The Secret of 20th-Century American Music
I’d like to begin by reading not from my notes but from my money: “E Pluribus Unum.” “Out of many, one.” And 100 of these do equal one dollar. But I think the conspiracy-minded among you will back me up when I say that this credo is actually a subtle-but-explicit reference to the harmonic series. When you go to the piano and strike middle C, you aren’t playing a tone, you’re playing a chord: Every single tone is actually a group of partial tones. The first and lowest and loudest of these partials, the fundamental (or prime), is the pitch we identify as that tone. The other partials, also known as overtones, sound simultaneously with the fundamental in higher octaves, their numbers growing successively within each octave according to a strict pattern of ratios called the harmonic series (also known as the overtone series). This subject will come up ‘at intervals’ during this discussion, so I’ve included a simple breakdown of the harmonic series in your notes. Right now, I just want to suggest that you consider this phenomenon of the simultaneous resonance of a group of pitches being perceived as a single tone. The composers I’ll be playing today all follow the example of nature; they introduce multiplicity so we can hear something singular. The secret of 20th-century American music is its hundred-year tradition of working directly with sound, in slabs or webs or clouds. The musical examples we’ll hear are all very different, but they spring from a common sensibility that goes beyond the discreet pitches of vertical harmony, and straight to sound.
This kind of music is virtually non-existent in the European concert tradition of the modernist era; only after the Second World War does it begin to form a coherent expression. But in the States it existed since the start of the century: By the 1900s, it’s seething throughout the music that Charles Ives was writing in New York. He worked on a lot of pieces during those years, most of which he wouldn’t complete until the mid teens. But there are already bursts of it in some of his remarkable Studies for piano around 1907, 1908, and in his First Piano Sonata, completed in 1910. By 1912 he’d finished an orchestral score called the Robert Browning Overture. Listen to how this piece concludes.
You see what I mean? The man is hearing things in a very different way. Now, it’s spectacular that someone in 1912 can hear like that. But if you’re hearing like that in 1912, you’re going to be very lonely. Ives created all his major works in almost complete isolation. He was not a professional musician – although his father was. George Ives didn’t compose, but he was a multi-faceted performer, a real original with an experimental streak. But by 1890, George was no longer able to support his wife and children, and so he quit music and joined the family’s banking business. Four years later, at age 49, he dropped dead of a stroke, leaving his 19-year-old son devastated. In 1898 Charles Ives joined the insurance business, convinced he could never support himself, much less a family, with the kind of music he wanted to make. He wound up amassing a considerable fortune, and during the years he made his company thrive, from the late 1900s to the end of World War One, he was going home on evenings and weekends and composing. He labored for years, writing music he would never hear performed. The visionary densities of the Robert Browning Overture recurred again and again, most notably in his landmark orchestral scores Three Places In New England and Symphony No. 4. His Piano Sonata No. 2, the “Concord” Sonata, at one point calls for the pianist to use a board 14-3/4 inches long to depress a full length of keys, black or white. He brought his innovations and humor and sense of awe and grandeur and nostalgia to a range of genres, especially vocal – choral writing and art song – and chamber: works for violin and piano, for string quartet. Ives burned hard during these years, and by the end of the teens he was burned out: In 1918, at age 43, he suffered a severe heart attack. He’d live – in rather precarious health – to the age of 79, but his composing ended.
However, we have evidence that by 1913, somebody else was hearing the same way. There’s a score by a 16-year-old composer from California, a piano piece called Adventures In Harmony, in which blocks of keys are played with the entire hand or with the arm. The composer is Henry Cowell, and he had the good fortune the following year to begin studying with a young composer named Charles Seeger (whose son is the singer Pete Seeger). Seeger’s own music was remarkably dissonant for its time; he had a lively mind and encouraged Cowell to follow his own interests in these new directions. In 1916 Cowell went to New York and saw a recital by Leo Ornstein. Ornstein was a Russian piano prodigy who’d emigrated to the States as a boy. He became something of a celebrity in the mid-teens, performing his own startling pieces where he played themes in clumps of two or three keys. Cowell almost studied with Ornstein, but it never happened. Instead, he wrote a piece called Dynamic Motion. This is Henry Cowell playing – some 45 years later.
As Cowell moved further in this direction, Seeger encouraged him to document and systematize what he’d learned. By the end of the teens, Cowell had written a remarkable book called New Musical Resources. In it, he coins the term tone-clusters; he explains how they can be created, nuanced, and manipulated, and he offers them as the fruits of a harmony based on seconds rather than thirds (seconds being the approach of Seeger and Ornstein). In arguing for the use of major and minor seconds, Cowell notes that they’re “derived from the upper reaches of the overtone series and have, therefore, a sound foundation.” In fact, the whole book is about the harmonic series, “which, although it forms a mathematical, acoustical, and historical gauge, is not merely a matter of arithmetic, theory, and pedantry, but is itself a living essence from which musicality springs.”
Cowell’s book details new harmonies and fiendishly complex rhythms based on the overtone series, but in his music of the 1920s, what gets his motor running isn’t so much the harmonic series as it is the experience of density and resonance. That’s the heart of his piano music, in his cluster writing; his use of sympathetic resonance, silently depressing certain keys; his innovative compositions to be played on the strings inside the piano. Cowell attracted a great deal of attention with what some were calling his “elbow music,” and during the 1920s he lectured and concertized throughout the United States and Europe (even the Soviet Union). He ended the decade with his Piano Concerto, in which his tone-cluster techniques get a real work-out – and not just on the piano: “There is less possible variety on the piano than with the orchestra, where clusters are at their best […] In orchestral use we have all the possible variety of large clusters which are neither all chromatic nor all diatonic, but constructed from a consistent building up of diversified smaller cluster triads.”
