SONIC TRANSPORTS: INTRODUCTION

Introduction

“Since the revolution in aesthetic attitudes wrought by John Cage circa 1951, it has come to pass that virtually anything is possible in music.”[1] So observes composer James Tenney, and he’s right – by adopting indeterminacy, Cage changed all the rules. That, after all, was the point. Cage wanted to compose without relying on his own tastes and memory, so he adopted chance operations to select and assign musical material. His first group of epoch-making pieces culminated in the still notorious extremity of 4’33” (1952), a score entirely tacet – no sound is performed in its four-minute-and-thirty-three-second duration. But because we live in a world where sounds constantly form, there’s always music for 4’33”’s listeners: the ambient events audible throughout the performance. John Cage’s revolution was to define music not as a method for manipulating specialized sounds, but as a mode of hearing: if you stop reacting intellectually and emotionally, and instead listen to any sound for its own unique character, then you’ve got music. The catch is, when all sounds have the same inherent validity to be music, it’s tough for a composer to insist that his or her combination of sounds is sexier than any other combination is.

The endless availability of music would stalemate composers if it wasn’t for their urge to develop technique in ways meaningful to their own characters. Thus, Tenney goes on to say that, although anything is possible, “not everything seems equally urgent or necessary, and without a sense of necessity, one’s musical activities can quickly degenerate into mere entertainment or redundancy. One area of investigation which has that urgency for me […] involve[s] more careful considerations of intonation and the design of new tuning systems.” Not every composer can find urgency in the technical areas that excite Tenney, but through his specific focus, he arrives at a far-ranging insight into technique: “The work of Harry Partch […] has become, in fact, an indispensable technical point of departure, just as Cage’s work has provided us with an essential aesthetic foundation.”

Harry Partch divided the octave into a scale of 43 pitches, rather than the twelve good tones and true that have come to dominate music in the West. To hear these tunings, he spent over 40 years – from the late 1920s until his death at 73 in September 1974 – designing and building a unique battery of instruments, each with its own distinctive sculptural beauty. Partch was also an inveterate storyteller and fabulist, whether the text was from African folklore, hobo graffiti, Greek tragedy, or his own imagination, and he conceived most of his major scores as stageworks to be performed by dancers and costumed singing musicians.

His venture into that kind of musicmaking may well be Partch’s most radical break from the concert-music attitudes of his time, surpassing even his pitches and his carpentry. Circa 1951 is also the date of Oedipus, “Partch’s first epic theater piece,”[2] and so is pivotal to another revolution – because even if new tuning systems aren’t your thing, Tenney is still right on when he calls this music an indispensable technical point of departure. Harry Partch is the fundamental revolutionary of technique: the man who turned his back on everything he’d been told was necessary – the tuning, instrumental, and performance practices Western culture had established over the centuries – and instead devised ways to make his own music.

Partch offers the most extreme demonstration of working with materials freed of conditioning or habit. After his epoch-making works, it has come to pass that virtually any technique is possible in music. And if you want to do more than entertain audiences or maintain the “classics” (whatever those might be for your situation), you’re faced with another catch, as tricky as Cage’s: Where’s the urgency not just for your combination of sounds, but also for the techniques you’ve adopted?

Rejecting hidebound attitudes both aesthetic and technical, composer Robert Ashley says, “The only people I’ve ever been interested in, the only people I’ve ever been affected by or influenced by, are people who make their own music. The idea that you can just sit down and make music is very different from accepting certain performing institutions (orchestras, string quartets) and other institutions (publishers) that are intermediaries for your ideas: you write a piece of music and then you give it to somebody and they give it to somebody else and finally it gets played. This idea had no interest for me whatsoever; it still doesn’t.”[3] What does interest Ashley are the composers who test the limits of their own musical structures and techniques by performing their own works. “Personal music” is his name for this approach: ”It’s an amazing change in point of view, and it has taken American Music out of its dark ages. I don’t think that one can exaggerate that at all. It has caused a crossover of popular music and so-called concert music, which is going to change the audience for a new music entirely.”

