versions of two songs from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an album reliant on vernacular speech sampled from a host of sources. Perhaps it also explains why Bob Dylan has never refused a request for a sample.” Lethem portrays both musicians, for all their differences, at ease with technological progress.

That initial proposed polarity between Dylan and Eno lingered with me in the year that followed, and the subsequent qualification by Lethem (in whose 2003 novel The Fortress of Solitude the two musicians serve as touchstones) kept me pondering it even longer than I might have. Certainly, Dylan has interacted with electronic music far less than have some of his peers. And unlike fellow ’60s-era folk-rock songsmiths Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon, he never allowed his sound to be radically rewired by a major minimalist (Philip Glass for Cohen) or an ambient maestro (Eno himself for Simon).

My fixation on the supposed Dylan/Eno distinction came down to two issues with which I couldn’t make peace: first, that Dylan, whom I consider inherently (heck, concertedly and willfully) ambiguous, can be used as a synonym for any artistic trait aside, perhaps, from a gravelly drawl; second, that Dylan is so distant from what has been depicted as “Enoid” that he has nothing to say about electronically mediated music. The two concerns were brought to a head as news accumulated, in recent months, about director Todd Haynes’s feature-length film, I’m Not There, in which seven different actors, including Cate Blanchett and Richard Gere, depict Bob Dylan over the course of his career. On the one hand, I was relieved that a film had been founded on a shared belief that Dylan is anything but singular (these are the “versions of his persona” as Lethem put it in his Dylan interview in Rolling Stone August 2006). On the other, I sensed that I had better get a real grip on “my” Dylan before being forced to reconcile seven additional ones.

I listened for this electronically mediated Dylan in his commercial recordings, tracked down various bootlegs, and parsed the loopy intros and outros that he provides to pop songs on the XM Satellite Radio show that he hosts. I slowly came to realize that the Dylan on whom I was fixated, “my” Dylan, wasn’t the Dylan I’d heard—it was the Dylan I’d read. I’d eagerly consumed Dylan’s 2004 autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, when it was first released, and it had been this Dylan who was stuck in my imagination. I read Chronicles again, in search of “my” little Dylan. Now, if only due to his legendary act of having plugged in, Dylan’s autobiographical musings would be worth parsing for their electric content. And as it turns out, the exercise rewards Brian Eno completists, copyleft advocates, and, especially, students of the recording studio as musical instrument.

Early on in the book, Dylan likens himself to jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, another musician who traded one audience for a second when he went electric. That parallel is precisely Dylan’s point: “Miles Davis would be accused of something similar when he made the album Bitches Brew, a piece of music that didn’t follow the rules of modern jazz, which had been on the verge of breaking into the popular marketplace, until Miles’s record came along and killed its chances. Miles was put down by the jazz community. I couldn’t imagine Miles being too upset.” Dylan reiterates the personal affinity 100 or so pages later when describing a first meeting with a potential producer: “He told me that hit records don’t matter to him, ‘Miles Davis never made any.’ That was fine by me.”

The comparison doesn’t quite do Dylan justice, since in 1965 Davis’s quintet was still playing “Stella by Starlight” and “My Funny Valentine” at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago, while Dylan was infuriating purists with his newly electric guitar. Three more years would pass before Davis and producer Teo Macero got Herbie Hancock to try out an electric piano in a Manhattan recording studio, yielding the first album of Davis’s own so-called “electric period,” Filles de Kilimanjaro. (Both Dylan and Davis recorded for Columbia Records, a shared experience that, unfortunately, goes largely unexplored in the book.)

The producer who breaks the ice with Dylan in New Orleans by name-checking Miles Davis was Daniel Lanois. In Dylan’s telling, the two were introduced by U2 singer Bono. It is not a case of love at first sight. “He’s got ideas about overdubbing and tape manipulation theories that he’s developed with the English producer Brian Eno on how to make a record,” writes Dylan, “and he’s got strong convictions.” Bono made the recommendation having worked with Lanois and Eno on such albums as The Joshua Tree and The Unforgettable Fire, albums that helped drive U2’s pub-rock anthems into arenas.

The partnership begins ominously. When Dylan and Lanois first meet in the courtyard of a New Orleans hotel, Dylan’s longtime guitarist, G.E. Smith, leaves them alone, saying, “See ya in a moment.” He’s not mentioned again for the remainder of the book (though he and Dylan will work together occasionally in the future). Dylan and Lanois go on to record Oh Mercy, released in 1989, and that album’s production receives the most sustained narration of any single event recollected in this book—and in Chronicles, a tale told anything but straight (it jumps between time periods like a William Faulkner novel), that is indeed saying something. For a Lanois enthusiast, the chapter is a valuable window into the working habits of the man whose collaborations with Brian Eno include the ambient milestones On Land and Apollo. Dylan describes at length Lanois’s “makeshift” studios, which he sets up in rented homes; his use of layering to achieve moods; and, for all the bliss of the end product, his strong personality.

I went back to Oh Mercy repeatedly during this reading, and to my other favorite Dylan albums, the usual combination of his eponymous debut, John Wesley Harding, Blonde on Blonde, “Love and Theft”, and so on. Nothing in those albums spoke to me about their electronic mediation, about the facts of their recording processes, as did Dylan’s own writing—though I do deeply desire vocal-free dubs of Oh Mercy and “Love and Theft” for the opportunity to relish the atmospheric grooves perpetrated on those two albums. Sadly for me, they probably don’t exist.

Dylan was by no means unprepared to work with a studio maven like Lanois—nor is it a surprise that it’s a Lanois album, Oh Mercy, that Dylan’s own production work (under the pseudonym Jack Frost) on “Love and Theft” most closely resembles. (“I didn’t feel like I wanted to be overproduced any more,” he told Lethem for the article in Rolling Stone, where he talked quite a bit about the recording process and his decision to produce himself.) By the late 1980s, he’d already developed his own head full of ideas, through experience, about the role of recording in the production of pop music. In the years leading up to his collaboration with Lanois, he played a tour with the Grateful Dead, and the band prodded him to perform esoteric items from the back pages of his catalog. Dylan, who was less than enthusiastic about this C-list set list, recalls in his book, “A lot of them might only have been sung once anyway, the time that they’d been recorded.”

This notion of songwriting as a spontaneous experience mediated in the studio is echoed later still in Chronicles (or earlier, depending on whether you gauge time by page numbers or years), as Dylan thinks back to some of his first recordings, singing into the tape recorder of Lou Levy, his original publisher before moving to Columbia. Levy came from an earlier generation, and Dylan’s improvisatory style was new to him. “Once in a while [Levy] would stop the machine and have me start over on something,” recalls Dylan. “When that happened, I usually did something different because I hadn’t paid attention to whatever I had just sung, so I couldn’t repeat it like he just heard.” Levy, attuned to the craftsmanship of Brill Building songwriters, like Gerry Goffin and Carole King, doesn’t know what to make of Dylan’s fluidity with words and meaning. The difference in opinions between Dylan and Levy about the role of the tape recorder sets the stage for the generation-gap-inducing events of Newport.

Levy makes two appearances in Chronicles—one at the opening and one at the close, book-ending three decades of Dylan’s music-making. The click of his tape recorder is something like Proust’s madeleine to Dylan. It’s the very act of recording that triggers his book-length reminiscence. (If anything, it brings to mind another New Orleans concoction, the narrative structure of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.)

At the end of that extended section on the making of Oh Mercy, Dylan writes, “Danny and I would see each other again in ten years,” when they’d record Time Out of Mind, which would have made a good title for his book. When you turn the page to the next (and final) chapter, it isn’t the next day, let alone the next decade. You’re back in Levy’s old-school office at Leeds Music Publishing, essentially the moment when the book began, some 220 pages earlier—before Lanois, before the Dead, before Newport.

Though the closing chapter is rich with business details—in virtually the same breath, Dylan blindly signs a contract with Hammond while negotiating himself out of his standing agreement with Levy—the real focus is Dylan’s appreciation for how the production of folk music was unlike that of the Brill Building songwriters who preceded him: “I didn’t have many songs, but I was making up some compositions on the spot, rearranging verses to old blues ballads, adding an original line here or there, anything that came into my mind—slapping a title on it. I was doing my best, had to thoroughly feel like I was earning my fee. … Into Lou’s tape recorder I could make things up on the spot all based on folk music structure, and it came out natural. … I changed words around and added something of my own here or there. … You could write twenty or more songs off that one melody by slightly altering it. I could slip in verses or lines from old spirituals or blues.” This is the Dylan who figures in novelist Lethem’s Harper’s exercise in Dylan-ology, in which he distinguishes plagiarism from plumbing, theft from love.

What Dylan writes isn’t self-incrimination, nor is he selling any alibis. It’s a description of craft that cuts across musical genres. The cut’n’paste method of adoption that served as Dylan’s initial songwriting strategy sounds all the more familiar some four decades later, when rhymin’ and stealin’, to borrow a phrase from the Beastie Boys, is the norm. You wouldn’t have to change many of those words for them to resonate with a remixer, DJ, or laptop musician.

Understand, Chronicles is by no means a book focused on music and technology. When Dylan speaks of field recordings, he’s talking about Alan Lomax tracking down blues singers in the Delta. When he says of Lanois’s work on the song “Most of the Time” that “Danny put as much ambiance in this song as he could,” he is at best secondarily referencing the ambient music of Lanois and Lanois’s influential colleague, Brian Eno. Still, of all the songs waxed by blues legend Robert Johnson, the one that Dylan singles out for exegesis is “Phonograph Blues,” which he calls “an homage to a record player with a rusty needle.” It’s also a song about sexual impotency, but more than anything, it’s among the most modern of classic blues songs. It’s one thing for a bluesman to sing of trains, but a lyric about a phonograph punctures the veil of rural antiquity that many folk fans foist on the blues. “Phonograph Blues” is an apt choice for a musician, like Dylan, who, ever conscious of technology, intends on dispelling romantic illusions.

One of the last things Dylan does in the book is to state the following: “First thing I did was go trade in my electric guitar, which would have been useless to me.” It’s page 237, but he’s still living in Minneapolis—his life has proceeded in the book, all the way up to his stint in the supergroup the Traveling Wilburys, but now it’s looped back to Dinkytown, a neighborhood near the local university, where he was first getting into folk music and developing his performing persona. Dates are hard to come by in Chronicles, but it’s likely between 1959, when he entered the University of Minnesota, and 1961, when he relocated to Manhattan. It’s a Rosebud kinda moment. The man famous for going electric recounts when, years earlier, a child of rock’n’roll newly smitten with folk, he’d first unplugged.

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Marc Weidenbaum

Marc Weidenbaum is an editor and writer based in San Francisco. He was an editor at Pulse! and a co-founding editor at Classical Pulse!, and he consulted on the launch of Andante.com. Among the publications for which he has written are Down Beat, e/i, Jazziz, Stereophile, Salon.com, Amazon.com, Classicstoday.com, Big, Make, and The Ukulele Occasional. Comics he edited have appeared in various books, including Justin Green’s Musical Legends (Last Gasp) and Adrian Tomine’s Scrapbook (Drawn & Quarterly). He has self-published Disquiet.com, a website about ambient/electronic music, since 1996; it features interviews with, among others, Aphex Twin, Autechre, Gavin Bryars, Zbigniew Karkowski, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, and the creators of the Buddha Machine.

Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?

The following excerpts are reprinted from Chapter Five, “Inventing Virtual Spaces for Music” of the book, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? by Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter, pp. 164-170. Copyright (c) 2007 by the MIT Press. Used with permission of the publisher.

  • READ an interview with authors Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter.
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    Prophetic visions of the future are sometimes found in the distant past, especially when brilliant minds anticipate what will be possible without being confined by their immediate reality. When Francis Bacon (1626) described the “sound houses” of his utopian college in his essay The New Atlantis, he was prophesying the electroacoustic world of contemporary music of the twentieth century:

    We have also diverse strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in letters or articulation from that they receive. We have means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.

    Without tools for creating an aural space, spatiality remained subservient to other compositional elements, such as rhythm, melody, timbre, and tempo. But with the evolution of advanced electroacoustic tools, Bacon’s seventeenth-century ideas, once merely footnotes to history, would be rendered into sound for ordinary listeners to hear; musical space became increasing fluid, flexible, abstract, and imaginary. This trend was most apparent in the second half of the twentieth century. From the perspective of electronic music, spatial design is an application of aural architecture without assuming a physical space. Musical space is unconstrained by the requirements for normal living, and musical artists are inclined to conceive of surreal spatial concepts.

    Like M. C. Escher’s painting of an imaginary space with interwoven staircases that simultaneously lead upward and downward, aural artists also have the freedom to construct contradictory spaces. As an analogy to a virtual aural space, [ M.C. Escher’s Relativity] has elements of visual spatiality, but the space itself could not exist. Similarly for an aural space, we can create sounds that appear to come closer without moving, or a spatial volume that is simultaneously large and small. Modern audio engineers and electronic composers, without necessarily realizing their new role, became the aural architects of virtual, imaginary, and contradictory spaces. Aural spatiality can exist without a physical space.

    By abandoning conventional norms defining music and space, modern artists created contemporary music. Although this class of music is considered by some to be an irreverent and unpleasant form of noise, the new rules of space are still worth investigating because they exist apart from the compositional creations that incorporate them. These rules are interesting both because they predicted the popular music of the late twentieth century and because they suggest future direction for the twenty-first century. Even if some twentieth-century contemporary music has not left an enduring legacy, the new rules of aural space are likely to survive in other aspects of our art and culture.

    The rule that requires musicians to perform in a tight cluster on the stage and listeners in predefined seats in the audience area is readily broken, as is the rule that requires both musicians and listeners to maintain a static geometric relationship throughout the performance. Moreover, when knobs on equipment can alter virtual spatial attributes, the rule that requires spatial acoustics to remain constant and consistent during a performance is also easy to transcend. In the world of virtual spatiality, acoustic space and sound location are no longer based on the laws of physics; acoustic objects can change their size and location instantly. Acoustic space and sound location have become as dynamic as the sequence of notes in the composition. As with all artistic rule systems, however, breaking old rules is easier than replacing them with meaningful new ones. A few decades is a very short duration for refining a new art form.

    A virtual space is not only a compositional element in music, but also an experience that can be extracted from music and then applied elsewhere, for example, to auditory displays in the cockpit of an airplane, the fictional spaces of computer games, or the dual audiovisual spaces of cinema. In these applications, there may not be consistency among the different sensory modalities. In some sense, with the ubiquitous technology of the twenty-first century, the experience of spatiality frequently dominates the experience of a physical environment. Space is no longer just a geographic framework (near-far, front-back, up-down) for positioning sounds relative to listeners. Space is no longer just a response to the acoustics of the environment. The older definition of cognitive maps of space as the internal representation of an external world, introduced in chapter 2, becomes fluid, plastic, and even more subjective. Aural architects of virtual spaces are manipulating their listeners’ cognitive maps.

    Artistic Dimensions of Space and Location

    Composers have always understood, both intuitively and consciously, that the location of the musicians contributes to listeners’ experience of a musical space. The hidden problem with positioning musicians throughout a space is that sound waves move comparatively slowly. Large acoustic spaces produce large delays, which displaces the temporal alignment of music arriving from different locations. Two notes beginning at the same time may arrive at a listener at different times. The spatial manifestation of time is an artistic issue for both listeners and performers, and as in advanced physics, time and space are related and connected concepts.