This way of hearing took a while to sink in. Ornstein retired from concertizing in 1920, after a grueling decade of performances, and his composition became increasingly conservative. George Antheil left America and settled in Paris, where he provided popular scandales in the mid-1920s, playing his buzz-saw piano works – the Airplane Sonata, Sonata Sauvage – and staging the provocative Ballet mécanique, with its player piano, live pianists, and expanded percussion battery. Both the composer and his music were received coldly here in the States in 1927, and Antheil returned to France. For Cowell, that was all mere “sensationalisms.” When it came to the kind of music he wanted to hear, the kindred spirits were, ironically, Frenchmen who’d settled in America.
One was Dane Rudhyar. He arrived in New York in November of 1916, age 21, and was already composing an unusual polytonal music inspired by Stravinsky and Scriabin. In 1922 he wrote an article for The Musical Quarterly, which just laid it on the line: “What has been revolutionized as yet is only the construction, the form, the sequence of music. But the musical unit, the note, stands undefiled, untouched to a very great extent. Composers like Ornstein and H. Cowell have by the use of clusters of sounds imperiled its existence, and […] have paved the way to the future revolutions.” Rudhyar points out that every tone is really a compound-tone of partials in the harmonic series, and he calls for electronic instruments that will permit “a more exact synthesis of tones, wherein primes and partials will both be considered and strictly defined.” By the mid 1920s, Rudhyar was composing piano works with rhythms derived from speech, and a textural approach in which the piano is seen as a “resonant mass of wood and metal, a sort of condensed orchestra of gongs, bells, and the like.” The problem is, his music sounds like Scriabin with a lot of pedal. Rudhyar is an important theorist – we’ll come back to him later – but this new way of hearing is not articulated that strongly in his music.
Cowell’s other French-born ally was Edgard Varèse; but Varèse, unlike Rudhyar, was tormented by the distance between his ideas and his sound. Varèse came to New York at the end of 1915, and in the ‘20s wrote a half-dozen compositions – two for orchestra, four for mixed chamber ensembles – which established him as one of the major creative figures of his day. His dissonant, crystalline music revolved around winds, brass, and percussion, and brought a new physicality and immediacy to the concert hall, a heightened sense of sound. But for Varèse, these scores were only a shadow of the music he heard in his mind, and he was constantly on the lookout for developments in technology which would permit him to create new sounds through electronic means. In 1931 he wrote the classic Ionisation, the first all-percussion score from any American or European composer; the ensemble in his next work, Ecuatorial, included two Ondes Martenots (a French device with high-frequency oscillators controlled by a seven-octave keyboard). But none of his scores approximated what he envisioned. This gap between what Varèse was hearing and what he was able to compose became a chasm by the mid 1930s:
“When new instruments will allow me to write music as I conceive it, taking the place of the linear counterpoint, the movement of sound-masses, of shifting planes, will be clearly perceived. When these sound-masses collide the phenomena of penetration or repulsion will seem to occur. Certain transmutations taking place on certain planes will seem to be projected onto other planes, moving at different speeds and at different angles. There will no longer be the old conception of melody or the interplay of melodies. The entire work will be a melodic totality. The entire work will flow as a river flows. […]
“The new musical apparatus I envisage, able to emit sounds of any number of frequencies, will extend the limits of the lowest and highest registers, hence new organizations of the vertical resultants: chords, their arrangements, their spacings, that is, their oxygenation. Not only will the harmonic possibilities of the overtones be revealed in all their splendor but the use of certain interferences created by the partials will represent an appreciable contribution. The never before thought of use of the inferior resultants and of the differential and additional sounds may also be expected. An entirely new magic of sound!”
That’s from a lecture Varèse gave in New Mexico in 1936. Earlier that year, he premiered in New York a short, haunting solo for flute, called Density 21.5; then he fell silent for almost 20 years. He simply didn’t have the means to make the music he heard and believed in. It’s a tragic time for him, and he wasn’t the only one lost in the wilderness by then.
When Henry Cowell revised and published New Musical Resources in 1930, he could rightly claim a certain pre-eminence among American composers. All along he had served the new music, becoming an invaluable source of information and communication among composers, and working for the discussion and performance and publication and recording of their music. Ives, Varèse, Seeger, Rudhyar, Carl Ruggles, Aaron Copland, John Becker, Wallingford Riegger, Ruth Crawford, Henry Brant, Johanna M. Beyer – they’re just some of the many composers who benefited from Cowell’s efforts. But in 1936 he was arrested for having sex with a 17-year-old boy, and he was locked up in San Quentin for almost four years. Cowell’s absence hurt the scene, which by then was reeling from the Depression. He eventually received a pardon from the governor of California, but the damage had been done. After his release in 1940, he composed prolifically in just about every area, and became an important authority on world music, which frequently fed into his own composition. He also continued to stump for other composers and help them – even the ones who’d deserted him: In 1942 he helped Ives edit and prepare the Robert Browning Overture for publication. But Cowell’s music never returned to the gleeful experimentalisms, the willingness to provoke or outrage an audience, which formerly he had embraced.
Rudhyar, struggling financially, composed less and less by the ‘30s. Antheil, seeing Europe prepare once again for war, returned to America in 1933, and his music became even more conservative than Ornstein’s or Cowell’s.
So this kind of music really fades in these years. Harry Partch burned his equal-tempered scores in 1930, and began composing in just intonation, tuning to intervals derived from the harmonic series. He composed works for intoning voice and the Adapted Viola, which he’d constructed in 1928, and gained some attention; his performances included a Henry Cowell New Music Society concert in San Francisco in 1932. But Partch became so isolated by having sidestepped the entire Western tradition of tuning, that by 1935 he stopped composing and for the next six years or so lived as a hobo, wandering across America. That life didn’t end for him until he went to Chicago and constructed the Chromelodeon I out of a harmonium. Some of the denser music played on that instrument has a bearing on our topic, as do the more-raucous moments for the full ensemble of string and percussion instruments, which Partch built over the next 35 years. But while his tunings may be radical, Partch’s harmonic sensibility is familiar. His chords may be rich and strange, but he was a storyteller, a fabulist, and he used his instruments and musicians to stage elaborate music-theater works. The kind of musicmaking under discussion today really works against narrative; it’s too extreme, too absolute, too much about itself to accommodate someone else’s language or images or ideas.