From premiering his first pieces for intoning voice and Adapted Viola to presiding over his most elaborate stageworks, Harry Partch made himself the patron saint of all composers who play their own music. Yet Ashley is well justified to cite John Cage and pianist David Tudor as “amazing pioneers in inventing the idea of a personal music” for their celebrated realizations of Cage’s indeterminate scores. (Cage remains active as a performer, most notably in recent years when he reads/sings from Empty Words, his non-syntactic texts derived from writings by Thoreau.) However, the actual crossover of musical sensibilities which Ashley describes reflects more than the examples of Partch and Cage; two other ‘50s revolutions are also at play, namely free jazz and rock & roll. With exposure to such a range of expression, the idea of playing one’s own music became more available to a new generation of composers.

And crossovers flow both ways: Virtually all the materials of modern concert music – dissonance, polyrhythms, noise, synthesized sound – have become available on the popular-music side of the fence. For today’s new-music scene, genre-breaching has become not just a fact of life, but its life’s blood. Take for example the 1984 New Music America, whose brochure printed the James Tenney essay quoted above: That weeklong extravaganza booked rock bands and jazz musicians along with performer-less installations, concert recitals of works by contemporary composers, video screenings, and a troupe of street dancers.

I got to it for only one afternoon, so I can’t say how much of what went down there was really new music – but I can say that I’ve made other affairs that suffered for being too indiscriminate. My point isn’t any elitist thing, because it’s perfectly cool to listen to and encourage all sorts of stuff. A self-proclaimed “new music” festival, however, ought to showcase musicmakers who, regardless of genre, are building on the freedoms introduced by Cage and Partch. Much to its credit, the 1984 NMA included performances by Glenn Branca, Fred Frith, and “Blue” Gene Tyranny.[4] Had The Residents been there, it would have been a clean sweep of the most productive, innovative, and, yes, personal makers of new music to come along in the last twenty years.

But a gathering such as New Music America really isn’t The Residents’ scene. “They don’t consider themselves to be new music,” insists Hardy Fox, spokesperson for The Residents’ San Francisco-based label, Ralph Records.[5] ”They think it’s a real hokey term. They like to think of themselves as pop musicians.” Nevertheless, the first time I heard these popsters perform live was at the 1983 NMA, where they wowed a huge audience with their staging of the Mole Show, a multimedia fable of social exploitation and violence. Watching that costumed ensemble play, sing, and sometimes get out front with the dancers, I couldn’t help flashing on Harry Partch: This was precisely the sort of music theater he believed in all his life, down to the unique design and intonations of most of The Residents’ instruments.

There weren’t any Partch-isms floating to the surface of the Mole Show – unlike The Residents’ Six Things to a Cycle (1975) and its derivative use of peculiar intonations pseudo-primitive percussion, and rhythmic vocalizing.[6] Partchmania also informs their 1979 LP Eskimo, but by then the group had assimilated more of Harry Partch than his gestures. Eskimo employs all those techniques from Six Things, throws in instrument-building and folk-inspired storytelling, and still sounds like nobody but The Residents. For a more Partchian experience than that, you’d have to be watching musicians performing live on stage…

So where’s the pop music in all this? Well, it’s even less prone to float to the surface. They have plenty of music that sounds nothing like Six Things or Eskimo, but very little of it sounds like anyone’s idea of pop. Since the early ‘70s, The Residents have been churning out the most warped stuff around. Their music corners the market on dissonant harmonies. Vocal, instrumental, and electronic tracks are invariably distorted through tape manipulation, filterings, sampling. Their lyrics, when decipherable, are relentlessly sardonic and/or morbid. And/or silly too: running through almost everything they do is a fiendishly black (and usually very funny) vein of ego-deflating humor.