    When musicians are tightly clustered, the time for a direct sound to travel among them is small, and synchronization depends on their artistic skills alone. Conversely, when an orchestra is large and spread across the stage, the sound delay places a limit on aural synchronization. Because musicians separated by 20 meters (65 feet) will hear each other with a 60-millisecond delay, the visual cue of the conductor’s moving baton takes over the function of producing temporal consistency. When musicians in a large orchestra are perfectly synchronized in time, neither the conductor nor the listeners hear that temporal alignment because they are closer to some musicians than others. For example, a listener near the stage but far off to the left will hear a musician at the far right side of the stage with a delay after hearing a musician on the left, even though the two musicians are playing the same note at the same time. This problem is exacerbated if musicians are widely distributed throughout a large space.

    Composers can compensate for audio delay in several ways. Tight synchronization is not required if the composer includes a temporal gap, perhaps silence, between sounds originating from widely distributed locations. The location of the musicians, which depends on the particular geometry of a space, can then become a compositional component, although when the composition depends on a specific spatial organization, the music is not easily transported to other spaces without having to be adapted. For this reason and because it is less flexible than other options, composers have seldom manipulated the spatial distribution of musicians.

    With the advent of electroacoustics, perceived location and intrinsic audio delays were separated. For example, deploying individual microphones and headphones for each musician removes the intrinsic delays when they listen to their colleagues. Unlike air as a medium, electrified sound moves through wires instantaneously. The sound engineer is therefore free to electroacoustically reposition musicians anywhere in the virtual space, without destroying the synchronization among them. Two musicians separated by a distance of 50 meters (165 feet) can still be heard synchronously. Aurally perceived location has nothing to do with actual location; virtual spaces and virtual locations break the relationship between time and space.

    Anyone who creates a complete sound field that produces the experience of spatiality is functioning as an aural architect. Traditionally, sound sources from loudspeakers were viewed as injecting sonic events into a listening space, but with the advent of surround-sound reproduction, the sound field includes, and in some cases, replaces the experience of the listening space. This chapter traces the history and evolution of space in music, ending with the aural architecture of virtual spaces.

    Incorporating Location within Traditional Music

    Many of the spatial ideas found in contemporary music originated from an earlier period when musicians were occasionally distributed within the performance space. There is a long tradition of antiphonal music, a dialogue of call and response among distinct groups of musicians at different locations, which does not require tight synchronization or simultaneous playing. This style is found in the chanting psalms of Jews in biblical times, and in early Christian music dating from the fourth century. In the late sixteenth century, Giovanni Gabrieli extended the tradition of cori spezzati (divided choirs) as an adaptation to the unique architecture of Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Venice (Grout, 1960). The musical space was vast, and it contained two widely separated organs and choirs at opposite sides of the cathedral. Adapting to that uniqueness, composers at Saint Mark’s featured a dramatic use of antiphony between the halves of the double choir. The penchant to divide performers was also part of the Venetian polychoral tradition, started by Adrian Willaert and culminating with nine choral groups distributed throughout the cathedral (Mason, 1976). The refinement of cori spezzati represented a musical revolution, and also appeared in secular music of this and earlier periods, such as madrigals with echoes (Arnold, 1959). By the twentieth century, the use of spatially distributed musicians became less unusual and more innovative. Richard Zvonar (1999) cites numerous examples. Charles Ives, in The Unanswered Question (1908), placed the strings offstage to contrast with the onstage trumpet soloist and woodwind ensembles. He was influenced by his father, a Civil War bandmaster and music teacher, who had experimented with two marching bands approaching the town center from different directions. Henry Bryant then extended the idea in Antiphony I (1953) and Voyager Four (1963) with five ensemble groups placed along the front, back, and sides of the space. Three conductors were required.

    For modern composers, dispersing musical sources throughout a space is no longer revolutionary; location is an active component of a composition. Antiphony and spatial distribution evolved into a space-time continuum, which Maja Trochimczyk (2001) calls “spatiotemporal texture.” At any time, a musical voice could appear from any direction, and by intentionally sequencing attributes of space, time, pitch, and timbre, a voice can create the illusion of movement (changing position) and transformation (changing size). When used in this way, space is a musical dimension. Charles Hoag, in Trornbonehenge (1980), used thirty trombones surrounding the audience as an imitation of Stonehenge, and R. Murray Schafer, in Credo (1981), surrounded the audience with twelve mixed choirs. Extending the blending of musicians and listeners still further, Iannis Xenakis scattered 88 musicians among the audience so that the listeners are actually inside the music; in another of his compositions, musicians moved through the space rather than remaining seated.

    Based on traditional theory, music has a temporal and pitch structure, and within those dimensions, a composer manipulates musical voices so that they either fuse into a unitary whole or remain segregated as distinct elements-musical layers. Contemporary music, however, has added a spatial dimension. Composers now require new rules for manipulating fusion and segregation. The proliferation of compositions that manipulate space signifies a new form of sound imagery (Trochimczyk, 2001).

    An analysis of contemporary music is made even more complex by the addition of the two related ideas: incorporating the spatial dimension of voice location, and elevating sonic segregation over fusion and blending. During the last century, even without using space as an artistic element, Western music abandoned fusion as a prerequisite. Layered musical elements retain more of their perceptual identity when not fused. Space has become just another tool for creating musical layers. Maria Anna Harley (1998) analyzed spatial music in terms of perceptual principles that contribute to segregating musical elements. By drawing on Albert S. Bregman’s Auditory Scene Analysis (1990), she applied the principles of perceptual psychology to music. Spatial differences between sound sources that result in temporal differences at the ears augment the aurally perceived segregation of musical elements. Like differences in time, pitch, timbre, and attack, differences in spatial location are yet another means to enhance this segregation. In other words, similar but not identical sounds belong to separate musical layers when they are also spatially separated. Disparate locations de-emphasize fusion. Many modern composers, such as Bartok, Boulez, and Stockhausen, intuitively use this principle in their music.

    That twentieth-century music drifted away from fusion is consistent with spatial separation of sound sources. As a means of preventing fusion, Bryant (1967) used several artistic principles that derive from spatial separation. In one composition, he illustrated his concepts by distributing stringed instruments along the walls on the ground floor of a concert hall, as well as in the first, second, and third balconies, thereby creating a broad and intense wave of sound. Spatial separation preserved the clarity of contrasting layers, especially when different musical elements are in the same register. Because identical or harmonically related notes in two musical layers would typically fuse if not spatially separated, spatial separation afforded the composer greater musical flexibility by permitting increased complexity without concern for unintended confusion. Placing the performers below, above, behind, or to the side of listeners is not intrinsically interesting. Indeed, serializing the direction of music from a sequence of orientations or choosing an arbitrary geometric shape for performer location is, for Harley (1998), simply a failure to understand the new art. Spatial music is interesting precisely because, and only because, it allows combinations of musical elements that would otherwise be artistically weak without using spatial distribution. As if to prove this assertion, Trevor Wishart (1996) analyzed spatial movement in soundscape art, apart from a musical context, and came to a similar conclusion about space as a segmentation tool.

    In her summary of musical space, Harley (1998) concluded that “geometric floor plans and performance placement diagrams are integral, though inaudible, elements of the musical structure – as integral and inaudible as some abstract orderings in the domains of pitch and rhythm.” Spatial organization of sound sources and listener locations are components of music. Yet even when the musical score carefully specifies an organization in time and space, the composer is still constrained by the inherent inadequacy of human performers to achieve precision timing when physically separated.

    Consider two musicians located at different places but playing the same note on the same instrument. Using the concepts of Pierre Boulez (1971), there are four important cases that differ only in relative timing: simultaneous beginning and ending (fused), delayed onset of one musician’s note relative to the other’s but still overlapping (conjunctive interval), a small temporal gap between the end of one musician’s note and the beginning of the other’s (disjunctive interval), and a large delay between the two musicians’ notes (distinct sonic events). The fused case corresponds to a distributed choir singing in unison, and the last case corresponds to the historical use of antiphony. The middle two cases are interesting because they have the potential to create the perception of virtual movement, which Boulez calls “mobile distribution” or “dynamic relief.” In contrast, a fixed distribution or static relief represents a static state without kinematics. Timing has always been a critical dimension in composition, but timing combined with space becomes two-dimensional: spatiotemporal.

    This extra spatial dimension, in addition to preserving segregation of musical textures, offers other possibilities. A disjunctive interval can produce a sudden change in the aurally perceived location of a musician, and a conjunctive interval can produce smooth transition between the two locations, spice glissando. However, both effects are fragile, depending on the skill of the musicians to control timing, pitch, timbre, attack onset, and termination. And both effects depend on the location of the listener relative to the musicians. Musical movement is therefore an illusion, or a metaphoric allusion, rather than an imitation of a physical process. In addition to this change in perceived location, true motion of a sound source produces a Doppler frequency shift. Whereas physical motion in physical space has a reality, virtual motion in virtual spaces is an artistic prerogative.

Generation of ’38 (Part 3): Because Time Was in the Air

[Ed. Note: Over the course of this week, NewMusicBox is proud to be republishing this three-part essay which was commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center for the 2007 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, John Harbison, director, and was originally printed in the festival’s program book. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author and the Tanglewood Festival. The first part of the essay is here and the second part is here– FJO]

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Finding ways to forge new syntheses and techniques for themselves through explorations and surprising reconciliations of tonal and post-tonal languages, the generation of American composers born in and around the year 1938 (who were the focus of the 2007 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music [FCM]) moved into the forefront of American classical music in the 1970s and ’80s. For many of them, one stylistic turning point enabling this development occurred in the mid 1970s. Heiss says:

It was time. By the mid ’70s a lot of people decided to act differently. It felt artistically right. It got to be the mid ’70s and the feeling came…. All this was “in the air”…. Suddenly Appalachian Spring was once again a beautiful piece.

Time was in the air, carrying with it new language, including “neo” terms and referential practices, as in the new tonalism, neo-Baroque compositions, “New Romanticism,” quotation, “polystylism,” and intertextuality. This discourse suggests a developing stage in the assimilation between the past and the future. The German philosopher Reinhart Koselleck wrote, “All testimony answers to the problem of how, in a concrete situation, experiences come to terms with the past; how expectations, hopes, prognoses that are projected into the future become articulated into language.”1 Music embodies this process within itself.

Without using the term “postmodern”—barely known in musical discourse in the late 1960s, Leonard Meyer described it in Music, the Arts and Ideas (1967). His formal definition is technically precise, and ends with a literary soundbite that is still relevant: “[This is] a period not characterized by the linear cumulative development of a single fundamental style, but by the coexistence of a multiplicity of quite different styles in a fluctuating and dynamic steady-state.”

New ways of telling time moved from background into foreground more directly in the next decade. In 1976, the opera Einstein on the Beach, composed by Philip Glass in collaboration with the visionary director Robert Wilson, was produced at the uptown venue of the Metropolitan Opera House; its experiments with performative time have made this work a historical benchmark. As part of the FCM generation, Philip Glass symbolizes the authority of the minimalist movement, on its way to mainstream recognition by the mid to late 1970s.

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Philip Glass
Photo by Jim Ball, courtesy G. Schirmer/Music Sales

Glass’s achievements point to stylistic divisions within FCM composers which they themselves so readily acknowledge. Most of them have not adopted his aesthetic of purposeful stasis. (It has remained for a younger generation to embrace and then develop more fully its potential.) Even so, minimalism made yet more room for everyone by swinging the pendulum of stylistic priorities so far in the opposite direction away from postwar serialism that the middle ground looked like a radical center.

Several factors in the 1960s helped direct the flow of aesthetic traffic along the way to Meyer’s “dynamic steady-state.” An old and frail Stravinsky, who was living and working in the United States, provided models and inspiration for the continued quest for growth within tradition. Even his “living presence” for Harbison symbolized the unknown future. “He was like a nova coming over the horizon” to Heiss. “Stravinsky was my hero. I just waited for his next piece,” Borden says. Stravinsky’s late works communicated new possibilities for integrating tonal concerns into twelve-tone music within a Spartan Webern-like texture of restraint and clarity. Curran said, “I began to find [In Memoriam] Dylan Thomas and Agon even more critically beautiful because they were of their time. They still had a critical edge.” By 1972 Wuorinen contemplated his creative future through the prism of Stravinsky’s late works, writing in 1986 how

“some of us, as composers, have been so profoundly affected by the late works, in which are first exhibited techniques and devices we have extracted to employ and extend, as to want to predict that the final chapter of his output will be the most significant in the long run. [They point] “even to a possible synthesis of the tonal and twelve-tone approaches.”2

Another contributing factor was the historical gain in the cultural weight of popular music in the 1960s. While rock and roll from the ’50s mattered little to the FCM generation, most of these composers responded to the changing valence of vernacular music filled with ever more gravitas during this period. As “Beatlemania” took hold, the musical intelligentsia fell like bowling pins knocked down by such albums as Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, with composers (e.g. Berio, Rorem) and historians (e.g. Wilfred Mellers, William Mann) writing tributes to their musicality.

“The Beatles turned out to be curious people,” said Corigliano. They made “pop music suddenly interesting again.” Del Tredici admits, “The Beatles penetrated my wall against popular music. I really paid attention to them.” For Bolcom, rock linked him to the counterculture—a period when you could “kick out the jams,” borrowing a punk rock phrase for rebellion.

Other composers within the FCM generation began reinventing tonal practices in the late ’60s, provoked more by the investment of cultural authority in vernacular expressive culture as a whole than rock in particular. In 1967 David Del Tredici used pop art as his bridge to Lewis Carroll’s world of Alice in Wonderland. He deliberately included electric guitars, an instrument he described as “a monster in the world of classical music.” Around then Bill Bolcom found ragtime through the burgeoning interest in historical American music that would come to fruition in the next Bicen tennial decade. He regards his music from the late ’60s as early examples of “the trend [of] integrating all kinds of music in the same piece to find interfaces.” Similarly, David Borden wrote a piece which “began with nasty atonal stuff then it broke into a friendly tonal part. George Rochberg heard it, he had already converted to tonality in the Beethoven sense. He said, ‘Nice try, Dave.’ ”

How much the ’60s in general precipitated these challenges to authority and hierarchy remains an open question. Who living through those years was not aware of the Sturm und Drang around us? In the watershed year of 1968, the FCM generation turned thirty, the age at which one allegedly lost the “trust” of the younger generation. They behaved as individuals with respect to politics, some more, others less directly involved. Harbison, for example, is unique among the group in taking an activist role in spending a Freedom Summer doing civil rights voting registration work in Mississippi. Chihara remembers how the Vietnam War mattered above everything else to him.

A third factor concerns philosophical idealism and the extent to which composers and intellectuals invested music with utopian agency at the turn of the ’60s and mid ’70s. We can only briefly hint at connections here. Many FCM composers believed that art could provide redemptive experiences to pervasive social alienation. As if they were recapitulating the axioms of John Dewey’s pedagogy, a few FCM composers, particularly those associated with Musica Elettronica Viva, wanted their audiences to “learn by doing,” writing pieces that enabled participation and spontaneous creative combustion between composer, performer, and listener.