This music doesn’t re-emerge until the mid 1940s, and it turns up someplace too-often overlooked: the music of Alan Hovhaness. He was a rhapsodic, mystically minded composer of Armenian descent, born in Massachusetts. In 1942 at age 31 he received a scholarship to study at Tanglewood, but soon he dropped out so he could study what he really wanted to learn, which was the music of Armenia. Two years later he premiered a concerto for piano and string orchestra called Lousadzak, with passages for the strings in which certain note-patterns were played simultaneously but at variable speeds. By the ‘60s he was achieving something quite remarkable with this technique: The free-rhythm music of Hovhaness can create gusts of whirling sounds, often swarming at you in crescendo waves. I’m going to play his Symphony No. 19, “Vishnu,” conducted by Hovhaness.
“In Symphony ‘Vishnu’ I continue to explore my invention of ‘spirit sounds’ or ‘controlled chaos,’ first introduced in ‘Lousadzak’ […] In ‘Vishnu’ I develop whirling waves of sounds to their apex of elaboration. […] Sometimes the sounds are delicate and mysterious. At other times bells, trombones, and trumpets reach climaxes of wild, free sounds, circling like orbits of fire.
“This symphony is in one movement. It is an unfolding giant melody of adoration to the immensity and sublimity of limitless stellar universes. Before and between the phrases of adorational melody are preludes and interludes of clouds or mists of sounds. […]
“The giant melodic line is non-harmonic, unisonal or soloistic with bells, drums, and drones, interspersed with myriad interludes of whirling clouds of sounds, volcanic clouds, storm clouds, celestial clouds, nebula clouds, star clouds.”
You’ll also hear the orchestral drones in some of the melodic passages generating unusual overtone activity of their own. It’s too bad I can’t squeeze in any of his piano music; Hovhaness has a fondness for a figuration he calls a “jhala”: “It refers not only to the musical instrument, the jhala taranga (a set of porcelain water bowls filed to varying levels and struck with mallets), but also to the music played upon the instrument.” The longer he sustains this rapid figure – and other, similar kinds of gestures – the richer and more dense the piano sound becomes. It’s all a question of how long you keep with it, really; later, we’ll look at how La Monte Young expands the possibilities by expanding the time scale of drones and rapid keyboard figurations.
But now I want to look at the other composer who broke the sound barrier by the 1940s. His name was Conlon Nancarrow. Unlike Hovhaness, Nancarrow wasn’t interested so much in texture and atmosphere; his fixation was rhythm and tempo. That emphasis may have helped his playing trumpet in jazz bands in the early ‘30s, but it never really informed his brief composition lessons with Roger Sessions or Nicolas Slonimsky; and he only met with frustration when he tried to find musicians for the chamber music he was writing. Thanks to Slonimsky, some of Nancarrow’s piano music – Toccata, Prelude, Blues – was published in Henry Cowell’s New Music Edition in 1938, which was then being run by others, because Cowell was in prison. Nancarrow was also in the thick of his own late-’30s wilderness: He was at war in Spain, fighting with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade against Franco. He returned to the States in 1939, but a year later he left the country and settled in Mexico.
During that interlude back in the States, however, Nancarrow read and was very taken with Cowell’s New Musical Resources. It would be a few more years, however, before he’d realize that Cowell had offered the advice that would change Nancarrow’s life and liberate him as a composer. Cowell was acknowledging the monstrous difficulty of certain rhythmic structures he’d derived from the harmonic series: “Some of the rhythms developed through the present acoustical investigation could not be played by any living performer; but these highly engrossing rhythmical complexes could easily be cut on a player-piano roll. This would give a real reason for writing music specially for player-piano.” In his Mexico City studio in the late 1940s, that’s exactly what Nancarrow started doing. He turned away from human performers even more decisively than Varèse had, and made his music with a customized, hand-operated punching machine, cutting out holes on a paper roll. The roll feeds into the player piano, where a mechanism “reads” the holes pneumatically and operates the piano hammers. Thus, Nancarrow could create piano music with speeds, articulations, and densities impossible from any human players. Here’s one of the first of his lifelong series, the Studies for Player Piano. It’s designated “3a,” the first movement of his five-part “Boogie-Woogie Suite.”
A lot of Nancarrow’s later music is built around canonic procedures. The Study No. 21, “Canon – X,” has a slow pattern of bass notes which constantly accelerates, played against the same material in an extremely fast treble voicing that continuously slows down. Study No. 24 has three voices playing against each other at tempo ratios of 14 against 15 against 16. Eventually, Nancarrow used irrational numbers as the basis of his tempi: Study No. 33 plays music at the square root of 2 against 2. Nancarrow was a composer’s composer for many years, admired by minds as different as Elliott Carter and John Cage; he didn’t become widely known until the late 1970s, thanks to recordings of his music. The German composer Trimpin has transferred Nancarrow’s piano rolls into computer information and uses a Mac to drive a device that depresses the keys of a piano. He’s thus been able to give us “live” Nancarrow in the concert hall, and there’s nothing like it. But despite Nancarrow’s ascendancy, few composers have attempted the work of making music for player piano. That instrument has been superseded by developments in electronic- and computer-music technologies – something Nancarrow himself would have used had it been available in his day. Luckily for us, he didn’t wait.