The Residents are so un-pop sounding that their album The Third Reich ‘N Roll (1975) can cover classic ‘60s tunes and make something of the game out of how unrecognizable the originals have become. Yet they really are pop musicians: not because their records are placed in the “Rock” bins at the stores, but because they’re always thinking about pop, both as music and as a social phenomenon. The essay on The Residents includes sections on Reich ‘N Roll, The Tunes of Two Cities (1982), and The Big Bubble (1985), their most ferocious examinations of pop music as (at best) bread & circuses and (at worst) demagoguery and mind-control. It also examines the group’s provocative decision to work anonymously – there are no names or faces for the Personality Cult Trip perpetuated by the music industry; only the image of some surrealistically costumed gents called The Residents.[7]

Having turned themselves into a conceptual art object, it came natural to the group to make music within a series of conceptual restraints. The essay looks at how they enthusiastically slipped into such hobbles as covering only old Top 40 for Reich ‘N Roll; faking anthropology on Eskimo; depicting two imaginary societies through examples of the music of each in The Tunes of Two Cities; singing in their own invented language on The Big Bubble; reinventing the music of George Gershwin, James Brown, John Philip Sousa, and Hank Williams for the albums in their American Composer Series. There wasn’t room to go into all the examples. But wherever you look you’ll find The Residents embracing some kind of deconditioning discipline, with an eyeball toward releasing non habitual and unexpected music.[8]

That attitude – discussed in the section on their first album, Meet The Residents (1973) – is one of the most striking ways in which their music touches base with the work of John Cage. There’s also The Residents’ reliance on capturing chance events: employing studio equipment in bizarre and ‘incorrect’ ways to produce new sounds; using tracks of ambient sound; playing instruments for which they have no training or which aren’t ‘musical instruments’ at all. Above all, the group has been able to collaborate on making music in such a way as to cancel out the tastes and memories of its individual members. And there just isn’t a more Cageian experience than that…

What’s Cageian in Glenn Branca’s music was not immediately apparent to me when I first heard it. But that was around 3 AM, and I was still reeling from a density and loudness more explosive than the highest decibel standards of the Mudd Club. I don’t think my own name was immediately apparent to me after hearing Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses for 10 electric guitars and one drummer. Those sounds were so unprecedented, so unfamiliar, that they barely reminded me of music, let alone the work of another composer. What was apparent to me, however, was that anyone who could do that to my ears was obviously onto something, and I began checking out Branca’s records and catching whatever performances of his I could make. Pretty soon I was hearing a distinctly Cageian experience in his sound – and so it was a bother to me (and to other admirers of this music) to learn that John Cage’s first reaction upon hearing Indeterminate Activity had been scathingly negative.

The essay on Branca kicks off with the flap created by Cage’s comments (made where else but at a New Music America). Other scandals before and since have been provoked by this visceral, high-volume music, but that particular one was too notorious to be ignored. Besides, it offers an excellent opportunity to observe how Branca composes in the best Cageian manner: to make music he cannot fully predict or control. That’s all right up front in Indeterminate Activity, were the guitars release gusts of overtones which randomly discharge unusual acoustic phenomena – often so intensely that the music becomes hallucinatory.

Branca was knocking on these heavenly gates back in the late ‘70s, when he was playing with the bands Theoretical Girls and The Static. Already thinking and working like a new-music composer, he performed pieces with these groups until the work became too involved, lengthy, and extreme for even the No-est of No Wave sets to accommodate. “Ultimately, my ideas were just too austere for those bands” is his explanation for taking the plunge from rocker to composer with (Instrumental) For Six Guitars (1979).[9] What followed was a series of striking pieces for ensembles of electric guitars, highlighted by The Spectacular Commodity (1979), The Ascension (1980), Symphony No. 1 (1981), Indeterminate Activity (1981), and the music for Twyla Tharp’s dance Bad Smells (1982).

Throughout that time, Branca was tuning his guitars in various ways – and even building new ones for his Symphony No. 2 (1982) – to get a better handle on the overtone behavior his music was generating. Eventually, he found himself systematically investigating the harmonic series, the ordering pattern that underlies all sound (and a whole lot more). One section of the essay on Branca, ”Ask the Nautilus Shell,” discusses the harmonic series itself, as well as the hit he got off it. That hit was palpable enough to give a new shape and purpose to his music, starting with the Symphony No. 3 (1983), for which he designed six keyboard instruments that were tuned to the intervals of the harmonic series.