The idealism of the age imbued a diversity of practices with common goals. Even though the sound of the music differs so greatly among some FCM composers, in the background hover similar principles and dreams. Rzewski honed radical politics, which has informed his destiny as an artist, particularly struck by Pete Seeger’s advice to include tunes that everybody can sing in whatever he wrote. Richard Teitelbaum set himself the goal of transcultural improvisation, combining Eastern idioms with improvisational practices. For Chihara, the late 1960s offered respite from academia: “I resorted to a Cageian silence. I read Zen in the Art of Archery…. One of the things he said was ‘I am the arrow. I cannot miss.’ You would identify yourself with many things. [This was] our posture as composers…. We embraced this, and other philosophies. We didn’t resist.” Few did.

The cultural aftershocks of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam war led directly to the intellectual revolutions of the 1970s of second-wave feminism and African-American cultural nationalism. Both have had special relevance for some FCM composers, who by virtue of gender (Tower, Zwilich) and race (Hemphill, Wilson) faced different professional and creative obstacles and challenges to their own artistic development. For both women and minorities, the reclamation of history by previously marginalized subjects had a salutary impact on their growth. (How many other occupations still use the noun “woman” as an adjective, as in “woman composer”?) For Tower the emergence of historical scholarship proved to be a primary tool for “self-determination” and “autonomy,” to quote Gerda Lerner, a pioneering feminist historian of the 1970s. After she participated in the International Conference of Women in Music in New York in 1981, Tower began organizing concert series for performances of neglected music by historical and contemporary women, an activity which she continues to this day.

Zwilich, ever the “contrarian” (her term), supported cultural feminism, particularly during the publicity blitz that descended upon her after she became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in music in 1983. She understood her position as a “role model” and did not shirk from frequent questions that focused on gender issues in the field. In one commission celebrating the opening of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, she composed a piece commenting on a self-portrait painted by a literally “self-effacing” female artist from the early 1900s to comment on the social constructions of gender roles she resisted fiercely in her own life.

The central importance of African-American music in American music as a whole deserves special mention, bringing with it this enduring question: how and why did the musical practices of an oppressed and alienated people long characterized as “primitive” and “inferior” become so vital to the American musical imagination?3 The two African-American composers represented in the FCM generation shed some light on the process. However different the musical styles of Olly Wilson and Julius Hemphill may appear, both identified with the Black Arts Movement, including black cultural nationalism. Both acknowledge the contributions of Amiri Baraka’s book Blues People in recentering their historical perspectives. Their music projects a continuum of African-American musical practices and experience which embraces the old country and the new. An activist in the Black Arts Movement Hemphill with his experimental jazz captured some of the atonal energies of the earlier part of the decade, fusing African-American vernacular practices with new idioms. As Marty Ehrlich describes it, “Julius began to use stylistic references to the entire breadth of African-American music.” Wilson formulated influential theories about the nature of African-American music, and his emphasis on “the heterogeneous sound ideal” worked sympathetically with his own classical training. Wilson remembers the beginnings of the Black Arts Movement in 1967 as an awakening of historical consciousness not unlike that experienced by Tower:

There were other people like myself coming to the same conclusion, that we had all studied European music but had experienced other musical traditions, but had no sense of this music as having a core of musical literature about it… no African, no American, no African-American. After that 1967 meeting… I concluded that I was going to become involved. I’m a composer so I became involved through music.

Being involved meant insisting that race, gender, and in the later decades of the twentieth century, sexual orientation as well, were crucial historical variables for understanding the American musical experience as a whole. The later developments for gay activism among some FCM composers, particularly Del Tredici and Corigliano, also speaks to the philosophical embrace of social justice as an artistic priority.

Perhaps the most important arena of change for FCM composers in the 1970s and beyond concerns access to mainstream institutions such as opera companies and symphony orchestras. In the early ’60s some composers worried that electronic music would render them obsolete. In 1970, an older generation sounded further alarms about the hostility at its worst and indifference at its best to new music by contemporary conductors and orchestra players in a gloomy set of essays, The Orchestral Composer’s Point of View. However, the future proved to be more sanguine than one would have predicted.

By the late 1970s some new programs filled the vacuum and these in turn benefited several FCM composers. Such programs were cooperative ventures between private foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts (its budget increasing ca. 400% in the ’70s and ’80s) and “presenters,” or producing organizations. Originating in the late ’70s, program descriptions as formulated by idealistic savvy administrators spoke the policy language of the era, justifying support in terms of community welfare, outreach, and cultural democracy. As John Duffy, a leading figure in such programs, stated in 2003, that “to me models for community involvement are Bach—his writing for the church…—Ellington’s another example. He’s got a band, he’s traveling, he’s writing; they’re creating works together. He’s prolific.” Duffy developed a composer residency program designed to “recapture the soul of the American orchestra.”4 Among the FCM composers who have held such positions are Bolcom, Harbison, Tower, Wuorinen, and Zwilich.

A renewed and surprisingly invigorating interest in traditional acoustic forms such as opera and symphonies marked the 1980s. With the increase in popularity of commissions for symphonic and operatic music in general that has occurred in the last two decades of the previous century, many FCM composers had more opportunity to develop and refine their own personal vocabularies through the diverse kinds of training they received. Because of their training, as Del Tredici remarks, they “looked back at tonality differently.” To put this another way, they recast postwar American serial composition as one kind of system, and harmonic functionality or pitch centricity as another, not to be considered as mutually exclusive with one superseding the other, but rather as practical skill sets.

These foregoing remarks are intended to suggest trains of thought rather than ironclad conclusions. Artists as individuals see themselves as part of the “collective individuality,” to borrow John Dewey’s paradoxical phrase. Just as they characteristically reject or disparage most historical style terms, they resist being identified with overdetermined interpretation about their motivations or their connections to historicizing trends. This is not to deny the intentionality of their composing choices. Certainly, Charles Wuorinen, for example, has committed himself to the most deliberate reflection upon the relationships between tradition and the creative process. Wuorinen has said in 2002,

I also couldn’t really believe that there was this unbridgeable, permanent discontinuity between the music of the past and that of the present. So part of my aim as a composer—-and I guess it’s more prominent now than it used to be—has always been to incorporate certain aspects, whether they’re rhetorical, sonic, or even intervallic, even harmonic, from older music into my own procedures, which remain fundamentally twelve-tone or ordered set music, I should say.5

At the same time, order does not mean mechanistic control. “Composing doesn’t happen that way,” Joan Tower said, “it’s less controlled.” Similarly Bill Bolcom asserts that we “invent new musical languages and then invent ways to talk about them.” Frederic Rzewski notes, how “You make important decisions very often on impulse without thinking about it and for no good reason. And later you invent reasons to explain why you did what you did.”

Even so, it seems clear to this writer that the FCM generation as a whole continues to thrive on the capacity for what we now perceive as the heterogeneous confusing present. In describing styles, these same composers today often employ the vocabulary of omnivorous and tolerant ears. They use “crossover” language, talking about bridges from the other arts or “interfaces,” “filtering,” “appropriating,” “eclecticism” and “pluralism.”

Perhaps most tellingly, many FCM composers recognize the richness of their training. “Choice”—that keyword of the last twenty years, spanning all kinds of political positions and cultural orientations—has replenished the composer’s tool box. Harbison says, “In this post-Schoenbergian world, having gone through a specific set of disciplines, people have enough to keep them going over a long period.” For Bolcom, “Twelve-tone is useful as an organizing principle, a wonderful way to use balance points. We should teach twelve-tone the way we teach counterpoint.” John Corigliano has described his orientation as “motivated eclecticism.” “Eclecticism is like orchestration, but it can also be dangerous. I think about the kinds of structures that will let me be eclectic before I write the piece. The eclecticism is motivated by the shapes and needs of the piece before I write it.” McKinley says, “Things have changed now. All this is part of a synthesis. Most of us are alike in our connection to a rich tradition, filtering it through the ‘sixties craziness.’ ”

As befits a generation that sounds apart and together, the challenge remains to understand the moment—for the collective culture to enter ever more generously into the messages of their music. Their contributions to opera and the instrumental literature, including chamber music as well as symphonic works, still await analytic and historical interpretation in the literature about late twentieth-century music, as it now stands. Perhaps we might be aided by even more curiosity about a flexible generation grasping the dynamic of “steady-state” and making it work for them in so many fascinating and unpredictable ways.

We are the beneficiaries of this huge amount of music, particularly because of the people we have had contact with…. From my point of view, it makes for a richer choice. Things meet in me.

Contemporary art music is completely lost. [There are] no signposts, no common practice. At the moment all is available, all music from recorded time…. A composition student can speak any damn language he pleases…. Whenever in music history has the music of the entire world been available? Now, I ask [composition students] to create a music that you could never know. Imagine what you would make if you made a music without memory.

The traditions keep turning over. People keep looking rearward for the tradition. The tradition in this music is forward. Forward! Not what you did last week, but this week. You see what I’m saying? Now…that’s a hard road.

I made ten charts of grunge music for the Seattle Symphony. [It is very important for a composer] to still keep that being on the edge. I feel this as a composer—it’s just important to have an understanding of every single music in the culture.

I am not fully aware of my intentions [in composing a piece]. It’s for other people to assemble motives and interpretations.

We filter in a more abstract way. Sometimes we appropriate. I can’t take any sort of doctrinaire position. What seems to be the necessity takes charge and overwhelms any position I have taken.

Notes:

1Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time. 1979 trans. Keith Tribe. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004): 3.

2Charles Wuorinen and Jeffrey Kresky, “On the Significance of Stravinsky’s Last Works,” in Jann Pasler, ed. Confronting Stravinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press): 262.

3This question is an adapted paraphrase indebted to that asked by Wilfred Mellers in his book review of Christopher Small’s Music of the Common Tongue: “why is it that the music of an alienated, oppressed, often persecuted black minority should have made so powerful an impact on the entire industrialized world, whatever the colour of its skin and economic status?” Wilfrid Mellers, “Musickings and Musicology,” The Musical Times 129/1739 (Jan 1988): 19.

4John Duffy’s discussion of Bach and Ellington is from an interview with Frank J. Oteri, “The Composer as Statesman in the Music Industry and Beyond: John Duffy,” NewMusicBox, Dec. 1, 2003. The second quotation is from John Duffy, “Preface,” in Theodore Wiprud and Joyce Lawler, ed. Meet the Composers’ Residency Program, 1982-92 (New York: Meet the Composer, 1995).

5Interview for OHAM, Charles Wuorinen with Ingram Marshall New York, N.Y. June 14, 2002.

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Judith Tick
Judith Tick

Judith Tick, Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Music at Northeastern University in Boston, specializes in American 20th-century music and Women’s Studies in music. As the author of articles and books about Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, and Ruth Crawford Seeger, she has won two ASCAP Deems Taylor awards and two awards for outstanding scholarship from the Society for American Music. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and serves on the editorial board of Musical Quarterly. Her forthcoming book, Music in the USA: A Documentary Companion, with Paul Beaudoin as Assistant Editor, is due out from Oxford University Press in 2008. She was recently appointed to the Board of Advisors for the revision of The New Grove Dictionary of American Music. She served as Consulting Scholar and Guest Speaker for the 2007 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.<p

Generation of ’38 (Part 2): Music is What Happens

[Ed. Note: Over the course of this week, NewMusicBox is proud to be republishing this three-part essay which was commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center for the 2007 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, John Harbison, director, and was originally printed in the festival’s program book. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author and the Tanglewood Festival. The first part of the essay is here – FJO]

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The poet Seamus Heaney has written of “that moment when the bird sings very close/To the music of what happens.” In recalling the 1960s and ’70s, many American composers born in or near the year 1938 (whose music was the focus of the 2007 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music [FCM]) use the phrases, “we were the first generation to” or “the last generation to….” These moments shape this brief overview of their coming of age as artists. What happens when so much happens?

At a formative time of their lives, these composers of the FCM generation lived through an era of profound challenges to the general belief. As they approached their thirties, they—individually and in some cases collectively—contributed to the rise of serial and atonal music, contributed to the decline of serial and atonal music; worked in electronic music centers, wrote music in traditional acoustic genres and practiced extended improvisation; switched on through the Moog, switched off through trance music or ostinato music, as minimalism was then called; idealized participation, idealized control; stayed afloat in the high tides of rock, lived uptown, lived downtown, lived underground, lived bicoastally, lived within cultural nationalism, lived counterculturally in California, lived multiculturally in Europe or through “non- Western” music. Composers that were reviled at the beginning of the ’60s by an older generation—particularly John Cage—achieved public acclaim by the early 1970s. Orthodoxies rose and fell.

Their professional training coincided with the moment when universities competed fully with conservatories. All of the FCM composers went to college, and most went to graduate school at a transitional stage in the training of American composers. Until ca. 1960, many composers entered the profession with a B.A. or its equivalent; some earned the “Master’s” which served as the terminal degree. After that point programs offering doctorates in music (Ph.D’s and D.M.A’s—Doctorate of Musical Art) became increasingly common, symbolizing the growing power of academia and the long reach of its patronage. “We were the last generation not to have to get doctorates,” David Borden notes. At a time when American universities were growing by leaps and bounds, “People could just make a phone call and you’d have a job.”

Paul Chihara
Paul Chihara

Only a few of the FCM composers have this now-required credential. In the mid-1970s Ellen Zwilich became the first woman to receive a D.M.A from Juilliard; Joan Tower, the second woman to receive the same degree from Columbia. Bolcom earned Stanford’s first D.M.A, Paul Chihara a Ph.D. from Cornell. Chihara understood how

We were the first generation to be “canonized” through doctorates. We were very much aware we were a bit of an anomaly. Babbitt was trained in the army, Schuller through the orchestra, Boulez through the Conservatoire…. It was a choice we made. We were the grandchildren of Gershwin and Porter, and Gershwin was the son of immigrants. We had the respectability of the university.

Most FCM composers have remained in the university world as teachers, some with full-time appointments and some not.

“We were a generation of highly skilled performers,” says John Harbison. “Many in the younger generation today are not.” Given the difficulties of contemporary composition, where scores of new music often got lost in translation— Wuorinen in 2002 described the prevailing norm as “very slovenly and not particularly comprehending”—several FCM composers, often using universities as launching pads, organized new ensembles. “To have composers’ groups was a novelty at the time,” Harbison recalls. “There would be no performance of their music unless they generated it. Even when [the historian] Arthur Mendel told John Heiss, ” ‘You’re at Princeton now. Put your instruments in your case. You have work to do,’ ” Heiss said, “the kids just smiled and played anyway.”

John Harbison
John Harbison

In 1962 Charles Wuorinen, Harvey Sollberger, and the cellist Joel Krosnick founded the trend-setting Group for Contemporary Music at Columbia. “Of course we were young and knew everything,” Wuorinen recalled in 2002, “so we decided that we would just reform the universe.” One of their concerts fell on October 22, 1962, the evening when President Kennedy informed the world of a “missile crisis” in Cuba—the discovery of offensive missiles surreptitiously installed in Cuba by the Soviet Union, precipitating one of the defining epochs of the Cold War. Like many people living through this historical confrontation and who therefore remember “where they were when,” as Kennedy delivered his speech on television and radio, Wuorinen was “in a taxi on my way uptown to the Macmillan Theatre [at Columbia]. “I thought, my God, we’re not going to live through another week with this.” “While the world was ending,” Harvey Sollberger said, “we were playing our little hearts out.”