By the same token, it’s also lucky – for us, anyway – that Edgard Varèse did wait. Because after World War Two, French developments in making music with tape at long last gave him the means he’d needed. His lengthy hiatus ended with the premiere of Déserts – “deserts.” Scored for woodwinds, brass, piano, percussion, and two channels of magnetic tape, its first performance was in 1954 at Le Théatre de Champs-Elysées in Paris, creating – naturally – a scandal, one which rivalled that of Stravinsky’s Rite Of Spring at its debut there some 40 years earlier. Déserts has four instrumental sections, which are alternated with three passages for tape. This is the first of those electronic interpolations – Varèse’s initial outcry from the new space.
Varèse chose his title Déserts not just for its suggestion of “all physical deserts (of sand, sea, snow, of outer space, of empty city streets), but also the deserts in the mind of man; not only those stripped aspects of nature that suggest bareness, aloofness, timelessness, but also that remote inner space no telescope can reach, where man is alone, a world of mystery and essential loneliness.” That’s a hell of a distance from Hovhaness’ hymn to endless universal clouds, but I hope you can start to see the connections between them and the other composers under discussion. They’re all looking for a music that can speak in the rhythms and textures and dynamics of nature, of the environment – natural and manmade. I’m sorry there’s no time to look at certain other electronic composers of the ‘60s, because Richard Maxfield’s tape pieces and James Tenney’s tape and computer music are very much about composing with aggregates and densities. Ben Johnston, a composer who works in just intonation and had studied with John Cage and Harry Partch, really summed it up: “With electronics, the keyboard is no longer the standard of musical thought. We aren’t thinking just in terms of a gamut of pitches, laid out linearly; we’re thinking of the world of sound. This is because we can deal directly with that if we want to.”
He said that in 1980, and today, with samplers and computers, it’s even more true. The catch is, it does you no good to sit there and say, ‘We’ll have a dog barking here, and a car horn there, and some thunder way over there,’ if you’ve never heard a dog barking or a car horn or thunder. And I don’t mean heard in terms of your ideas for them or about them as phenomena; I mean heard in and for themselves, heard as themselves. Heard with your attention on high and your ego on hold, heard as you would hear the best music. You cannot make music with those materials if they aren’t music to you already. And that’s where John Cage comes in.
Cage had studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles in 1934. “Several times I tried to explain to Schoenberg that I had no feeling for harmony. He told me that without a feeling for harmony I would always encounter an obstacle, a wall through which I wouldn’t be able to pass. My reply was in that case I would devote my life to beating my head against that wall – and maybe that is what I’ve been doing ever since.” In 1990 Cage wrote that his was a “lifE spent finding […] alTernatives to Harmony.”
He’d also studied with Henry Cowell and in 1939 wrote his First Construction (in Metal) for percussion sextet. For the next couple of years Cage sidestepped harmony by composing for percussion, and in the early ‘40s he began preparing the piano: inserting various objects between the strings, such as a bolt or a bit of rubber, to alter the piano’s pitch and timbre, and create a percussion-orchestra effect. He wrote a gorgeous series of works for prepared piano, climaxing in 1948 with his Sonatas and Interludes. Cage’s focus on rhythm also shaped his approach to form, and these works are “based on a number of measures having a square root, so that the large lengths have the same relation within the whole that the small lengths have within a unit of it.” In 1951, Cage composed Imaginary Landscape No. 4, which uses such a form, only the lengths are no longer time-lengths for instrumental music; they’re lengths of space, with “the speed of travel through this space being unpredictable.” The piece is scored for 12 radios, two players per radio; one adjusting the wavelength, the other, the volume. Their knob movements were determined through a random process patterned after the coin-tossing methods used in consulting the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes. Cage’s piano piece of that year, Music of Changes, assigns activities to the pianist in the same way. When it came to selecting available sounds, he made sure silence had a 50-50 chance of turning up; the sounds the pianist would sound could be either single, aggregate, or “complex situations (constellations) in time”; the performer could also regard “sounds of indefinite pitch (noise)” as “free to be used without any restriction.”
Inspired by his studies of Zen Buddhism, Cage devised a method for indeterminate composition, which enabled him to bypass to varying degrees his own tastes and memory. The culmination of this approach came next year, in 1952, with the still-notorious extremity of 4’33”, a score entirely tacet – no sound is performed in its 4-minute-and-33-second duration. But because we live in a world where sounds constantly form, there’s always music for 4’33”‘s listeners: the ambient sounds audible during the performance. Cage’s revolution was to define music not as a method for manipulating specialized sounds, but as a mode of hearing: Stop reacting intellectually and emotionally, and instead listen to any sound for its own unique character; then you’ve got music.
In a way this whole discussion could be about Cage, because in 40 years of composing indeterminate pieces, he developed numerous methods for constructing densities. He traced star maps to arrange pitch aggregates for the piano score Etudes Australes, in which he also treated the two hands independently. He gladly made music with all sorts of electronic media, including tape and computers. He observed that “You can get rid of intention by multiplying intention,” and he combined musics for a kind of work he called a Musicircus, such as his bicentennial score Apartment House 1776, or his 1986 Roaratorio, inspired by Irish music and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. His Europeras 1 and 2 a few years later sliced and diced and superimposed orchestral and vocal music – and the costuming, staging, and lighting – from the literature of European opera. Certain of his works can also be played simultaneously: the orchestra score Atlas Eclipticalis with the piano piece Winter Music; the tape collage Fontana Mix with the vocal solo Aria and/or with any parts from the Concert for Piano and Orchestra.
Cage considered himself an experimental composer, in the sense that he made music, “the outcome of which is not foreseen.” I’d like to play for you an example of the experimental Cage. This Variations II, a 1961 work scored for any number of players and any sound-producing means. Performers are given a situation for drawing and measuring lines, and then translating that information into parameters of frequency, amplitude, timbre, duration, point of occurrence, and structure of event. This realization is by Cage’s frequent colleague, the pianist David Tudor. He’s playing inside the piano with phonograph cartridges, only in place of the needle are different implements such as a toothpick or a pipe cleaner. “Question: Then what is the purpose of this ‘experimental’ music? Answer: No purposes. Sounds.”