In some of his later pieces, Branca has combined certain of the Symphony No. 3 keyboards with retuned electric guitars and electric organs, as well as with other new instruments (and always with the heavy-duty drumming of his long-time associate Stephan Wischerth). When such an ensemble is going full tilt, the sound careens from hurricane violence to lush-yet-transparent clouds; and at either extreme, it can release a sublime heart-stopping beauty. Branca propels the energy and intensity of rock into a whole other dimension that defies comparison. Nothing else sounds like this music – least of all, anything by Harry Partch. But it was apparent (immediately!) to me at the premiere of the Symphony No. 3, watching a stage filled with musicians blasting away on those constructions, that at last a symphony had been composed in the best Partchian manner.[10]

Card-carrying Partchism is also on hand when you have a guitarist who improvises not on guitar but on various home-made, guitar-like instruments that he calls, appropriately enough, home-mades. Yet it wasn’t a quest for new tunings which prompted Fred Frith to build instruments – a regular guitar offers him plenty of international range judging from his first Guitar Solos album of 1974. By 1984 and his Live in Japan LPs, however, Frith had taken his “guitars on the table approach” about as far as he could: An electric guitar lying flat on its back just wouldn’t survive some of the percussive playing he was ready to pursue. But a wooden slab rigged with tuned wires and high-volume pick-ups – he can drive into that as many nails or screws as he has a mind to. He can also walk it with a chain, drum it with anything from a metal rod to a 2×4, throw fistfuls of rice or coins or chopsticks at it, toss it to the floor…

Over the years, he’s done all that to his home-mades. Some not-so-rough stuff too, which can also be fabulous. In part because home-mades are heir to so many unnatural shocks, there’s a disarming freshness to the sound of him dusting it down with a shoe brush or plucking its strings. The “Improvisation” section of the essay on Frith discusses more of his methods and attitudes as a free improviser. Here I just want to observe that his improvisations are free of more than dependency upon melody or metronomic pulse (or genre considerations of jazz or rock); they’re free of his own virtuoso guitar chops. When Frith plays out, he’s also improvising his techniques for calling up, sustaining, and manipulating those mercurial sounds.

Frith schooled for these tactics in the ten years he played with Henry Cow, a band that defied virtually every traditional attitude toward rock, jazz, and improvisation. His first important efforts as a composer were also for the Cow – and it wasn’t too keen on traditional attitudes toward composing, either. The band’s individual music writers (usually Frith or saxophonist Tim Hodgkinson) could expect to have literally every measure of their pieces rigorously scrutinized by the other members. Instead of leaving scars, the focusing of that attention helped Frith get clear on the kind of composing he could do best. “I don’t think of myself as a ‘serious composer,’ you see. I prefer working around my own strange ideas about popular music, than worrying about being a composer and writing those kinds of structures.”[11]

Since Henry Cow’s disbanding in 1978, Frith has formed other groups, most notably The Art Bears and Skeleton Crew, with which he shares credit for the music. He can be heard most distinctively and seriously as a composer in his studio LPs: Gravity (1980), Speechless (1981), Cheap at Half the Price (1983). And they’re all filled with popular-music forms. Cheap even has an entire side of out and out pop songs; but their unusual vocals and provocative subjects give them a spin that’s rare for today’s pop. Gravity’s emphasis is dance music, although the dancing itself might be Irish or Middle Eastern or Latin or Greek or Caribbean – and in any combination, within individual cuts or even within individual tunes. Far from just quoting styles, Frith splices them together into his own rhythmic and melodic weaves; not Folk Music but what he likes to call Fake Music. Speechless has Fake Music too, as well as hard rock, country, noise, and all sorts of other things, commingling with the same lively imagination that characterizes Gravity. All that’s missing is Gravity’s sense of joy. The introspective and troubled Speechless doesn’t so much embrace different styles and genres as try them on and discard them.

Alongside all the pop gestures in these albums are tracks of random environmental sound, making contributions as essential as anything played by the musicians. Frith’s pleasure in the music that’s composed by everything and nobody informs all his work: His albums, bands, and improvisations are constantly alive to the musicality of everyday life. Which to these ears smacks of card-carrying Cage-ism.