By the end of the 1960s, the model of the Group for Contemporary Music was replicated by other FCM composers. Joan Tower, an original member of the GCM, was a founding member of the Da Capo Players in New York. In Boston John Harbison helped transform Emmanuel Church into an innovative space for making music. In cities outside of New York, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and San Francisco, the New York model was emulated, and even funded by private foundations.

Many FCM composers sought out the composer-leaders of the postwar European avant garde. During the 1960s almost all FCM composers made their way abroad on proliferating fellowships and grants from private foundations and the federal government, as well as through Europe on $5 a day—a famous guidebook of the era. In the postwar decades, Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, Dallapiccola, and Berio were reinventing Western European modernism through their music and their aesthetic fiats, interrogating the reception of previous icons like Schoenberg and Stravinsky in order to make room for their own emerging voices. Some FCM composers attended the famous summer courses in contemporary music at Darmstadt, West Germany, among them Richard Teitelbaum and Rzewski. At different points Charles Fussell, John Harbison, and David Borden studied with Boris Blacher in West Berlin. In Paris Philip Glass studied with the legendary Nadia Boulanger. Both Bolcom and Rzewski played in Boulez’s ensemble Domaine Musicale.

New music was rising from the ashes of war, from “almost still smoking, destroyed cities throughout Europe,” as Curran (in 2000) remembered his first visit to Europe in 1957; not all that much had changed in 1965 in Berlin, when his mentor Elliott Carter brought him over through a Ford Foundation program.1 Charles Fussell spoke of the anxiety of getting to East Berlin by going through “Checkpoint Charlie,”—the security apparatus surrounding the political zones of a then politically divided city. Bolcom said, “The trauma of the War [in Paris in the early ’60s] was still in evidence.” There as well for one year, ca. 1962-63, David Chaitkin recalls the political climate in the waning years of the French-Algerian War. Chaitkin heard Boulez mix music with politics in his Domaine Musicale concerts at Place l’Odeon. “Every day Boulez would make a statement damning the government policy on Algeria.”

At home the atmosphere was heady in different ways, perhaps because more was at stake. The FCM composers were the first generation to learn—or at least have the option of learning—systematic twelve-tone composition as it evolved within second-wave American modernism, that is to say, postwar American serialism as practiced by what has come to be known as the Princeton School led by Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt. They belonged to the first generation of American composers to be told, as Babbitt wrote, that a “foundational discourse [in theory] was a “precondition of musical citizenship.”2 What kind of musical polis required its composers to carry passports of musical theory?

Let us remind ourselves of the experiences the FCM generation brought to this moment. They had grown up with Home Front “Americana,” as the music of Copland, Harris, and Thomson is frequently labeled. They understood the vernacular imperatives of jazz. Moreover, the debate between neoclassicism and twelve-tone music (one of the historic debates of 20th-century music) had also marked their youth. As Heiss remarked, “We were born into the Stravinsky vs. Schoenberg dilemma as young people.” However, by the time the FCM generation entered graduate school in the early 1960s, the dilemma had been “resolved” so to speak in favor of Schoenberg, or at least it had abated for several reasons.

Already in the early 1950s both Stravinsky and Copland had broadened their purviews, using twelve-tone practice in their compositions during that decade. Furthermore, in the 1960s it became increasingly clear that the mainstream music of “Americana had run its course,” as David Del Tredici stated. Both Copland and Barber suffered public failures at the premieres of works written to celebrate the opening of the orchestra and the opera at the newly constructed cultural complex, Lincoln Center. A few years later, Copland told John Corigliano, “When I had a premiere, all the younger composers came to hear it. Now they don’t.” (“He said this matter-of-factly,” Del Tredici relates.) Del Tredici, who spent a year at Princeton in 1962, also recalled how “it was enormously exciting to abandon tonality. It was irresistible. Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, I loved their music.”

But “loving this music” was not enough. At the same time that the sonic ideals of atonal music—be it electronic or acoustic—permeated the American soundscape of the avant garde, the debate over the relevance of science and theory raged as well at large in the culture as a whole. As American theorists like Milton Babbitt, Alan Forte, and George Perle accelerated the production of discourse about music, they enacted this conflict as well in their own separate spheres of influence. In his now-classic metatheoretical articles about compositional practice with twelve tones, Babbitt shifted the intellectual paradigm for musical communication away from humanistic philosophy to science and analytic positivism. He established a new language and a rationale for the language at the same time, propelling “discourse about music” onto the center stage of American compositional training. The expansion of Schoenberg’s legacy through the theoretical virtuosity of Milton Babbitt characterizes postwar American serialism at the height of its influence in the early 1960s.

Several FCM composers studied at Princeton, Columbia and Yale where they were exposed to an intellectual sobriety and a new theoretical vocabulary which has since become standard in the field (e.g. “set,” “pitch class,” “combinatoriality”). New journals such as Perspectives of New Music published at Princeton and the Journal of Music Theory published at Yale set the tone for wider dissemination of revisionist thought.

Alvin Curran
Alvin Curran

What was it like to be there? The FCM composers display their differences from one another in considering this question. Alvin Curran said, “It all hit me with the force of a tornado. I was suddenly immersed in twelve-tone theory with Allen Forte, and then from his own perspective, Elliott Carter, his own creations…. Those who were informed so much so carried on mock battles. The Princeton-Columbia axis was no joke. You were in it or you were not. Now we can look back lovingly, but not then.” Recalling his own “culture shock” when he moved from the University of Iowa to Columbia, Sollberger recalled the struggle to establish serial music, so to speak, undertaken by his mentors. He thinks that in that particular musical environment outside of academia, his teachers and friends Babbitt and Carter were underrated, indeed neglected. Charges of a “serial tyranny” seem like a “Stalinist rewriting of history.” On record in many places, Wuorinen staunchly opposes notions of serial “power,” as a self-serving myth. Borden believes that “Our generation was the one who broke away from the serial school. We felt it was sort of imposed on us.” Del Tredici did not “do atonality because he was forced to in any way. Atonality was exciting for me.” Zwilich thinks that the evaluation of serialism should not be “so strict…. Don’t overdo the serial domination thing. After all in the ’60s we had David Diamond, Gian Carlo Menotti, Alan Hovhaness, and Terry Riley.”

Today this fascinating moment stands between memory and history. It is already filled with ideological tensions framed as critical debates in language that recalls charges of “imperialism” in the 1960s or even the Cold War. Did the rise of entertainment and rock deafen ears to other messages? In the absence of a substantive scholarly literature offering fresh syntheses, we live with fragmented testimony bearing witness to the need for historical interpretation. The few comments from FCM composers presented here stand as a particular kind of “narrative truth,” their experience of the past as remembered from the perspective of its own future. “What happened” remains especially problematic in that the music offering clues remains insufficiently assimilated through the experience of a wider public.

Still there is no doubt it could be tough. Heiss reported that an atonal composer said to him, “Atonal or tonal. Decide. You’d better make the right choice. Your career will depend on this.” Did it? Perhaps the careers of FCM composers depended on exactly the reverse—not believing in “the right choice.” Not deciding.

Notes:

1Alvin Curran, OHAM interview, 2000.

2Milton Babbitt, “The Structure and Function of Music Theory,” as cited by Martin Brody, ” ‘Music for the Masses’: Milton Babbitt’s Cold War Music Theory,” Musical Quarterly 77/2 (summer 1993): 166.

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Judith Tick
Judith Tick

Judith Tick, Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Music at Northeastern University in Boston, specializes in American 20th-century music and Women’s Studies in music. As the author of articles and books about Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, and Ruth Crawford Seeger, she has won two ASCAP Deems Taylor awards and two awards for outstanding scholarship from the Society for American Music. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and serves on the editorial board of Musical Quarterly. Her forthcoming book, Music in the USA: A Documentary Companion, with Paul Beaudoin as Assistant Editor, is due out from Oxford University Press in 2008. She was recently appointed to the Board of Advisors for the revision of The New Grove Dictionary of American Music. She served as Consulting Scholar and Guest Speaker for the 2007 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.

 

Generation of ’38 (Part 1): Sounding Together While Sounding Apart

[Ed. Note: Over the course of this week, NewMusicBox is proud to be republishing this three-part essay1 which was commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center for the 2007 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, John Harbison, director, and was originally printed in the festival’s program book. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author and the Tanglewood Festival. – FJO]

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“Over the years I noticed 1938 as a curious phenomenon.”
“Why this year, try 1610.”
“We have been aware of this coincidence for the longest time.”
“I know only some of these people on this list.”
“I know most of the people on this list.”
“We are wildly different people.”
“People born at the same time have things that they share, instilling across the board empathy.”
“We may share the same musical moment but the musical veins we have tapped are very divergent.”
“The fact that so many important composers came out of this generation is not an accident.”

So here we have a group who does not necessarily think of (or want to think of) itself as a group whose music is being programmed as if it were a group which perhaps it is: a set of American composers born in 1938 (more or less). The comments above, which come from informal telephone interviews done in the last few months, have influenced the perspective of this overview. Taking its title from a phrase coined in 1930 by the musicologist Charles Seeger (Pete’s father, who used it in his theories about modern music), this essay asks what it means to “share the same musical moment.” Since it would take a book to answer this question, we will focus on just a few aspects of their shared experiences.

To be born in 1938 meant straddling the two crises of the mid twentieth century—the Great Depression of the 1930s and the oncoming Second World War of the 1940s. Most of these composers were too young in the War years to remember much about this era. Still, the fact that Paul Chihara learned popular music at the Minidoka Relocation Center in southern Idaho (a Japanese-American internment camp), singing “Blues in the Night” at the Saturday Night Canteen when he was four years old, reminds us of Home Front anxieties and fears. Music as part of “expressive culture”—a term which takes in everything from classical concerts, pop, and swing, to movies, radio shows and dance competitions—fended off fear with tradition and pizzazz, transmitting the value of American optimism which Aaron Copland would later define as an essential national characteristic.

The belief in progress through science and engineering also marked this moment. The 1939 World’s Fair, with its still vaguely familiar slogan “Building the World of Tomorrow,” promised revolutionary progress which the future delivered for this generation. Within ten years of the Fair, LPs and stereo had replaced 78s; television came along in another five. Recordings democratized access—you didn’t have to live in a city to hear The Rite of Spring or Billy the Kid. Frederic Rzewski:

The LPs had just come out. You could take a record into the little booth and listen to it. I heard the Shostakovich Ninth Symphony right there in the store, in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1948. “Do you have something by Schoen berg?” “Yes, this just came in.” It was A Survivor from Warsaw. It knocked my socks off. It was the first thing I ever heard of Schoenberg’s. I was ten years old.

To be born in 1938 meant growing up with stage two of Dvorák’s idea that folk music supplied the materials for a national style, or what Aaron Copland’s generation called “an American vernacular.” (At stage one in the 1890s, when Dvorák lived in the United States, controversy swirled around his suggested candidates of African-American and Native American folk songs.) In May 1939, when the King and Queen of England paid a state visit to Roosevelt’s White House, at the official concert they heard the Coon Creek Girls and Alan Lomax along with the classical singers Marian Anderson and Lawrence Tibbetts. Composer William Bolcom remembers how “everybody used to sing [from] Norman Lloyd’s The Fireside Book of Folk Songs when they were kids. Similar fare in September 1939 was offered up to attendees of the first International Congress of the American Musicological Society in New York City, who heard Sacred Harp hymns and watched the “Swing of Harlem” team do the lindy.

The International Congress symbolizes another aspect of the historical moment—an exodus which produced a changing cultural demographic. Some of the European attendees were stranded here because Hitler had invaded Poland just one week before the Conference. Others already in exile or on their way by 1945 included Schoenberg, Bartók, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Krenek, Weill, Milhaud, Eisler, Bukofzer, and Adorno. Rzewski says, “The United States was the center of classical music in the 1940s. It was full of European musicians. It was full of these musicians who toured all over the place all of the time.”

In a way this was a “da capo” moment in American music history because the influx of European musicians in the 1940s and 50s parallels the earlier influx of European immigrants to the United States in the 1850s and 60s. Back then German musicians came in such numbers that they jumpstarted American symphonic orchestras and spread Romantic music into the hinterlands; in New York famous Italian opera coaches ran studios teaching American girls how to sing Verdi. A hundred years later David Del Tredici credits his piano teacher Bernhard Abramowitsch (another German Jewish refugee) for teaching him composition through performance: “Large form is a felt, experiential thing, not an intellectual thing… Abramowitsch taught me how to project the large tonal form in the big sprawling pieces which were the things I liked best, like the Schumann Fantasie or the Chopin Polonaise-Fantaisie, or late Beethoven long slow movements.”

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Ellen Taaffe Zwilich

Ellen Zwilich (who met the Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnányi at Florida State University in Tallahassee) draws out the implications of such contact:

The fact that so many important composers came out of this generation is not an accident. It rests on a foundation of education that no longer exists. It was a uniquely American education leavened by European influence, not from afar, but in the bloodstream. As it happens, our generation had the best of both worlds. The cream of the crop moved to this country. They were our teachers, or our teachers’ teachers.

The teaching took place within the foundation of solid music education for some of the FCM composers. Many recall their high school years filled with ample opportunities for active substantive music-making. David Chaitkin said ruefully, “the schools [then as opposed to now] were in very good shape.” John Heiss recalled a production of Carmen in the tenth grade at his public high school in Bronxville, New York. Charles Fussell grew up as a Moravian-American, belonging to a historically rich community of German-speaking immigrants who came to the Colonies in the late 18th century, settling in Pennsylvania and North Carolina in particular. Famous for their music, Moravian-Americans built their social life around it, and Fussell recalls the high quality of his education and the prestige his high school music teachers enjoyed in his town of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

At Midwood High School in Brooklyn, John Corigliano found Bella Tillis, who started SING!, a citywide competitive program for that classic adolescent experience—the high-school musical. Julius Hemphill (and his cousin Ornette Coleman) went to a public high school in Forth Worth, Texas, where the distinguished jazz clarinetist John Carter taught music. Similarly, at the segregated Sumner High School in St. Louis—founded in 1877 as the first African-American high school established west of the Mississippi—Olly Wilson also fared very well. When Eileen Southern, the pioneering historian of African-American music, interviewed Wilson in 1974, she exclaimed “Sumner High! That school has produced a lot of musicians.” (Its alumni include Chuck Berry and opera singers Grace Bumbry and Robert McFerrin.) Ellen Taaffe Zwilich describes her particularly rich environment in a white suburb of Miami:

Coral Gables High School had what amounted to a conservatory in the high school. It had a music building with two wings, two choruses, two bands besides the marching band, an amphitheater for concerts, and the symphonic band was practically a professional organization. We played all the new stuff, Persichetti, Paul Creston, lots of adaptations. The school owned instruments, the practice rooms had intercoms, there were two offices for instrumental teachers. [One of the band directors] Paul Cremashi, would say “Taaffe, come conduct. Taaffe, go write an arrangement,” and the student with demerits had to copy out the parts.