The term minimalist has been thrown around a lot, usually to label music that uses repeated patterns; you’ll also hear it used for gradual-process compositions, or singular-event pieces. I would suggest that what all minimalist music really has in common is that it’s essentially non-dramatic; its coherence isn’t based on contrast or transitions or narrative. That’s why minimalism really begins with John Cage; his indeterminate compositions may have a lot of different things in them, but they’re presented with no sense of hierarchy or varying significance. “To be able to move one’s attention from one point to another without feeling that one had left something important behind, is the feeling which I enjoy having and which I hope to give to others. So that each person can place his attention originally rather than in a compelled way or in a constrained way; so that each person is in charge of himself.” Other important minimalist composers have offered very different takes on aggregate music. Morton Feldman wrote free-duration pieces in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, such as Piece For Four Pianos or Chorus And Instruments, where everybody works from the same score, in which pitches are assigned but their duration is left open. Performed at a soft volume, these works create shimmering, mobile-like chords that have no clear beginning or end. A few years later, Steve Reich began making tape pieces – It’s Gonna Rain, Come Out – where loops of voices gradually go out of synch; he then applied this principle to his instrumental works, such as Piano Phase, in which two pianists play the same material, and one slightly speeds up, creating phasing patterns between the overlapping parts.
La Monte Young, who brings an improviser’s sensibility to minimalism, was going to study with John Cage in New York back in the fall of 1960, but Cage was out of town. Young was from California by way of Idaho, and as a teenager in Los Angeles in the early 1950s he’d played jazz saxophone and also studied composition. A few years later he stopped playing sax and his composing shifted into long sustained tones with for Brass and Trio for Strings. He attended Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Advanced Composition Seminar at Darmstadt in 1959, and there he found a real inspiration in meeting David Tudor and seeing him perform Cage’s music inside the piano. Young had also been reading a lot of Cage and thinking about Cage’s ideas, and back in New York, he began creating performance pieces, and then conceptual works; his Compositions of 1961 being simply the instruction “Draw a straight line and follow it” – which has proven to be his method of operation ever since.
He also began improvising on piano, in a static, modal, drone-style, with Terry Jennings playing alto saxophone. A year or two later Young switched to sopranino sax and developed a blues style that used fewer and fewer chord changes; but in his playing, he articulated groups of pitches so rapidly and relentlessly that they started sounding like chords. By 1963 Young was taping this austere, ecstatic music, which he played with the late poet and musician Angus MacLise on hand drums, visual artist Marian Zazeela on vocal drone or bowed guitar, composer Tony Conrad on mandolin or bowed guitar, and soon-to-be-rocker John Cale on viola. When MacLise left the country early in 1964, Young let the propulsive, rhythmic element of his music go with him, and turned further to the drones, creating new densities over longer time scales – three or four hours – for performances of The Tortoise: His Dreams and Journeys, an ongoing improvised work. Young also became interested in just intonation, and began retuning his ensemble; that same year, he retuned a piano and launched another ongoing improvised work: The Well-Tuned Piano. In a just tuning the strings reinforce and bring out an array of partial tones, and so Young’s rapid, static playing can sound unearthly. He calls this kind of passage a “Cloud,” and they pop up throughout The Well-Tuned Piano; here’s an example from a 1981 performance.
Young has done a lot of important work in just intonation, including sound environments where a Rayna synthesizer generates chords from intervals high along the harmonic series. The Well-Tuned Piano, however, has become his magnum opus; in the late 1980s he was giving performances that lasted over 6 hours. For Young, the only way to make that music is by refusing to preconceive or determine what’s going to come next. “I try to really be open to the highest source of inspiration, so that information can just come flowing through me […] like the concept of the empty glass or the hollow bamboo tube […] Then things come that are […] beyond just pure imagination. They’re an opening up to a higher level of information.”
A very different improvising pianist, who also experienced a real breakthrough in his music by the early 1960s, is Cecil Taylor. For over 40 years, he’s been playing an equal-tempered piano, and he’s created some of the wildest, most violent and dense and extreme and propulsive music ever heard. Taylor insists that “Most people don’t have any idea of what improvisation is … It means the magical lifting of one’s spirits to a state of trance. It means the most heightened perception of one’s self, but one’s self in relation to other forms of life. It means experiencing oneself as another kind of living organism much in the way of a plant, a tree – the growth, you see, that’s what it is … I’m hopefully accurate in saying that’s what happens when we play. It’s not to do with ‘energy.’ It has to do with religious forces.” It sounded more like demonic possession to some listeners: This wasn’t jazz – or if it was, then This was the death of jazz. All I can say is, if this is jazz when it’s dead, then it’s gone to Heaven. Here’s an encore from 1974.
A New Yorker who studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, Taylor found his real education on his own, principally in the musics of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and Horace Silver. By the 1950s he was playing a thick, heavily chromatic, frequently atonal, rather forbidding post-bop piano music – and it could go on for quite some time. In the early ‘60s, his sound became more atomized, more visceral and percussive; he played longer sets and delved deeper into multiple tempi, in his solo playing and with small ensembles. Very talented musicians would play over and over with him, for weeks or months, and realize that they still didn’t understand what was going on – that’s how different his sensibility was. Jimmy Lyons, who played alto saxophone with Taylor for many years, really put his finger on it: “Playing with Cecil made me think differently about what music’s about. It’s not about any cycle of fifths, it’s about sound.” You’ve heard what Taylor’s sound was like 20 years ago; he’s now in his mid sixties and can still play flat out for hours. He’s also composed for large ensembles of musicians, and in those works, such as Legba Crossing, or even the 10-musician album Winged Serpent, he adapts his densities and cross-tempi and sense of spirit to a large canvas, and that’s something which can sound truly unique.