When “Blue” Gene Tyranny performs his Country Boy Country Dog Concert for improviser(s) and electronics (1980), there are enough Cageian connections to smack anyone’s ears. An electronic tape of processed natural sounds runs throughout the piece, steadily and sometimes raucously working out its own shifting patterns of harmonies, rhythms, and tempi. But Tyranny, improvising at the piano, is under no obligation to respond to any of it. Whenever he does engage the tape, his responses are spontaneous and personal. Equally spontaneous and personal are the decisions of the sound engineer at the performance, who has the freedom to select or withhold different tracks of the tape, or to alter the sound of the piano. In the Concert, tape, pianist, and engineer form a trio of soloists, giving a special life to Cage’s idea of eliminating intentionality by multiplying intentionality.

Tyranny’s involvement with Cageian ideas goes back to his teens in the early ‘60s. Already an outstanding pianist, he premiered several landmark Cage works in his native Texas. He was also composing his own indeterminate pieces for musicians and tape by then, as well as playing in rock bands and listening to jazz. The essay on Tyranny examines the broad spectrum of genres and media which has found its way into his work over the years. But whatever materials he may use from rock, jazz, or concert music (traditional and-or avant-garde), he inevitably finds ways for the predetermined and the spontaneous to cooperate and reveal themselves with a new clarity. And that for him makes all his stuff new music: “The ideas of new music come from very personal, subtle experiences in people’s lives. It expresses possibilities both of making music and of things quite beyond our habits. We are moved by our ideas, even the most subtle of ones, which we may call spirit. Really trying to bring out spirit per se, whatever that would mean – that seems to be involved in new music.”

Tyranny’s LP The Intermediary (1982) sheds some light on the area of spirit that’s referred to as inspiration. He took a tape of one of his own virtuoso piano improvisations and fed it through various computer programs, generating a slew of synthesized sound; then he collaged into the improvised track certain electronic reinventions, letting them anticipate or accompany or echo their piano realizations. In Harvey Milk (Portrait) (1980) the sounds of Milk speaking to a cheering crowd are electronically refracted to trace the interplay of action and feeling, which characterizes both the man and his listeners (including whoever hears him in this piece). This particular investigation of spirit moves from a stylized documentation of Milk to a web of mutating electronic sound, cryptic and non-referential, yet resonant of the emotion and urgency which motivated Tyranny to create the Portrait; and which motivated Milk’s politics too.

These pieces are discussed in detail in the essay on Tyranny. But even in these brief descriptions, their Cageian features – the superimposition of different musics, triggering and interactive programs that function autonomously – are obvious. What’s Partchian in Tyranny’s music is subtler, but every bit as basic. In the interview, he acknowledges the impact of first hearing Partch’s music. One way he’s assimilated that maverick attitude is through electronic composition. Even if he never swings a hammer, Tyranny is still an instrument-builder whenever he constructs his own sound-making designs. On a deeper level, as he’s explained it to me, Partch is important for him as a paradigm of exploring feeling – emotion, dramatic narrative, archetypal imagery – through new musical techniques, just as Cage exemplifies a philosophical approach in which composing means investigating ideas of freedom.

Of course, Tyranny would be the first to reject any limitation of John Cage and Harry Partch to antagonistic polarities of head and heart. And I’m with him all the way on that: The personal, even archetypal qualities of events ordinarily considered too uneventful to be music have been revealed through Cage’s compositions; Partch’s complex and meticulous systems of intonation led him to define new freedoms of technique and performance. Music is only inhibited by an either/or approach to head and heart, or to aesthetics and techniques.

Or to “pop music” and “serious music.” The uninhibited musics of The Residents, Branca, Frith, and Tyranny are at the forefront of the “crossover of popular music and so-called concert music,” which Robert Ashley described. His conviction that this crossover would “change the audience for new music entirely,” is being vindicated. An expansion is occurring today, and not just in audience size and demographics. Something even more important is involved: how people can think. The late Dane Rudhyar defined this shift in perspective when he wrote of the need to develop an attitude “dis-Europeanized and to some degree dis-culturalized, that is, free from the limitations that any culture imposes on the experience of reality.”[12]

The four subjects of this book represent no one unifying school or style of music-making; but they all offer new avenues toward precisely the deconditioned awareness Rudhyar described. Now more than ever, few things seem more urgent – musically, socially, or personally – than such a deconditioning. Insanity, after all, is measured not by the weirdness of the information you dispense; it’s measured by how much outside information you refuse to take in. The more you can hear, see, relate with, and understand something for itself, independent of you and of The Line you’ve been told to think regarding this thing (or this person – especially yourself), the more free you are, the more alive you are, the more sane you are. In the other direction, as they say, lies madness; also ignorance, dependency, and fear. And who needs that crap?