Coming of age in the ’40s and early ’50s meant that for some of these composers the notion of “separate spheres” in music did not correspond to their musical experiences. They walked the “middle of the road”—to borrow President Eisenhower’s Republican euphemism for “liberal.” David Borden recalls, “As I was growing up, both classical and popular music were enjoyed equally and I was encouraged to learn both in my piano lessons.” Most learned the repertory now called the “Great American Song Book,” a mixture of Broadway and film songs as well as commercial pop. They went with their parents or friends to see blockbuster movie musicals in Technicolor, sharing what John Corigliano calls “a sense of beauty that was popularly loved.” They were raised on the sophisticated chord progressions of pop standards. As Heiss remarks, “I still am trying to figure out [Jerome Kern’s] “All the Things You Are.”

The importance of jazz deserves some special comment. Many FCM composers (Harbison, Heiss, Curran, Milburn, Zwilich, Wilson, Hemphill) were “jazzers.” At the professional Performing Arts High School in New York, Stanley Silverman played guitar (acoustic and electric) and joined the high school jazz band. Few immersed themselves in the professional world of jazz quite so early as William McKinley, who gigged so much as a kid that he joined the Musicians Union when he was twelve. Many FCM composers reel off the names of their idols from the ’40s and ’50s, seamlessly moving from swing into bop.

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Olly Wilson

This is not to deny the different social contexts for racialized musical expression. These were the years of battles over segregated schools, and the Supreme Court decision desegregating them (“Brown vs. the Board of Education”) happened in 1954 when this generation was in high school. Therefore, jazz has different meanings for white and black musicians. For Olly Wilson, Duke Ellington promised a better future:

Ellington was of course a consummate musician. He was also a cultural hero when I was growing up. His career in the big band tradition clearly suggested that it could give musicians a career at a certain level of class…it represented people of class. He embodied that more than anybody else, he did represent a cultural icon. To me he gave me an understanding of a level of performance that was clearly a high standard, and also his style and development clearly changed, there was a quest for continual growth, a question for continual expansion.2

And for Julius Hemphill, jazz embodied what the critic Albert Murray calls the American “vernacular imperative”— the need “to stylize the idiomatic particulars of everyday life” into sophisticated enduring art.

I grew up in the “Hot End” of Fort Worth. The Hot End is where people came for entertainment, such as it was, and to drink and carry on. It was musically rich. I could hear Hank Williams coming out of the jukebox at Bunker’s, the white bar. And Louis Jordan, Son House, and Earl Bostic from the box at Ethel’s, the black bar across the street. Texas gets hot, you know. Winter is an afterthought. We had all the windows raised. So right across the street, these two jukeboxes were blaring. I had a great childhood. I mean, I was right down there with the action. It helped formulate some ideas, you know what I mean.3

Alvin Curran’s comments from an interview in 2001 underscore the ambiguities of experience as a white boy playing jazz.

It was a racist world. I mean racist not only in the color lines that existed then so strongly, but also in the elitist traditions which were carried on and maintained between the great European tradition and then the dubious but nevertheless unavoidably, recognizably great traditions of American popular music, especially in its black origins. So these things were very clear to us as kids. We didn’t know what they meant, but, as I say, the experience was one of “excitement, joy”—in whatever expression, whether I was playing in a local Dixieland band or a dance band that was run largely by a group of Italo-American kids in high school or I was playing in the high school band or the Brown band or the local symphony orchestra or whatever.4

Not all FCM composers profess much interest in pop music or jazz. It mattered only somewhat to Bolcom, and very little to Del Tredici, Rzewski, Joan Tower, or Charles Wuorinen. “I was a wild thing from South America,” Tower says, who landed at a fancy prep school in Massachusetts when she was a teenager and had no important musical awakenings, so to speak, through its curriculum. But overall, many of the FCM generation experienced popular music and classical music as different dialects of the same tonal language.

As the FCM generation sorted themselves out and readied themselves for college, which they all attended, they carried their musical upbringings with them in ways they could not understand at the time and would prove significant for them at many stages of their creative development. This moment is crucial. In 1984, at a mid-career moment, giving talks to Tanglewood composers, John Harbison summed it up:

Here is how it went for me: in adolescence Mozart string quintets and Bach Cantatas, Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms, Bartók Concerto for Orchestra. With jazz groups: Kern and Gershwin songs. Oscar Peterson, later Horace Silver. And I freely admit the Four Freshmen, Nat King Cole. This is the most impressionable time. Everything from these years is indelible. If we really cared about teaching music we’d do it then, and before, and then leave people alone.5

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Notes

1The author would especially like to thank Vivian Perlis and the staff of Oral History American Music [OHAM], Yale University, with help in preparing this essay.

2Eileen Southern, “Conversation with Olly Wilson. The Education of a Composer,” The Black Perspective in Music 5/1 (spring 1977):93.

3Marty Ehrlich, ed. “Julius Hemphill (in his own words),” includes this quotation from the Smithsonian Institution Jazz Oral History Project. Interview by Katea Stitt. 1994.

4Alvin Curran with Ingram Marshall, New York, N.Y. October 6, 2000. Interview for OHAM.

5John Harbison, “Six Tanglewood Talks (1, 2, 3),” Perspectives of New Music 23/2 (Spring/Summer, 1985): 14.

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Judith Tick
Judith Tick

Judith Tick, Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Music at Northeastern University in Boston, specializes in American 20th-century music and Women’s Studies in music. As the author of articles and books about Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, and Ruth Crawford Seeger, she has won two ASCAP Deems Taylor awards and two awards for outstanding scholarship from the Society for American Music. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and serves on the editorial board of Musical Quarterly. Her forthcoming book, Music in the USA: A Documentary Companion, with Paul Beaudoin as Assistant Editor, is due out from Oxford University Press in 2008. She was recently appointed to the Board of Advisors for the revision of The New Grove Dictionary of American Music. She served as Consulting Scholar and Guest Speaker for the 2007 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.

 

Memories Are Better Off Sung

[Ed. Note: In one of those fabulous moments of synchronicity, at the end of our talk with Matthew and Eleanor Freidberger, which appears as our August 2007 Cover, Matthew mentioned to me that composer David T. Little had written an analytical essay about The Fiery Furnaces’s album Rehearsing My Choir. David, of course, is no stranger to this site, and the fact that he had written such an essay was even further proof that The Fiery Furnaces were part of our musical universe at NewMusicBox. When we first launched NewMusicBox eight years ago, we would always pair our main conversation with a large analytical essay further exploring the same ideas from a different perspective. It’s something we haven’t done in quite a while, but after tracking down David’s essay, it seemed a perfect compliment to our already-posted Fiery Furnaces discussion. – FJO]

The Functions of Memory in The Fiery Furnaces’ Rehearsing My Choir

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Rehearsing My Choir

Issues of memory play an important role in the music of siblings Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger’s rock band, The Fiery Furnaces. Although memory is suggested in much of their prolific output, nowhere is it more focused than in their 2005 release Rehearsing My Choir (RMC). With a narrative spanning seven decades, RMC tells the life story of the siblings’ then-83-year-old grandmother Olga Sarantos, a former church choir director. Featuring Olga in the leading role—with Eleanor serving as an additional commentator—the songs of RMC travel freely between eras, as the stories told flow in a non-chronological linearity.

Supporting this narrative, the album’s musical materials draw broadly from different historical eras, forming a strange yet appealing blend of sounds from the past and the present. Like a child in a candy store, Matthew, the group’s primary composer, picks and chooses genres and eras to suit his needs, combining them accordingly. The specific influences that I detect are minstrel shows and ragtime of the 1890s, radio dramas of the 1930s, American musicals from the 1930s through the mid-1940s, and rock operas of the 1970s. Coincidentally, these eras correspond to a forty-year socio-historical cycle, that I, for the purpose of this discussion, have termed “nostalgia waves.”

According to historian Michael Kammen, “the 1890s, the 1930s, and the 1970s were marked by…wave[s] of nostalgia because these were periods of grave self-doubt accompanied by concern for the future.” These waves often follow periods of struggle or tragedy; e.g. the Great Depression and the Vietnam War. In this light, the general sound of Rehearsing My Choir could be described as meta-nostalgia: adopting the sound of each past nostalgia wave from what could be considered an anticipation of a fourth nostalgia wave in the 2010s.

However, the stylistic references that create this feeling of nostalgia, and consequently meta-nostalgia, are fake ones. Unlike what one might expect in a work of Berio or Rochberg, the Friedbergers’ stylistic references are drawn with a broader stroke. In this, they engage our collective memory. Collective memory, according to Kammen, is “a living image of the past […] or the collective representation of an event as it has been refashioned over time.” More than the “accumulation of individual memories,” it is the shared and mutable popular image of an historical entity. Collective memory dictates a portion of what we “know” as a culture, and therefore what and how we will remember.

Collective memory can be problematic, as it is often inaccurate. One wishing to reference the 1920s, for example, faces a dilemma. Far from the age of flappers and the Charleston we know as “The Roaring ’20s,” the 1920s were a rather dull time for the majority of Americans. What we know as “the ’20s” represents the experience of only a small, elite portion of the population. Therefore, in order to communicate their intentions, one wishing to reference the 1920s, must actually reference “the 1920s,” the era as it is understood in collective memory.

The Friedbergers understand this. Styles referenced in RMC are neither quotations nor accurate stylistic reconstructions. Rather, they are references to styles as they appear in collective memory; ragtime becomes “ragtime,” and so on. (It is interesting to note that, according to my conversation with Mr. Friedberger, Olga is actually a composite character, telling stories from the lives of her mother, husband, sister, etc. In this sense, she is not Olga, but a character: “Olga.”) Although certain technical musical elements are utilized—stride piano figuration, for example—this is not what really sells the reference. What does sell the references is instrumental color, which in this case corresponds interestingly to the world of photography.

Photographs are memory aids, documenting our pasts and preserving the images of people or special events so that we may more successfully, completely, and accurately remember them. Naturally, photographs taken at different times have different qualities: size, shape, tint, etc. Because of this, regardless of the content of the photograph, one can get a general sense of when the photo was taken. For example, a Daguerreotype from the 1850s has a much different hue than a Polaroid from the 1960s. Of particular interest to this discussion is the hue of the photo, a result of the process and materials used in its production and development. Just as the hue of a photograph can suggest when it was taken, so too can a sound’s color suggest the era from which it came, as filtered through our collective memory.

Photographic hues
Photographic hues

In RMC, a tacked and out of tune upright piano brings with it the color of honky-tonk and ragtime of the 1890s. An electric organ, with hearty vibrato, evokes the radio dramas of the 1930s as well as the domestic life of the ’60s and ’70s, when this instrument was a fairly common household item. When drums are used, they are tuned and miked to suggest the rusty hue of the 1970s. Other times, drums are electronically programmed, with beats reminiscent of disco. Additionally, the autoharp, electric-harpsichord, toy piano, imitation-Theremin, and imitation-Mini-Moog all make appearances. While each instrument offers a sonic snapshot of the era from which it came—and they are often used this way—they are also combined at times to form a veritable orchestra of nostalgia, as in the beginning of “The Wayward Granddaughter.”

The basic unit of music that a listener remembers is, arguably, the motive. In RMC, the use of motives engages memory immediately, adding a series of internal cross-references to the work, suggesting relationships between movements we might otherwise not realize. Friedberger simply and effectively utilizes the idea of the motive both as idée fixe and as developing object, as he combines motivic fragments into larger thematic units, such as what I have called the “memory theme”.

“…Listen to this tune that sounds like a condolence card, bought at the last minute for someone you can’t stand,” says Olga as we hear the “memory theme” for the first time, as the second half of “The Garfield El.” A binary theme, both parts are actively developed throughout the piece, although both also occur frequently in their original form. Musically straightforward, what I find so touching about the theme in general—and in the first part in particular—is how it can’t quite find a point of rest.

It begins with concurrent, unprepared 4-3 and 9-8 suspensions, moving from dissonance to consonance as suspensions do. In the next measure, however, the same pitches in the melody are placed over a G/D dyad, reversing the pattern, which now moves from consonance into dissonance (5-4 and 3-2). This failure to resolve perhaps suggests that the story we are about to hear is bittersweet, like most memory, and that subsequently not everything will work out the way that it is supposed to. Olga’s reference to a condolence card reinforces this, as we are reminded of loss; a poignant preface, as we will see.

This emphasis on strong-beat dissonance is retained in Part B, where a similar pattern of mostly-unprepared suspensions intensifies the feelings of loss. In “The Garfield El” iteration of this theme, Olga sings along on “La,” when Part A returns. This leads to the text: “Listen to this tune I’m playing now kids. Does it seem sad? Does it remind you of when?” With this final question, the last line of which returns as the title of the very last movement, we are propelled into Olga’s world.

Showing itself to be the seminal material for much of the piece, this theme—developed in whole or in part—also returns at dramatically significant moments in its original form. Like the opening motive of Mahler’s Symphony No. 7, it recurs so frequently, that before long we hear it as a part of our own memory. Similarly, when the motives and themes of RMC recur, they often feel like recollections as they surface, then vanish again under the local texture.

At one such moment in the title track, the “memory theme” returns amidst the story of a misogynistic, Robert-Mitchum-obsessed Bishop. Accompanying the music is the text: “That next Sunday was my late sister’s Namesday,” after which Olga sings a single “La, la, la” along with Part A. Unlike its previous iteration, she doesn’t sing the melody to which we had become accustomed, but rather harmonizes it a fourth above, alone and unsupported by any instrumental doubling. Through this one musical addition, Friedberger brings the listener into the world of negative memory.

Harmonization of memory theme
Harmonization of memory theme
Aschrott-Brunnen” width=”150″ height=”200″ border=”0″ valign=”bottom”>
The original Aschrott-Brunnen

Negative memory is a concept often associated with the work of German artist Horst Hoheisel. The idea is to activate negative space so that the absence of an object’s one-time presence will be felt more strongly. Although there are many examples of this in Hoheisel’s work—and elsewhere, to be sure—it is most clearly articulated in his 1987 “negative-form” monument in Kassel, Germany, Aschrott-Brunnen (Aschrott Fountain).

Hoheisel's sketch
Hoheisel’s sketch for his 1987 monument

The original Aschrott-Brunnen was a 12-meter tall fountain donated by Jewish entrepreneur Sigmund Aschrott in 1908, and designed by architect Karl Roth. Under the Nazi regime, it became known as the “Jews’ Fountain” and during the night of April 8, 1939, was destroyed, leaving only its circular base.

The reconstructed <I>Aschrott-Brunnen</I> pyramid
The reconstructed Aschrott-Brunnen pyramid, on display and awaiting burial

In 1984, the project of memorializing Sigmund Aschrott and his fountain was awarded to Hoheisel. He proposed that the fountain’s destroyed pyramid be rebuilt, sit in public view for a few weeks, and then be inverted and buried. His insistence that the reconstructed pyramid sit on display was significant to the work and its process. It reminded present-day viewers of the fountain’s original presence that, once buried, would again be rendered absent through amplified negative space.

Horst Hoheisel's <I>Aschrott-Brunnen</I>
Visitors view the flowing water of the inverted fountain through the glass base of Horst Hoheisel’s Aschrott-Brunnen

Once inverted and buried, the hollow sculpture was to be flooded with water—re-creating the lost fountain, but now underground. The whole monument was then to be covered with glass at street level so that the buried fountain could be viewed—and heard—from above. The sound created by the water reinforces the work’s sense of negative-form and loss: we hear the fountain, but see only its absence. One could argue that what Hoheisel accomplishes in his Aschrott-Brunnen, Friedberger accomplishes in parts of RMC.