There are other important expressions of these qualities in creative black music, notably from Ornette Coleman, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Anthony Braxton. But when it comes to densities and cross-tempi and a sense of spirit on a large canvas, the great American composer – regardless of race or idiom or era – is Sun Ra. He did it the most successfully, for the longest time, with the greatest consistency and the broadest range. He was older than Taylor, presumed to have been born in 1914 – Ra was never much on the mundane details of his nativity, and insisted that he was from the planet Saturn. Far from kidding around, he developed an entire persona and philosophy based on his vision of intergalactic travel and his studies of the Bible and Egyptology. Some never forgave him for his rhetoric of space and myth, and have refused to take his music seriously. But the stance and the sound were inseparable, and not simply as some program clinging to the music. By making himself the king of the omniverse, Sun Ra was able to inspire and motivate and maintain and create for and document the Arkestra, a real-live big band, for 40 years. He certainly didn’t do it with the support of patrons or grants or the academy or the recording industry; he did it by creating a disciplined situation, artistically and socially, in which his musicians discovered the possibility of getting beyond themselves – sometimes way beyond themselves. That’s how Ra was able to keep outstanding artists with him, even when they could have been better recognized on their own (better paid too). John Gilmore, who played tenor saxophone, was with Sun Ra by 1953; the following year, altoist Marshall Allen joined up, as did Pat Patrick, who played baritone sax. The first Arkestra album appeared in 1956; shortly after that Ra formed his own record label, Saturn, on which he pressed and released LPs for decades. (They’re collector’s items now, and number upwards of 200.) He also made many recordings for numerous labels in America and Europe.
Sun Ra and his Arkestra left Chicago in 1961 and settled in New York, where they performed regularly for most of the decade at a small East Village club called Slug’s, playing sets that established the band’s m.o. for the next 30 years. The musicians dressed in colorful, glittering costumes, and would often march around the audience joyfully, while playing or singing. Performances would be supplemented by dancers or film projections or light shows. The sets themselves became unpredictable excursions over the history of creative African-American music. Ra had played in bands since he was a teenager, and in 1946 was pianist and sometimes arranger for Fletcher Henderson; with the Arkestra, he delighted in playing arrangements of classics by Henderson, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, and others. But the next number might easily be one of his driving hard-bop originals or a roof-raising collective free improvisation. Many Arkestra musicians became adept multi-instrumentalists, and the band’s percussion section grew to include an array of exotic and original instruments. Between the two, the Arkestra’s rhythmic freedom increased drastically. “Most jazz will lay out over one rhythm,” Ra once commented, “but my music has two, maybe three or four things going, and you have to feel all of them. You can’t count it.” That’s also true of his keyboard playing. Sun Ra was a gifted pianist, adept in numerous idioms, as well as a skilled improviser who was right at home in polyrhythms, dissonance, clusters, and resonances. But he also had a lifelong devotion to electric keyboards: There’s a wonderful recording from around 1953, ‘54, of “Deep Purple” played by the violinist Stuff Smith, with Sun Ra on piano and Solovox, a device driven by the piano which makes it sound weirdly stringlike. Ra played one of the first Moog synthesizers that became available, buying a preproduction Mini-Moog in 1969; over the years, his arsenal included Wurlitzer organ, Farfisa organ, Rocksichord, Yamaha organ, Spacemaster, electronic celeste, DMX. The history of electronic music has generated a considerable literature, and yet it’s managed to totally ignore this man’s groundbreaking work. I’m going to play a 1970 performance in France. This amazing synthesizer solo by Sun Ra ends with a call, to which the Arkestra responds.
Other kinds of improvised electronic music are also pertinent to this discussion, especially from David Tudor, some of whose gifts you’ve already heard, and Laurie Spiegel, whose Macintosh program Music Mouse enables her to create very rich pieces in real-time. But the music I’d like you to consider next is by Pauline Oliveros.
She was an accordion major at the University of Houston in the early 1950s and finished college at San Francisco State in 1957 with a B.A. in composition. That same year she began playing improvisations with Terry Riley on piano and Loren Rush on string bass and the Japanese koto. (She was playing mostly French horn then, but the accordion never went out of the picture.) In 1960 Oliveros and Ramon Sender formed Sonics, a center for electronic music, which was then part of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. It later moved to Mills College, and she was its director there for a year.
As a child she’d always loved the strange static and whistles emitted by her grandfather’s crystal radio and her Dad’s short-wave radio – sounds that can be created and manipulated in real time. In her electronic music, she played oscillators that had been set above the range of human hearing, and used them to generate difference tones. The frequency of those sounds is the difference of the pitches being played, and so they’re audible; she amplified that and fed it into a tape-delay system, which she was also playing. With these works, Oliveros was composing not what the musician had to do, but how the instrument was to be constructed. “The design of how they would come into existence was what I mapped, but not the content at all. So it was a kind of performance architecture using tape machines and understanding certain operations in the circuitry which was non-linear. I actually delighted in the notion of a non-linear system for performance, where my reactions to the material would have to be instantaneous. I didn’t have time to think about it in rational terms, but had to act in the moment. That’s been the key element of my work.” The results were lush, beautiful pieces, such as Bye Bye Butterfly, I of IV – but I’m not going to play them. Instead, I want you to hear how she’s worked in the same way with her accordion. In the mid 1980s she created what she calls “The Expanded Accordion,” feeding her instrument into a range of digital-delay processing with custom performance controls. A few years later she raised the stakes by having her accordion retuned in just intonation. Today she’s a virtuoso in her command of densities, timbral manipulations, multiple tempi, and the creation of partials and resultants. This piece is an excerpt from her recent Crone Music; here, Oliveros’ accordion and processing are also interacting with the processing and mixing of Panaiotis.