FOOTNOTES

1. James Tenney, “Reflections after Bridge,” New Music America 1984 brochure, pp. 8–9. All other quotes attributed to Tenney in this essay are from that article; all emphases are Tenney’s.

2. Peter Garland, Americas. Santa Fe: Soundings Press, 1982, p. 279.

3. Nicole V. Gagné and Tracy Caras, Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1982, pp. 18–19.

4. Branca played a movement from his Symphony No. 4; Frith performed in a piece by John Zorn; Tyranny was a featured musician in Perfect Lives, the Robert Ashley video that was screened at the festival.

5. Interview with Hardy Fox, 15 June 1981.

6. That dance score was released in an 18-minute studio version as Side Two of their LP Fingerprince. Harry Partch died around the time of those sessions, and the song “Death in Barstow” (originally planned for Side Three of Fingerprince, but released instead on their Babyfingers EP), with its refrain, “First I went to Barstow, then I went to bed / First my friend was with me, then my friend was dead,” always struck me as an allusion to Partch’s death and to his woozy and wonderful setting of hobo graffiti, Barstow (1943).

7. Which means no interviews with The Residents…

8. There’s also the toy instruments and nursery rhymes of Goosebumps; Commercial Album’s yoke of brevity, where all the songs are exactly sixty seconds long. Even touring internationally with the Mole Show represented a special aesthetic and technical hurdle for The Residents: Other than a handful of legendary live sets played in California in the ‘70s, they’d worked exclusively in the studio up until then.

9. David Orr, “Glenn Branca” in Terminal!, December 1985, p. 6.

10. In the best Partchian manner, Branca intends to use his music in certain theatrical works he’s envisioned for years, developments of his Boston-based theater pieces of the early 1970s.

11. FINE PRINT: the interviews with Branca, Frith, and Tyranny are edited together from several long talks I had with each of them during the writing of the essays (1981–87). All undocumented quotes attributed to them in this book are from these or other conversations (or from my correspondence) with them.

12. Dane Rudhyar, The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music. Boulder: Shambhala, 1982, p. 110.

Acknowledgments

My topmost thanks go to Glenn Branca, Fred Frith, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, and The Residents.

The writing and publication of this book owes a great deal to the kindness and generosity of Patricia Poore, and I’m most grateful to her.

Special thanks go to Frank de Falco, for everything.

For their assistance, patience, interest, and enthusiasm, which mixed it up together in volatile portions, my thanks to Mariano Airaldi, Robert Ashley, David Avidor, Gene Bagnato, Scott Becker, Sylvia Bloch, Tim Buckley, Tom Burns, Tracy Caras, Rich Connaty, Tom Cora, Gian de Falco, Bill Duckworth, Barbara Ess, Hardy Fox, Jim Fox, Bruce Gallanter, Peter Gena, Don C. Gillespie, Peter Gordon, Rudolph Grey, Tim Holmes, Doug Kroll, Clem Labine, Kevin Lally, Bob Marino, Manny Maris, John Payne, Phil Perkins, Bruce Posner, and Carol Tuynman.

Sonic Transports is dedicated to Jack Britton and John Cage.

Links to:

SONIC TRANSPORTS: Glenn Branca Contents

SONIC TRANSPORTS: Fred Frith Contents

SONIC TRANSPORTS: The Residents Contents

SONIC TRANSPORTS: “Blue” Gene Tyranny Contents

SONIC TRANSPORTS: Contents

For more on these composers, see:

Music Book: Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music, Second Edition

More Cool Sites To Visit! – Music

For more on Glenn Branca, see:

Music Lecture: The Secret of 20th-Century American Music