In RMC, by activating the space above the melody as we have known it, three things occur. First, whereas the original melody moved at this point from dissonance to consonance, the new pitches move from consonance to dissonance, nullifying the resolution normally heard here. Second, once the single iteration has stopped, we feel its sudden absence, as the melody continues as usual. Third, it re-contextualizes the material, as we realize that these added upper notes—representing Olga’s late sister—had been missing from every other iteration of the theme. As with the pre-burial display of Hoheisel’s Aschrott pyramid, large-scale absence in RMC is amplified through this well-placed, local, and temporary presence.

Slightly shifting focus now, I would like to explore a particular harmonic characteristic of the piece: what I’ll refer to here as “regression” which should not be confused with the Schenkerian use of the word. I use “regression” here simply to mean the opposite of “progression.” E.g. The clearest occurrence of this type of “regression” occurs in the second song, “The Wayward Granddaughter,” in which the following lines bring the movement to a close over numerous repetitions of the progression.

Well, we could talk about it Connie /
but often memories are better off sung. /
Remember when you were young… /
Remember when I was young… /
La la la / la la la.

Harmony and the hold of the past
Harmony and the hold of the past

The move to a second inversion d diminished chord in the third measure transcribed above, and subsequent moves like this in progressions throughout the piece, recall the “plunge” in the first movement of the Schubert String Quintet D. 956, at the entry of the second theme. Having begun in C Major, the Quintet suddenly shifts keys to a nostalgic E-flat Major. As Scott Burnham observed in “Schubert and the Sound of Memory” (Musical Quarterly, Volume 84, Number 4; Winter 2000), this “plunge into the flat side of the main key draws attention inward rather than onward.” Rather than inward, I prefer to think of this move as a pull backward. Like a hand reaching from the past that prevents one from moving ahead, the listener is jarred into a different time and place. It’s like having the rug of time pulled out from under you.

Aside from its presence on the local level of the progression, this sort of regressive harmonic shift also functions structurally, accounting for many of the relationships between movements, relative to their location along the era spectrum. Upward harmonic shifts—for example from Bb-centric music to C-centric music—tend to accompany a move into the future—from the 1960s to the 1990s, for example—whereas harmonic shifts downward generally indicated a move from the present to the past. This explodes the harmonic implications to the structural level. One could argue that this—along with the aforementioned hue of instrumentation and other devices—further places the listener in the era appropriate to the era at hand within the larger narrative.

Key scheme/era relationships
Key scheme/era relationships throughout the work

Ultimately, the structure of RMC interacts with memory in various ways, depending on the level at which it is analyzed. On the largest level, of course, it is a rock album which is a collection of songs performed by the same group. When we probe a little deeper, however, its form begins to resemble a musical with two acts of five songs each, introduced by an overture, “The Garfield El.” The two-act form is supported by silent lead-ins added in post-production: there is a three-second lead-in after “The Garfield El” (before “The Wayward Granddaughter”), and a one-second lead-in before “Seven Silver Curses,” which I am proposing as the beginning of Act II. All other movements progress attacca.

Unlike a typical overture, in which musical themes are introduced, “The Garfield El” introduces disjunct narrative fragments, many of which, though not all, prove prefatory. For example, the phrase “I found a skeleton tooth in the junk drawer and I mean to open to the folding green and white door and take a late train to my lost love,” anticipates “Seven Silver Curses,” in which we hear of “the silver teeth of a man killed by a jealous wife!” “The Garfield El,” like a box of memory-laden trinkets, is opened for the first time in years to reveals its contents, preparing the listener for the stories we are about to hear.

Musically, “The Garfield El” consists of two parts: the memory theme, and, preceding it, oscillating chords—appropriately train-like—clanging on a tack piano. In an example of Friedberger’ prose which is at times reminiscent of Christopher Knowles’ text for Einstein on the Beach, Olga compares the strings of the piano to train tracks, suggesting that through music-as-transport-device, we can travel with Olga into her past:

“Spin, steel, tick tack on three little strings made three little rails made one note clunk. Three rails squeaking and sputtering down the West Side.”

The structure of the multifarious stories told throughout RMC suggests an ancient Greek mnemonic device called a memory palace in which texts would be memorized through a visualized structure: a palace. Portions of texts would be placed into specific “rooms” of the palace in a specific order. When the memorized material was to be recalled, the rooms of the palace would be revisited in the mind, in the order they had been visualized. The text stored inside that room could then easily be recalled.

While one can view RMC as an album with 11 songs, or as a musical in two acts, this is not the work’s most interesting structural feature. More interesting are the smaller units within each song, their relationships to each other—supported by motives—and the paths between them. It is in this that the structure of RMC begins to resemble the memory palace in which each room contains a story—or story fragment—from a different era.

While listening to RMC, one is constantly reminded that the past is everywhere. Guided by loose stylistic references, relying on instrumental hues, the listener is given the responsibility to make the leap from the 1920s to the 1960s in the blink of an eye. The only indication as to the order in which these eras occur appeared a press release issued by Rough Trade Records at the time of the album’s release from, which is something that most listeners of the album would never have access to and which itself charmingly confusing:

Tracks 3 and 4 take place in the 40’s; tracks 5 and 6 in the 20’s and 30’s; track 7 in the later 50’s; track 8 starts in the very early 40’s; track 9 goes back and forth; track 10 takes place in the early 60’s; the final track takes place in the early 90’s. Track 2 takes place a few years ago; track 1 took place when it was recorded. [all punctuation sic]

For a recent project, I had the opportunity to interview several individuals about their lives. Consistent throughout these interviews were two elements. First, the individuals to whom I spoke remembered the events, names, places, times, and often dates that they were describing in great detail (or at least thought they remembered). Second, their recollections tended to follow a non-chronological linearity, letting their memories connect naturally as they spoke. Jumping from era to era as needed, they each traveled through their own memory palace in telling their story. In fact, the way these individuals told their stories is precisely the same way that RMC unfolds. We hear Olga’s stories the way she would have remembered them—non-linearly and in fairly significant detail.

Supported by melodic, harmonic and narrative-based devices, RMC not only tells Olga’s stories, but also explores many aspects of memory. And it does so by utilizing and updating time-tested techniques found in Schubert, Mahler, Berio, and others. Not only does this enhance the narrative—proving Friedberger’s skill as a musical storyteller—but also makes RMC something more than just another rock record. Although Rehearsing My Choir has divided listeners—much like Lou Reed’s 1974 Metal Machine Music—it has similarly shown Friedberger to be an artist capable of things greater than what the rock world and its critics might want. What is reassuring is that, like Reed and others of his ilk, Friedberger has proven that he is not afraid to stretch the boundaries, and break them if necessary.

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David T. Little

David T. Little is an East Coast-based composer and performer. He is the founder and artistic director of the rock band/ensemble Newspeak—for which he sometimes plays drums—and is co-founder/co-director of Free Speech Zone Productions. Currently a Ph.D. candidate in composition at Princeton University, Little’s research deals with issues of musical activism in the 20th and 21st centuries.

A Language We Already Understand: Noah Creshevsky’s Hyperrealism

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Noah Creshevsky (Photo by Randy Nordschow)

We are living in a time of complex and immediate changes, in an ongoing quantum montage of life’s activities: compressed, flattened, and retransmitted in an electronic flipchart of images and sound. Indeed, it’s a hyperreal world, according to composer Noah Creshevsky—and he’s got it sound sampled, cataloged, deconstructed, and remade.

Creshevsky doesn’t carry the credentials of a hyperboundary gatecrasher. Trained in composition by Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Luciano Berio at Juilliard, he is the former director of the Center for Computer Music and professor emeritus at Brooklyn College. An advocate of fellow composers and a man of quiet demeanor, Creshevsky looks the part of retiring theorist nestling down to a future devoted to analyzing The Art of the Fugue.

But not so fast. Creshevsky counts Bach—or more likely Gesualdo and Josquin—among his old friends, but what he is creating with that friendship is a musical presence that pokes a keyhole into the future. Future keyholes too often result in a poke back in the mental eye. But Creshevsky’s two-decade development of hyperrealism jibes with both scientist and author Raymond Kurzweil’s vision of the future and the marketing mentality of the iPod.

The Premise of Hyperrealism

Creshevsky defines hyperrealism as “an electroacoustic musical language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment, handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or excessive.” It sounds like the 1960s mix-it-up performance art era all over again. It’s not, and the composer’s dry summary does the language a disservice. In our recent conversation, he explained that we’re already familiar with the language he uses: “Soundtracks and commercials are the best examples. That’s where hyperrealism is found routinely. If you take the best moments from good movies and you close your eyes, you’re hearing a collection of music, sound effects, subverbal utterances, verbal utterances—the whole soundtrack. It’s useful to substitute the word ‘soundtrack’ in certain sentences in looking at what kind of a world we live in.”

Here are some of hyperrealism’s salient features:

  • Just as the acoustic palette includes the sonic results of a body of instrumental techniques, the expanded hyperreal palette incorporates the sonic results of the rest of the world. That is, it expects that the real world will be sampled and distilled into a vocabulary of sounds. These sounds may be unique to a composition or become part of a common vocabulary.
  • The expanded palette is most successful when the source material is from a shared real world—whether that means “natural” sounds (such as voices, birds, or wind), naturalized sounds (tire squeals, instruments, or footfalls), or adopted sounds (horns, cellphones, or electronic toms). Obviously, original electronic sounds are not among the shared.
  • The expansion of the palette demands sounds and abilities presently outside the normal human expressive and muscular capabilities. Hence there must arise the superperformer. The superperformer lives in the technology of the composer (although if Kurzweil is to be believed, that will change for composer, performer, and listener).
  • The expanded palette and the superperformers must be realistic. The transformation of sounds beyond the recognizable disguises the shared nature of the sound and removes the commonality out of which hyperrealism draws its strength. The expanded palette is edited but not processed.

Hyperrealism, with its sense of heightened or exaggerated reality, drives hyperdrama, which Creshevsky says “is character-ized by a steady level of heightened sensations. Hyperdramas attempt to consolidate and compress intensified states. Hyperrealistically extended palettes and/or restricted palettes in conjunction with superhuman performance capabilities express a larger-than-life level of emotional intensity.”

The Music

The test of any musical language is whether it is capable of diverse, deep, and convincing expression while at the same time maintaining intellectual integrity and accessibility to a wide range of participants. In the case of hyperrealism, this test is ongoing. Even though listeners are used to the hyperrealism of television commercials, video games, and movie soundtracks, in the case of so-called “pure” music, there is a need to get used to the expanded palette in order to throw off the reaction to the music as funny or trivial—or seeing the hyperrealism beast as a one-trick pony being painted in different colors.
In Creshevsky’s case, the getting-used-to requirement is met in each piece, as this is not music that can be expressed within the boundaries of a three-minute tune. From the tightly coherent, five-minute Born Again to the twelve-minute hyperdrama Ossi di morte, the work traverses a detailed sonic landscape without repetitive exposition or hooks.

Listen to Born Again:

In fact, the maddening difficulty in deciphering Creshevsky’s architecture derives in part from the orchestration of samples. His music must be absorbed in chunks in order to become one with the hyperreal approach, without resorting to a linear analytical process that the music will defy.

What does that mean? First—and this is one of Creshevsky’s critical premises—is that there is no rush. Unlike concert-hall music of the pre-recording past, this music can be heard over and over again. Second, we have become used to the complex hyperreal but have not allowed it to its rightful place within (choose your adjective) serious, art, or nonpop music.

Indeed, Creshevsky says, “Those soundtracks are organized in much more complex ways than we organize a string quartet, because we can include a string quartet as part of it. There’s the music part of the soundtrack—and then there’s all the rest.” Composers have tended to exclude the rest as outside music, he contends. As for average listeners, “There’s very little classification going on. They don’t listen and say, ‘Is this tonal or atonal?’ because the music is often not tonal if it’s in a horror movie or a science fiction movie or mystery scene. They don’t ask if it’s a live orchestra or synthetic. They don’t differentiate if it’s really music or just part of a soundtrack—an overall sound experience. And they don’t distinguish between styles. They don’t care. We don’t care.”

In some ways, he has yet to expand the palette to include what might—as a parallel to total serialism—be called “total hyperrealization.” His music is spacious, but there is no use of spatial relations; works exist in timbral and pitched worlds. In fact, his frugality in terms of creating space is surprising. Likewise, his dynamics are for the most part conservative. And finally, the regularity of events is often in sharp contrast to the flexibility of the palette. One step at a time, perhaps.

Man & Superman

On his CD, Man & Superman (Centaur CRC 2126), Creshevsky makes significant early contributions to hyperrealism. And if this were the only Creshevsky CD you had at hand, you might stop there.

The opening work, Variations (1987), bring to mind the Diana Deutsch experiments in sound perception. What carries the continuity? Event position? Timbre? Melody? Are you sure? Can you follow the variations? (Can I? Not ab initio.) Yet within its cloud of samples, there exists a piece that, stripped of its color, might be a modernist etude for piano.

Within the same context of playability exists the following year’s Electric String Quartet, made with samples and voices. Again, questions arise. Why a string quartet? Why superperformers? The work is almost playable, but in here another element intrudes: implausible perfection.

Listen to “Talea”, the last track of Man & Superman:

Says Creshevsky of perfection, “We’re accustomed to that. We live in a hyperreal world. They’re already removed from the concert hall because nobody plays that well, with such power.” Do listeners accept a recording with mistakes? “No, they don’t. They won’t. They resent it. We have a right to expect [perfection],” and that expectation, he insists, shows the path to hyperrealism. “Once you’re writing for recording, you’re not limited.”

Who

Creshevsky’s next CD, Who (Centaur CRC 2476), already challenges his own basic tenets of hyperrealism. With a Stravinsky-like opening of brass samples, Fanfare (1998) moves to vocal samples and defies his own statements on repetition. But to understand Creshevsky’s progress, more detail on his background is needed. At Eastman, where he spent his early years, he was taught that material should be created in a way that it can be re-used in some other form. “This means that a thing in itself has no validity unless it is reproduced,” he says. “And a nice metaphor for that is human reproduction—that you’re not worth anything unless you reproduce yourself somehow.”

There’s a burr in Creshevsky’s voice. “We live in an overpopulated world. We live in an information-rich age. It’s a positive thing. There’s enough. And look, there’s a record! And this did make a difference in how people listened to music. So a high point in a piece doesn’t have to come a second time. If you want to hear it again, you simply put it on again.”

The classical idea of repeating the exposition is totally obviated in a world of recording. “It’s being stingy,” he says. “A penny saved is a penny earned, and it winds up being a big jar of pennies you don’t know what to do with. You’re not actually saving anything. ‘What economy of means!’ As if this is self-evidently a virtue! And as soon as you say, ‘What did you save? Why is it a virtue?’ you’re really hard-pressed to know how to answer. And the motives can become annoying—unless you do it to the point of mania like the Grosse Fuge. I think the Grosse Fuge is about human fallibility. It’s just barely playable.” (Here Creshevsky’s fascination with the barely-playable reveals itself.)