The other area of American music which has thrived on the idea of composing directly with sound is of course rock. And here again, the examples are all very different. The fabled “wall of sound” of Phil Spector, cramming a single studio with a multitude of different musicians – that’s much more about texture than it is about harmony or momentum. There’s also the feedback sound of the Velvet Underground (John Cale, one of its founders, had played with La Monte Young); the twisted large-ensemble music of Frank Zappa; the noise band Borbetomagus; the surreal studio-made music of the Residents. A lot of punk or hardcore is of course all about densities of various kinds – heavy metal too. A single amplified electric guitar is so rich and resonant, it can be manipulated in so many ways – Jimi Hendrix playing The Star-Spangled Banner would fit right in with what we’ve been hearing. That volcanic kind of playing also distinguishes other notable electric-guitar improvisers, including Rudolph Grey, Eugene Chadbourne, and the late Sonny Sharrock.
Several composers have explored the possibilities of creating densities with an ensemble of electric guitars, including James Tenney and Steve Reich. The first one to do it seems to have been Rhys Chatham, who’d studied with La Monte Young. He premiered a quartet, Guitar Ring, around 1977; in 1990, he did a piece for 101 electric guitars. But he actually hasn’t composed a lot for guitar ensembles. The person who’s worked with it the most consistently and successfully, with the greatest inventiveness and range of sound, is Glenn Branca.
Branca dropped out of Emerson College in 1976 and came to New York, where he played in experimental art-rock bands. By ‘79 his fascination with the densities and loudness of electric guitars had led him into areas too complex and austere for the rock-band format, and he began working with musicians on the performance of his own compositions with (Instrumental) For Six Guitars. He created a series of landmark works for multiple electric guitars, accompanied by the high-voltage drumming of Stephan Wischerth: Lesson No. 1, The Spectacular Commodity, The Ascension, Symphony No. 1. Branca unleashed a visceral, high-volume sound unique to rock and new music, where the interaction of amplified partials created a hallucinatory range of acoustic phenomena. By the early ‘80s he wanted these sounds to come out even more, and he experimented with different tunings and new instruments – his Symphony No. 2 is scored for tiers of mallet guitars, which he’d devised so he could work with a greater number of open strings.
Branca has written 13 symphonies to date, most of which are for various ensembles of electric guitars. (Nos. 7, 9, and 11 are for orchestra, and he can get a very strange sound out of an orchestra!) For Symphony No. 3, he designed a half-dozen keyboard instruments, which plucked their strings like harpsichords (one rubbed the strings with rotating leather wheels). Pick-ups amplified the partials from the vibrating strings, and the keyboards were tuned to the first 127 intervals of the harmonic series.
Branca dedicated the score of his Symphony No. 3 to Dane Rudhyar – not so much for his music, but for his prose. Rudhyar, then in his late 80s, had just written a book, The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music, which taught Branca a lot about the harmonic series. It also offered him a language for the kind of music he’d been making, with Rudhyar’s discussion of what he termed “a pleroma of sound […] the interaction and interpenetration of a multiplicity of relationships […] These pleromas of sound have musical meaning in the total resonance they induce […] not only in the ears of a listener but in his or her psyche – far more than in the component notes and their precise frequencies […] each of the particularized and limited pleromas has its own character, and its holistic emanation (tone) is meant by the composer (consciously or not) to fulfill a particular need. The need may be personal, social, or cultural, or it may be transpersonal – the need for the psychic transformation of the composer or the listeners in a concert-hall or ritualized situation.”
This is the conclusion of Glenn Branca’s Symphony No. 3.
I’d like to conclude this discussion by observing that there are two ways to make the kind of music we’ve been hearing: the hard way and the easy way. For the hard way, you can first go to a musician who’s gifted at working with densities. David Avidor and I went to the electric-guitarist Rudolph Grey, whom I mentioned earlier. We put him in the studio and asked him to work with the image of being in darkness for 2, 2-1/2 minutes, and then moving into light for a minute or 90 seconds. That’s all we told him; nothing else about his sound, or about what we would do with the tracks.
David and I took that performance and used it in our opera Agamemnon. We employ four versions of it – half speed, normal speed, double speed, and quadruple speed – all heard simultaneously. They’re aligned vertically right at their transitions from darkness to light. Over these tracks we laid the completed vocal part: the poet John Giorno, declaiming lines I’d written by re-arranging words from a 16th-century text. With this combination of voice and instruments, certain words of Giorno’s were unintentionally – but most appropriately – punched by the entrances of the high-speed guitars. We also wanted the music to touch on the ideas of redundancy, inhumanity, and violence – and the possibility of transformation – which are the great themes of Aeschylus’ tragedy.
Musicians, studios, tape, slow speeds, fast speeds – like I say, that’s the hard way. Composing with densities or aggregates or pleromas or clusters – call it what you will – may be the secret of American music, but it’s a natural sound, and hence can be made naturally and simply. The easy way is to use your voice, which is naturally in clusters of pitches; nobody talks ‘on a sin-gle pitch.’ Vocal multiphonics can be generated in all sorts of ways, the simplest being an exhaled breath at the break in register between chest and throat. The longer you’re able to sustain these chords, the more comes out of them – harmonically, rhythmically, timbrally.
But that’s the subject of another lecture. This one is over.
(This lecture was first given at Sarah Lawrence College in 1995.)
SOURCES
“derived from the upper reaches”
Henry Cowell, New Musical Resources. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 117.
“which, although it forms”
Henry Cowell, New Musical Resources, pp. 138–139.
“elbow music”
Joel Sachs, Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 91.
“There is less possible variety”
Henry Cowell, New Musical Resources, p. 120.
“sensationalisms”
Henry Cowell, “Trends in American Music” in American Composers on American Music, ed. Henry Cowell. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1933, p. 6.