Sha (1996) makes a successful legato from different samples. He alludes to the Renaissance with Josquin-like pairing of voices and—before departing for other realms of verticality—harmonies reminiscent of Gesualdo. Twice (1993) is quasi-operatic and very linear, with a hint of how Charles Wuorinen’s orchestration reworked the songs of the “Glogauer Liederbuch.” And in the title tune, Who (1995), “romantic” materials arise before breaking out by sample division. Again, it’s hard to associate without thinking of Klangfarbenmelodie (even Creshevsky has used the term) but with the melody audible. It plays with associations—”brass” chords at same level as other chords give them more drama by position. Organ and timpani drive traditional expectations where the context does not jump off the recording. By the time the listener arrives at the composition et puis (1998) —music that is most successful because the composer does not get trapped in orchestral expectations—the method and energy of presenting events can suggest styles such as country dance and bluegrass.

Gone Now (1995) reiterates a Creshevsky compositional pleasure: the use of early music harmonies (and implications) in a non-functional guise. What is unique and significant is that Gone Now is reminiscent of what Eric Salzman hinted at but turned away from in The Nude Paper Sermon, but never exits the tonal door for Michel Chion, nor makes reference to Stockhausen’s Stimmung. The listener conversant with contemporary nonpop expects this, but it does not happen. Perhaps the use of sliding samples militates against typical tonal expectations. Voices, strings, pennywhistles, harps, horns, trumpets, noises, electronic tones—interrupted by points of stasis—curve around to the 13th-century Notre Dame motets with intervening dissonances (Dominator-Ecce-Domino or Pucelete-Je Languis-Domino) and points of purity. And then the listener laughs—Scott Johnson pioneered this with John Somebody, but that is not Creshevsky’s path, either. The samples follow the composition and vice versa. They are integral.

And then, with Breathless (1997), Creshevsky hits another wall. Hyperrealism fails when the speed of recorded voices is manipulated, as we are so familiar with them—they are too low or too high, like a tape recorder that’s been too slowed down or too sped up—and the timbre collapses. Creshevsky understands that this is a delicate border—”I transpose them within what I regard to be a realistic range, so that they don’t turn into chipmunks”—but his perception and this listener’s, at least in this instance, are quite different.

Hyperrealism

But by the time of the CD Hyperrealism (Mutable Music 17516-2), Creshevsky has solved those issues by discarding the arbitrarily dissociative and perfecting his vocal sampling. Ossi di morte (1997), an exhausting vocal hyperdrama (considered to be one of music’s milestone compositions by composer/scientist Piero Scaruffi), reconstitutes a vocal ensemble from fragments, using the highly exaggerated mannerist style, and melds it with orchestra (also reconstituted from fragmented samples) to build an operatic edifice, with Rossini-esque bel canto, vocal coughs, and even a flash of verismo as it careens rhythmically toward a devastating conclusion of the voices one might imagine arising from the throats in the condemned in Bosch’s Garden (where, perhaps, they had just been feasting on a last meal that ended with ossi di morte).

In the more formal Jacob’s Ladder (1999), an organ continuo pulls the outlier elements together in a manner that will recur in later works, which also includes vocal syllables, rising/falling scales, and strings. Freed of modernist confrontational proclivities, it develops clearly and inevitably, with directions down and up in contrast.

Each of the remaining compositions—Canto di Malavita (2002), Vol-au-vent (2002), Hoodlum Priest (2002), Novella (2000), and Born Again (2003)—reveals a security with hyperrealism. It is no longer a manifesto but the language Creshevsky sought.

Listen to Canto di Malavita:

Jubilate (2001) exists in several versions: the one on “Hyperrealism” with the real and hyperreal voice of Tom Buckner, one with Beth Griffith, and a unique live performance with both Griffith and a cello part derived by Craig Hultgren. With mewls and gutturals and slides and purrs and gasps and gulps, it is a Creshevsky piece that cannot be heard first among his work, for its Flemish/Italian hybrid harmonies are lost in the sound effects—effects which reveal rather than intrude. Though the composition is good-natured and joyful, its elegant shape invites listeners in ways that the composer’s other works challenge them.

Among Creshevsky’s unreleased recordings are Cantiga (a 2003 revision of a 1992 work), reminiscent of and contemporaneous with Nic Collins’s ambitious but less crafted Broken Light for modified CD player and string quartet; the almost Wagnerian I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now (2004), a hyperdrama with melodic lines, harmony, and samples as leitmotiven that are torn away as if Creshevsky were saying, “I am done with these sounds”; and Psalmus XXIII (2004), in which pure vocal sounds combine with gasps and cries in modal monody evolving into tonal counterpoint.

The Compositional Process

Creshevsky’s working methods are, by his own description, straightforward. “I always start the same way—I start by sampling,” he says. “Sampling is like photographing. You hit the shutter and you take a little moment of something. I take very tiny moments.”

He classifies the samples. In Hoodlum Priest, for example, he classified the samples by sung notes, gurglings, languages, and other criteria, making key maps along the way. The samples are transposed over a realistic range. “I organize the material. I make a palette.”

Creshevsky re-emphasizes the qualifications for his palette. “Hyperrealism involves collective reality. That’s a changing thing. The cellphone—when I first heard it in the dentist’s office, under nitrous oxide at that—I thought, ‘What the hell is that?’ That was years ago, when people were first using these phones that didn’t have bells in them. Now they’re a synthetic sound that’s become part of our collective natural environment.”

But Creshevsky never simply quotes material; rather he collects samples of fragments from which he builds short sections, similar to the way a screenwriter might use blocks of images to construct a storyboard. Once these sections have passed through the computer assembly and editing process, he writes about each section on an index card with tempo, sonic elements, and a description. He maintains one card for each section, discards those which are not satisfactory, and puts them in order. He explains, “You’ve got 12 cards in your hand, and you say, ‘Well, look at this one. This one couldn’t come before that one. You’d need to hear this one before you hear that one. This would be a good ending.’ The cards begin to take an order, and ultimately you wind up with a piece.”

Listen to Twice:

Problems and Solutions

With Creshevsky, it’s hard to know whether he’s a chicken or his samples are eggs. The results seem fluid, with the chicken-egg creative process entirely covert, especially his stylistic choices: “It’s postmodernism, isn’t it, where you’ve got these materials. Why not use them? I feel free to write in whatever style I want. The new Psalm is in C major.”

Confronted with the timbral richness and composition-by-composition distinctiveness, Creshevsky finds his defense in the hyperrealism he finds in other media. “When we go to a movie or you turn on the television, you get a different timbre every time. The sonic material is different every time. Every movie is different from the last movie. It is a different movie. But we’re expected to go hear more piano music or yet another string quartet!”

In a recent chamber ensemble showcase, two string quartets played the same movement of a Debussy composition. “It’s that kind of a kill-each-other experience,” says Creshevsky.

The kill-each-other experience of the concert hall has led Creshevsky to another conclusion: that the days of live concerts are not only numbered, but it is already over. The composer lives in New York, surrounded by a vast palette of natural and mechanical sounds, but in an environment where audiences are bored. Concerts of nonpop frequently turn out 40 people. He says, “My feeling is that next year there will be 30— not there will be 50. There’s no sign of the 40 turning into more, and there’s every sign of them turning into fewer.”

name

“We are oversaturated with music.”

That decline brings him to another inevitable conclusion: “Most music is better heard at home. I bought tickets to hear a new Berio piece, and when I left I thought, ‘What did I hear?’ It was just too much to hear.”

Composers need to rethink the basic approach to how they make music. Instead of writing on commission for an imminent performance opportunity from an ensemble, composers’ premier preoccupation should be writing for recording. The idea, he says, is to compose “for the electronic dissemination of music rather than the live presentation of music.”

Electronic dissemination permits and even encourages the open palette of hyperrealism by revealing an unspoken quality of acoustic music: that we are, in fact, done with it. “We are oversaturated with music. We hear more music, but music’s dying, they tell us. It’s the critics who are dying. They have these terrible jobs. These poor critics hate music because they have to listen to the same thing over and over! They have created this self-fulfilling prophesy that art music is dying. But at the same time, you can’t deny that to a certain degree, it is dying. I don’t think music is really dying. I think we hear more of it than ever because it’s everywhere. I think the oversaturation is not to music itself, but to timbre. We’re tired of it. With many musicians (no matter what they say), there’s the deeply held belief that real music is made out of twelve notes, played on a certain limited number of instruments. That’s the oversaturation.”

Putting computers in the concert hall is no answer. “I think it’s barking up the wrong tree,” Creshevsky says. “You sit there with the other 29 people and you watch the guy with the laptop computer. Maybe your seat is in the center, but the balance is not as good as what you’re going to hear at home. Why am I here? I support the work of my friends, but why is it better? The other part of me says that it’s a thrilling experience—this person can play the Chopin Etudes like that live? It’s something fabulous—or they’re waiting for catastrophe onstage.”

However, economic and social considerations mean that having a soprano onstage requires that ongoing work be apportioned to her. “You can’t have her there, sit to the end, and then sing a couple of notes. It’s socially and dramatically unacceptable to have somebody sit around for a whole concert. There’s the visual and the dramatic and the economic!” But in recordings, the situation is irrelevant. Economy of means and the economics of employment are obviated.

He also disputes the virtue of economy of means in a musical context, where thematic elements are conserved and apportioned with care. “This is not saving a tree or the environment. You’re saving a note.” He suggests that the alternative already exists because we live in a hyperreal world. Listeners who scan their radios for something to hear make listening decisions almost instantaneously.

Creshevsky identifies two reasons—reasons that John Oswald understood intimately with his own gloss on hyperrealism, plunderphonics: “One is that you don’t like the timbre, and two is that based on that flash, you know what you’re in for. I’m dwelling on the flash.”

That flash has helped Creshevsky decide to use what’s useful and not to dwell on the Western orchestra. “I started to sample from cellos a couple of weeks ago for a new piece, and I said, ‘I’ve done this!’ And more to the point, ‘I can’t stand to do it anymore.’ This idea of palette expansion means I have to expand my own mind as well as that of the listeners. It wasn’t exciting me, and it ought to excite me.”

Is the palette expansion the future or a transition? In The Age of Spiritual Machines, Raymond Kurzweil posits a future in which all knowledge will be accessible and humans will grow past their sensory and intellectual limitations—perhaps within two generations. He sees advances in fuzzy logic and its successors that will let creative imagination go hand-in-hand (or neuron-in-neuron) with technological contraptions. However, the appearance of the iPod might give one pause with respect to Kurzweil’s dream, for it is a consumption device, where the hardware, the software, and the firmware—the music we will imagine and extend—is in a state of perpetual intellectual lockdown. It is a feeding tube of sound.

Faced with these possibilities, we reach to Creshevsky’s own writings. In a recent article, Creshevsky concludes:

Every act of composition might reasonably begin with a fresh and open-ended consideration of every available sound source. If someone has a commission for a string quartet from a reliable ensemble that will practice, and if this composer has a social or personal interest in giving and attending concerts, then he or she should write a string quartet. But if your quartet is intended to be heard on a compact disc or over the Internet, indulge yourself. Be extravagant. A soprano can provide one solitary high note, if you like, perhaps just there, at the end.


The Quotable Creshevsky

I love Chopin. I won’t put it on again. I’ll put on something else, because life is only as long as it is. I’ve already heard the Chopin. It’s like Citizen Kane. It’s a wonderful movie, but I really don’t want to see it again.

*

As a child I thought, “I am willing to suffer like Beethoven in order to produce wonderful music.” And then as I got older, I thought, “No I’m not!” The pleasures became greater and I said, “Hey, I’d like some of that! Give me some of that!”

*

Freedom is priceless. And potentially we have this freedom if you can control your vanity and greed and all the rest of these deadly sins. Those kinds of sins do play into music—greed, for example. “My piece is not long enough. Let me get more out of it.” Then there’s that, “Oh, that’s very, very good. I’m going to save that for another time.” That’s stinginess. A kind of vanity and stinginess.

*

What is a natural violin to a kid who has never heard a violin? I don’t know. The only thing that everybody universally recognizes as being natural is voice.

*

People do not classify. Only professionals classify. I am claiming it. I stake my claim to it. I gave the right definition of it. I made hyperrealism. This is what I am. I am a hyperrealist. I write hyperreal music.

###

Dennis Báthory-Kitsz has made work for sound sculptures, soloists, electronics, stage shows, orchestras, dancers, interactive multimedia, installations, and performance events. Dennis co-hosted Kalvos & Damian’s New Music Bazaar, co-founded the NonPop International Network, and has been project director for new music festivals since 1973.

New Music Economics (Part 3): Keeping Up With the Rent

[Ed. Note: This article is the third in a three-part series exploring economic issues faced by the new music community.]

Orchestras are frequently criticized for not playing enough new music. But less attention is focused on the cost of such “adventurous programming,” both from the viewpoint of orchestras renting new scores and the publishers and composers producing them.

Performing new music can be an expensive gamble for orchestras. While major orchestras are more likely able to afford to take risks (and therefore have less of an excuse for offering routine, predictable fare), ensembles lower on the financial totem pole must budget carefully in order to offer challenging repertoire.

The music of self-published composers offers the perk of being both less expensive and negotiable, according to Andrew Berryhill, executive director of the Duluth-Superior Orchestra, which performs in Northern Minnesota and the Twin Ports region: “I am thrilled to work with self-published composers, as they are significantly cheaper. They are scrambling to get their pieces performed.”

Cathy Thorpe, manager of Boosey & Hawkes’ rental library, says programming self-published composers is invariably more appealing for orchestras with small budgets. “There is a natural order to that which is appropriate. These orchestras have to search out music they can afford and composers need to find orchestras willing to play their works.”

But self-published composer Jennifer Higdon doesn’t agree with such hierarchies: “I want my music to be affordable for everyone and to get it out in the world. Orchestras are struggling. I decided early on that renting music is too expensive. We negotiate and will adjust the fees.”

She adds that when she was conducting the University of Pennsylvania’s orchestra during the 1994-95 season she “wanted to do new music, but we couldn’t afford it, which is what pushed me towards self-publishing.”

Chris Theofanidis, another self-published composer, says many artistic administrators have commented that they can’t believe how low his rates are. “I charge about half the price of a publisher, but I still earn more as I keep all the profits. Rainbow Body [his orchestral work] would be about $700 to rent from a publisher, but I can offer it for $300 to $400 dollars, depending on the number of performances.”

But while the lower cost of renting music by some self-published composers might appeal to smaller orchestras, certainly part of the reason many published composers are performed so frequently is thanks to the zealous efforts of their publishers.

Daniel Dorff, a composer and vice president of publishing at the Theodore Presser Company, says, “I would rather keep half the money generated from a lot more performances than all the money generated from fewer performances. No one is doing this for big bucks: we are doing this to have our music heard. The Internet certainly makes a big difference. But disseminating the music is not simply a matter of technology, but committing energy to it.”

Composer Gabriela Lena Frank, a relatively new addition to Schirmer’s roster, says the company “gets my scores to conductors and people I would never have access to. They brainstorm on my behalf and I’m benefiting from their many decades of relationships.”

She adds that the economic benefits for her have been “tremendous.” While self-published composers say they make more than they ever would with publishers, Lena Frank asserts that she makes “more even with Schirmer taking some of my royalties than I would keeping 100 percent if I was self published.”

Each publisher has a different agreement with its composers regarding sales, but typical rental rates are split 50/50 between composer and publisher, explains Marc D. Ostrow, Boosey’s general manager. Composer Marc Adamo, on Schirmer’s roster, adds that publishers “keep all the parts organized – and suddenly a 50/50 split looks pretty good, or the administration will eat up your life and you will never write another piece!”

The time and money spent promoting their composers is just one overhead facing publishers (and hence just one reason their scores are more expensive to rent). Office space, staff salaries and benefits are a major expense. As Daniel Dorff says, “We need to be profitable while working on this music that we’re crazy about!”

Publishing houses are rare enterprises within the classical music industry: they aren’t non-profits. Self-published composer Daniel Felsenfeld calls them “for-profit businesses with a nonprofit mission,” while Adamo notes, “I don’t know anyone who goes into this in a hard nosed corporate way. Publishing is a bunch of idealists.”

Also, only a very lucky few composers are signed by a publisher – and just as some musicians prefer to start their own labels rather than wait around for the rare chance to be signed to a major label, many composers self publish because it’s their only option.

Copyist Bill Holab is one of the people making it easier for the self-published to thrive. He provides services such as engraving and typesetting and negotiates rental fees and copyright on behalf of composers, including Osvaldo Golijov and Michael Torke.

“Many composers are self published because financially it can work out better for them,” he says. “I do negotiate rental fees, with the approval of the composer. We are flexible and you have to be – as the goal is to get the music played. When Barber was starting out the publishers did everything for him, but there were fewer composers then. In the current landscape composers really need to look out for their own interests.”

He also points out that the lines between published and self-published composers are “blurry” these days: some of the music of Philip Glass, the Godfather of self publishing, is distributed by Schirmer and Chester Music, for example.

Another essential spoke in the self-publishing wheel is the New Jersey-based Subito Music Publishing, which, explains co-founder Stephen Culbertson, is like two separate companies: a publishing wing that represents composers, including renting, promotion and copyright; and a separate division that provides printing services for any composer on a price-list basis.

Theofanidis says it costs about $200 to print a full set of orchestra parts through Subito; on his own it would cost around $150. Higdon prints and binds everything herself on her own machines; neither says part production is a drain financially.

When it comes to publishing music for sale rather than just rental, the costs are significant. “If we want to publish a score of a rental work, it’s a major investment,” says Todd Vunderink, Vice President of Peermusic and Director of Peermusic Classical. “You want it to meet standards, as opposed to work on rental scores done by good copyists. There could be a lot of things you might want to change to match your own house rules of engraving. We will end up spending many hours working on what the engraver has done, which is not compensated in any way.”

Vunderink explains that (allowing for a range of copyists’ fees) a 15-minute orchestral work could cost between $5,500 and $10,500. This includes the publisher’s time supervising the work through to getting the music on the stands. In addition, he estimates another $3,000 to $4,000 for reformatting the performance score onto 9 x 12 inch paper, which is the industry standard.

Engraving for a symphonic score might cost $26-30 a page, says Lauren Keiser, president and CEO of Carl Fischer publishing. Then there are additional overheads like the cost of designing covers. His company will be publishing Ricky Ian Gordon’s opera The Grapes of Wrath; the vocal score is about 400 pages. It will probably cost between $15,000-$20,000 to print and engrave it, says Keiser.

The overheads for rentals are also more than simply sending out the physical materials, as staff need to organize perusal scores and go through scores once they’ve been returned and sometimes clean them up. Boosey’s Cathy Thorpe explains that she deals with 6,000-7,000 smaller, amateur, regional level and community orchestras “with less sophisticated administration in place” than top tier ensembles. “They think we are amazon.com and we spend a lot of time solving crises and dealing with their poor planning. We take that responsibility off the composers’ shoulders.”

Both self-published composers and publishers allow rental scores to be kept for an average of 8-12 weeks and impose both rush fees (if scores are needed within less than ten days) and late fees. As for those rental fees, antitrust laws prevent publishers from disclosing their rates, but all companies have flexible pricing tiers that take into account factors like the size and budget of the organization, and whether it’s an amateur or college ensemble.

While the music of self-published composers is often cheaper to rent, it doesn’t mean that smaller orchestras avoid published composers, of course. The Duluth-Superior Orchestra, which has a $1.4 million budget and offers seven classical concerts a year, has programmed Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 next season, even though it will be a strain on the budget. A John Adams piece, says executive director Andrew Berryhill (a fan of the composer, whose The Chairman Dances was performed in January) costs about $600 to $700 a performance compared to around $100 to $200 for some self-published composers.

Programming new music is a tricky balancing act, agrees Cathy Cahill, CEO of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. She adds that during her six-year tenure, the orchestra has never opted not to perform a new work because rental costs were too high. “But if we decide to do a John Adams piece, we have to spend more on that concert and less on the next one.”

For major orchestras, the few hundred dollars difference between a self-published and a published composer is negligible. Berryhill, who was assistant director of programming for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1996-2002, says that cost (unsurprisingly) was less of an issue there. “When Daniel Barenboim says this is what he wants performed you don’t argue over rental costs!”

Self-published composers do often negotiate prices or even give their scores away for free, which isn’t particularly surprising, as artists in many industries are often willing to sacrifice payment for valuable exposure. Higdon has given her music away as a goodwill gesture and doesn’t regret it. It’s one way, she says, of advertising her music and breaking into market where her music isn’t known, in this case Russia.

Dorff doesn’t blame self-published composers for doing so, and says that if he were on his own he might well do the same. But if someone calls Presser about one of his scores he knows the company won’t negotiate. For the most part, publishing companies don’t budge much on prices, although Peggy Monastra, the interim general manager of Schirmer, says that the company has made deals with orchestras for fundraisers, for example. “It’s a case by case scenario and we regularly donate to specific institutions.”

The internet has affected the music publishing industry as much as any other. Piracy is a lot easier and publishers, who used to be hurt by photocopying, now also lose out to people sending illegal PDFs around. Copyright administration is thus another important fact of publishing, adds Monastra. “It’s one advantage to having a publisher, and I think composers are more conscious of copyright than they were a few years ago, since everything has become digital.”

It will be interesting to note whether, and how fast, more self-published composers make it into the American Symphony Orchestra League’s list of the top 10 most frequently performed living U.S. composers. According to the League’s data, nine of the ten most frequently performed living composers in the U.S. during the 2005-06 season were published, with Jennifer Higdon the only independent in the list. But two of the top four most frequently performed new works that season were by self-published composers: Higdon’s Blue Cathedral and Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round; those two works also held the top two spots in 2004-05, with Chris Theofanidis’s Rainbow Body in the No. 7 spot that year.

But what will happen to the works of Golijov, Theofanidis, and Higdon sixty years from now? Lauren Keiser says it’s helpful for young composers to learn about self publishing, but wonders “who will service their legacy” when they or those they work with die. Long-term viability can also be a problem for published composers who have works with various companies, he adds. “Their catalogue is divided, and so when they pass on their work is divided, instead of with one house firmly behind their talent.”

The long-term viability of both self-published composers and publishers might be questioned from both sides of the fence. But in any event, the extraordinary advances in technology that have facilitated the trend towards self-publishing can only be a good thing. The Duluth-Superior Orchestra founded a competition for college-age composers six years ago offering prize money for publishing and copyist services. Now it’s not even an issue anymore, says Berryhill. “The fact that composers can produce legible and clean music themselves has lessened our expense for new music dramatically. And any barrier removed to performing new music is a good one!”

***

VivienSchweitzer
Vivien Schweitzer
Photo by Eluned Roberts-Schweitzer

 

Vivien Schweitzer is a New York City-based music critic, arts reporter, and pianist. She covers music and dance news as Associate Editor of PlaybillArts.com, and has contributed classical and world music criticism, profiles, and features to The New York Times, The Economist, the Financial Times, BBC News, Newsday, Time Out, and The Gramophone.

New Music Economics (Part 2): The Malady Lingers On

[Ed. Note: This article is the second in a three-part series exploring economic issues faced by the new music community. The final installment will appear next Wednesday.]

In 1918, Igor Stravinsky composed The Soldier’s Tale, a new-music/theatre piece designed for a performance tour; it was initially unsuccessful and lost money. In 1976, Philip Glass premiered his own theatrical production, Einstein on the Beach; it was quite successful, playing to capacity audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Nevertheless, it also lost money. (Glass wrote that during Einstein‘s brief, sold-out run at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, the deficit was $10,000 a night.)

What happened? Stravinsky had the misfortune of seeing his planned tour cancelled due to a worldwide influenza outbreak. Glass fell victim to a subtler ailment: Baumol’s cost-disease.

Baumol’s cost-disease (sometimes more prosaically referred to as the Baumol-Bowen effect) is well-known among economists and arts administrators, but not many working musicians have even heard of it. First described by economists William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in 1966, the main symptom of the disease is this: labor costs in the performing arts will always inexorably rise, and at a faster rate than other industries. That’s because in most industries, technological advances allow for increased productivity without an increase in labor. This doesn’t happen in the performing arts, though. As Baumol and Bowen famously describe it in their book Performing Arts: the Economic Dilemma:

Whereas the amount of labor necessary to produce a typical manufactured product has constantly declined since the beginning of the industrial revolution, it requires about as many minutes for Richard II to tell his “sad stories of the death of kings” as it did on the stage of the Globe Theatre. Human ingenuity has devised ways to reduce the labor necessary to produce an automobile, but no one has yet succeeded in decreasing the human effort expended at a live performance of a 45-minute Schubert quartet much below a total of three man-hours.

From the beginning, Baumol’s cost-disease has, rightly or wrongly, been one of the main rationales behind government subsidization of the arts—without outside funding to make up the deficits, goes the argument, labor costs in the arts will eventually increase to the point that artistic activity becomes economically unsustainable. As such, other economists (who get suspicious whenever the government funds anything) have, from the beginning, tried to—well, not so much disprove it, as it’s logically sound on the surface, but find loopholes or other mitigating factors that Baumol and Bowen may have missed.

A typical objection is to point out that many popular music groups still make money—a lot of money—from live performance, and that if classical or new music groups are running deficits, it’s their own fault. But Baumol and Bowen don’t say that live performance can’t ever be profitable—if you can convince people to fork over a high enough admission fee to pay the performers, good for you. As time goes by, though, that admission fee is going to have to get more and more expensive compared to the economy as a whole. People may still pay to see the Rolling Stones, but, adjusted for inflation, they’re paying a lot more for the privilege than they did thirty years ago. Eventually, that expense becomes more than the market will bear, and you either go bankrupt or need additional funding to make up the loss. (Just recently, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra dramatically boosted subscriptions for next season by lowering ticket prices across the board, but the program will require an annual subsidization of $1 million to continue.)

Baumol himself later suggested one of the most ingenious escapes: if you extend the cost-disease to its logical conclusion, it actually benefits the arts. The imaginary scenario works like this: pretend that all non-artistic industrial activity becomes so efficient that all yearly worldwide demand for non-artistic products can be met with a week’s worth of labor, and at the cost of one dollar. That leaves 51 weeks of labor and the entire wealth of the world, minus a dollar, to be expended on artistic pursuits. There’s something to this; when the economy as a whole is humming, the arts indirectly benefit (look at the boom/bubble of the 1990s), and, historically, the arts have thrived best in large cities, which are also centers of financial and industrial activity. But the imaginary scenario is an unattainable ideal; whether an actual economy could ever reach the point where performers are fully inoculated against the cost-disease remains a mystery.

Laissez-faire types might insist that if labor costs are too high, it just means that performers are being paid too much, and either salaries should be lowered or ticket prices should be raised. Lowering pay, though, is pretty much a death knell for professional performance: musicians, actors, and dancers are skilled workers, and in order to make sure enough people stay in those careers, wages have to at least somewhat keep up with what skilled workers earn in other industries. (The fact that they hardly do is testament to the dedication of artists.) More importantly, performers have to be able to earn a living wage, and the cost of living is not going to be determined by how much artists take home, as they’re in a significant minority; rather, the spending power of workers in more common industries will set the pace.

As for ticket prices, there’s another complaint about Baumol and Bowen figuring into that. The most common riposte to the cost-disease has been to point to the rise of recordings and mass media—those technological advances, it’s argued, have greatly increased productivity: one performance can now reach thousands more people than it did in the past, at no extra labor cost. But it’s a mistake to so completely conflate the recording and performing arts industries; record companies don’t perform, they buy a performance, which they then reproduce and sell for a profit. There’s a one-time payment to the performers, and the possibility of royalties, but the ability to reproduce performances ad infinitum correspondingly increases market competition. (You’re up against not just your local contemporaries, but everyone in world history who’s ever gone into a studio.)

What’s more, since the mass reproduction of recordings makes them relatively cheap (even free, in the case of advertising-supported media), their very availability drives down the price that audiences will pay for live concerts. And, oddly enough, as technological advances make recording cheaper, the cost-disease becomes more of a factor, not less. It’s the difference between capital costs and labor costs: when the initial investment in recording equipment and space was prohibitively expensive, the difference between paying a four-piece rock group and an 80-piece orchestra was comparatively unimportant, but as the up-front payout goes down, the players’ paychecks make up a higher percentage of the financial risk, and the cost-disease once again rears its ugly head. (This, incidentally, is why giving recordings away outright as a means of promoting live performance doesn’t solve the conundrum; while it might be viable in a given situation, in the long run, it just puts your financial health back into the fickle hands of Baumol and Bowen.)

On the other hand, record companies are far less susceptible to the cost-disease. Musicians rarely make money off of recordings, because the record companies’ overhead and profit take precedence; some performers have tried to keep more revenue for themselves by starting their own recording ventures. Success isn’t automatic—the risks remain high, even as the costs of creating and manufacturing recordings have declined. Internet technology, however, has lowered the barrier-to-entry even further, cutting the distribution costs involved in selling recordings to almost nothing. The demise of Tower Records is lamentable, but the economic forces that shut their doors are creating opportunity: for a historically miniscule start-up investment, performers can control content, manufacturing, and distribution in a vertically-integrated way. In this model, live performance becomes not just an end in itself, but also a marketing tool that funnels money into your record business.

And composers may have a built-in immunity—in economic terms, the creation of new repertoire is, at least technically, an increase in productivity, so somewhere, there’s a cost benefit in new music. It’s perhaps more of a factor in popular music, though even there, the premium that audiences are willing to pay for novelty doesn’t seem to be keeping up with the cost of living—rock and roll may be coming down with a cost-disease of its own. But, like bloodletting in the Middle Ages, the cutting-edge might at least temporarily stave off the plague.

In the end, such stratagems can only slow the spread of the cost-disease, not cure it. A pessimist would say that market forces eventually will do away with live concerts, making the excitement and power of the shared experience a thing of the past. But I’m an optimist: the fact that live performance persists in the face of market pressures speaks to a basic human need that even Adam Smith’s invisible hand can’t slap away. Performers may have to learn to live with the cost-disease, but it’ll take more than that to kill us.

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Matthew Guerrieri

Composer, conductor, pianist, and writer Matthew Guerrieri is far less productive than he seems.