“What has been revolutionized”
“a more exact synthesis of tones”
Dane Rudhyar, “The Relativity of Our Musical Conceptions” in The Musical Quarterly, January 1922.
“resonant mass of wood and metal”
Dane Rudhyar, New World Records NWCRL247, liner notes.
“When new instruments will allow me”
Edgard Varèse, “The Liberation of Sound” in Perspectives on American Composers, eds. Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone. New York: W.W. Norton, 1971, pp. 25–27.
“In Symphony ‘Vishnu’ I continue”
Alan Hovhaness, Poseidon 1012 liner notes.
“It refers not only”
Alan Hovhaness, MGM E 3160 liner notes.
“Some of the rhythms developed”
Henry Cowell, New Musical Resources, pp. 64–65.
“all physical deserts”
Edgard Varèse, CRI SD 268 liner notes.
“With electronics, the keyboard is no longer”
Nicole V. Gagné and Tracy Caras, Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1982, p. 262.
“Several times I tried to explain to Schoenberg”
Calvin Tomkins, The Bride & The Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant Garde. New York: Viking Press, 1968, p. 85.
“lifE spent finding”
John Cage, Another Timbre at178x4 liner notes.
“based on a number of measures”
“the speed of travel”
“complex situations (constellations) in time”
“free to be used without any restriction”
John Cage, “Composition” in Silence, pp. 57–58.
“You can get rid of intention by multiplying intention”
Gagné and Caras, Soundpieces, p. 79.
“the outcome of which is not foreseen”
John Cage, “History of Experimental Music in the United States” in Silence. Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 1961, p. 69.
“Question: Then what is the purpose”
John Cage, “Experimental Music: Doctrine” in Silence, p. 17.
“To be able to move one’s attention”
Chicago 82 – A Dip in the Lake, Les Disques du Crepuscule, TWI 116.
“Draw a straight line and follow it”
An Anthology of Chance Operations, eds. La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low. Munich: Galerie Heiner Friedrich, 1970, p. 117.
“I try to really be open”
Nicole V. Gagné, Soundpieces 2: Interviews with American Composers. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1993, p. 475–476.
“Most people don’t have any idea”
Cecil Taylor, MPS 0068.220 liner notes.
“Playing with Cecil”
Val Wilmer, As Serious as Your Life: Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution, 1955–1977. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2018, p. 57.
“Most jazz will lay out over one rhythm”
Wilmer, As Serious as Your Life, p. 106.
“The design of how they would come into existence”
Gagné, Soundpieces 2, pp. 213–214.
“a pleroma of sound”
Dane Rudhyar, The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music. Boulder, Colorado: Shambhala, 1982, pp. 139, 142, 145.
Link to:
Music: Lectures: Contents
For more on these composers, see:
Music Book: Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music, Second Edition
Music Lecture: “Intense Purity of Feeling”: Béla Bartók and American Music
More Cool Sites To Visit! – Music
For more on Glenn Branca, see:
Music Book: Sonic Transports: New Frontiers in Our Music
Music: Radio Show #7, Postmodernism, part 4: Three Contemporary Masters
For more on Glenn Branca and John Cage, see:
Music Book: Sonic Transports – Glenn Branca essay, part 1
For more on Glenn Branca, Alan Hovhaness, Pauline Oliveros, Sun Ra, and La Monte Young, see:
Music Book: Soundpieces 2: Interviews with American Composers
For more on John Cage, see:
Music Essay: The Beaten Path: A History of American Percussion Music
Music: Radio Show #8, Daoism in Western Music, part 1
Music: Radio Show #22, Neo-Classicism, part 3
Music: Radio Show #25, Schoenberg in America
For more on John Cage and Henry Cowell, see:
Music: Radio Show #19, The Percussion Ensemble
For more on John Cage and Conlon Nancarrow, see:
Music Book: Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers
For more on John Cage and Sun Ra, see:
Music: Radio Show #4, Postmodernism, part 1: Three Founders
For more on John Cage and Edgard Varèse, see:
Music: Radio Show #29, Electro-Acoustic Music, part 1: New Instruments
For more on John Cage and La Monte Young, see:
Film Review: Prism’s Colors, The Mechanics of Time
For more on Rudolph Grey, see:
FIlm Script: Dracula in the Evil Empire
And be sure to read Rudolph Grey’s book Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr.
For more on Rudolph Grey and Pauline Oliveros, see:
For more on Alan Hovhaness and Edgard Varèse, see:
Music: Radio Show #33, Electro-Acoustic Music, part 2: Musicians and Tape
For more on Charles Ives, see:
Music: Radio Show #27, 20th-Century Music on the March
For more on Charles Ives and Henry Cowell, see:
Music: Radio Show #16, John J. Becker and the American Five Plus One
For more on Charles Ives and Edgard Varèse, see:
Music: Radio Show #10, Percussion in Early 20th-Century Music
For more on Conlon Nancarrow, see:
Film Fiction – Film Dream #13: Luis Buñuel
Music Essay: Conlon Nancarrow
Music Lecture: My Experiences of Surrealism in 20th-Century American Music
Music: Radio Show #26, Surrealism in 20th-Century American Music
For more on Pauline Oliveros, see:
Music: Radio Show #17: A Tribute to Pauline Oliveros
For more on Pauline Oliveros and La Monte Young, see:
Music: Radio Show #5, Minimalism
For more on Sun Ra, see:
Music: Radio Show #9, Daoism in Western Music, part 2
Music: Radio Show #35, Electro-Acoustic Music, part 3: Musicians and Synthesized Sound
For more on Edgard Varèse, see:
Music Book: SONIC TRANSPORTS: Glenn Branca Essay, part 9
For more on La Monte Young, see:
Music: Radio Show #31: A Tribute to La Monte Young
NICOLE V. GAGNÉ 