Sep 1st 2013

Rocking the cradle of experimental music

by Michael Johnson

Michael Johnson is a music critic with particular interest in piano. 

Johnson worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his journalism career. He covered European technology for Business Week for five years, and served nine years as chief editor of International Management magazine and was chief editor of the French technology weekly 01 Informatique. He also spent four years as Moscow correspondent of The Associated Press. He is the author of five books.

Michael Johnson is based in Bordeaux. Besides English and French he is also fluent in Russian.

You can order Michael Johnson's most recent book, a bilingual book, French and English, with drawings by Johnson:

“Portraitures and caricatures:  Conductors, Pianist, Composers”

 here.

I recently became a “chance music” composer by accident – the best way. John Cage would have approved. I was playing a quiet CD, Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, when my little granddaughter started tinkling around on my Baldwin upright in the next room – hitting random notes up and down the keyboard. The two separate events merged beautifully. I’m sorry I didn’t record it.

I was reminded of this today while reading Alvin Lucier’s delightful book, Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music. One of his chapters is titled “Indeterminacy” – music that leaves most of the music-making to chance rather than to a composer’s strict instructions. “By using chance,” Lucier cites Cage as having said, you can “eliminate or forgo all those habitual ideas that you have and to discover something different”.

In lucid, deadpan prose, Lucier brings back to life one of the most fascinating and important periods of American music, the experimental trends and fads of three decades ending in the 1980s. Much of today’s new music in the United States, Japan and Europe is founded on the daring innovations developed in this period by a small group of composers, most of them American.

No one is better placed that Lucier to tell this story. He was a participant and, now in his 80s, is a veteran of 40 years of teaching a college-level course on this period at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. His book is a collection of notes for his witty and erudite lectures covering the sometimes outlandish experiments of such historic figures as Cage, LaMonte Young, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Feldman and others. 

If you somehow missed experimental music while growing up, I recommend looking for it on YouTube where most of Lucier’s examples are easily available. You may be surprised how accessible much of it is. As I write this, LaMonte Young’s Well-Tempered Piano is playing in background. Nothing could be more calming.

Lucier’s gift for story-telling and his jargon-free language make the book a joy to read. One regrets not having had an opportunity to attend his lively lectures in person.  He discusses and analyzes about one hundred of the key compositions of the period and shares memories of the composers – many of whom he knew personally. 

He recalls one concert in which Cage’s friend, the pianist David Tudor, dives under the piano and begins making sounds on the underside of the instrument. “The audience screamed. … People were furious. I was flabbergasted.” Still, Lucier remembers being also thrilled. At one point Cage rose up on a hydraulic platform playing the piano, using a radio as one of his instruments. The Pope’s voice came on the air asking for peace in the world.  “It was a wonderful moment… I guess you could say that concert blew my mind. I stopped writing music for a year.” 

This slim volume will clear up some mysteries that younger fans of new music wonder about, such as what Steve Reich intended with his rather basic Clapping Music. The answer is obvious when you know it: he was inspired by flamenco dancers when he happened to see a Spanish troupe clapping and stomping in a Brussels club.

Lucier’s talent for the anecdote takes him to Walter Piston’s class at Harvard where a student set to work creating one of Cage’s  “prepared” pianos, inserting penny coins to deaden some of the strings. “Why there must have been 40 cents in that piano,” Piston said. Lucier recalls that Cage “howled with laughter” at that story and made him tell it over and over. 

He also devotes time and space to deliver more thorough inspections of some of the seminal pieces of the era such as Robert Ashley’s Wolfman, first performed in 1964. “It was the loudest piece of music anyone had heard at the time,” Lucier writes. Wolfman is an homage to amplification.”

Other key works covered include Gordon Mumma’s Hornpipe, Christian Wolff’s For 1, 2 or 3 People and Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis, which he says with some pride “prompted the biggest walkout in the (New York) Philharmonic’s history”. He also notes that Leonard Bernstein introduced the piece by denigrating its importance. Lucier’s comment on Benstein: “Dumb”. 

One of the most interesting deconstructions concerns Lucier’s own milestone work, I Am Sitting in a Room, in which a short statement is spoken into a tape recorder, then recorded and rerecorded multiple times until the words become unintelligible. At the end of 15 minutes, the recording resonates with an eerie kind of music that had never been heard before. As Lucier puts it: “I stayed up all night doing it. As the process continued more and more of the resonances in the room came forth; the intelligibility of the speech disappeared. Speech became music. It was magical.”

People who heard Lucier perform it in person still talk about the experience decades later. 

Lucier and his composer friends suffered from lack of interest from concert-goers. Much of their work is only now being rediscovered and offered to a more receptive – if minority – public.  As Lucier recalls the period: “We composers were in a cultural war. We were colonized by the European musical establishment. Things are better nowadays.”







     

 


This article is brought to you by the author who owns the copyright to the text.

Should you want to support the author’s creative work you can use the PayPal “Donate” button below.

Your donation is a transaction between you and the author. The proceeds go directly to the author’s PayPal account in full less PayPal’s commission.

Facts & Arts neither receives information about you, nor of your donation, nor does Facts & Arts receive a commission.

Facts & Arts does not pay the author, nor takes paid by the author, for the posting of the author's material on Facts & Arts. Facts & Arts finances its operations by selling advertising space.

 

 

Browse articles by author

More Music Reviews

Oct 28th 2015
A decade ago, any mention of a choir would probably have brought Sunday morning hymns to mind. But there’s been a revolution in attitudes towards joining the local choir.
Oct 24th 2015

The Boston Philharmonic Orchestra opened its season this week with rousing performances of two works that had never before been combined on a program for Boston audiences – Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” and Richard Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra”.

Oct 18th 2015

Morton Feldman’s delicate, will o’ the wisp compositions demand of the listener a special mental and spiritual investment, a belief in music’s potential to pervade human consciousness.

Oct 9th 2015

Boston is that most musical of American cities, so there is never a shortage of recital and concert to choose from. I visit Boston twice and year and partake freely of the offerings.  Boston’s talented performers are the equal of New Yorkers, Parisians, even Berliners.

Sep 6th 2015

Not to brag, but I've stood upon some pretty rarified podiums: I've conducted "New York, New York" for Frank, "The Candy Man" for Sammy, and "Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie," for Don McLean.

Sep 5th 2015

Frank Castorf’s maintained his anti-romantic stance with his production of “Götterdämmerung” at Bayreuth on Wednesday, August 26th, and went further by giving the heroic music of Siegfried’s Funeral March and the final measures of the opera to Hagen.

Sep 3rd 2015

Perhaps Frank Castorf was in a bad mood when he conceived his production of “Siegfried” for the Bayreuth Festival –or he was just mischievous.

Aug 31st 2015

The decadence of the Nordic gods continued to be a major theme in Bayreuth’s “Die Walküre” as envisioned by Frank Castorf, who grew up in East Germany with the Marxist view of the world.

Aug 30th 2015

Two outstanding young pianists – one from Hungary, one from Italy – have been selected to become the first Oberlin-Como Fellows, two tuition-free years of study in a new partnership of the International Piano Academy Lake Como and the U.S. Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

Aug 26th 2015

In the Frank Castorf production of “Das Rheingold” that I saw in Bayreuth on Friday (August 21), Wotan and company have their god-like powers, but they are just a bunch of gangster types in a low-life setting.

Aug 14th 2015

Some stage directors probably would say that it’s insane to take a full-sized orchestra out of the pit and put it on stage during an opera performance, but that didn’t stop director François Racine from doing it for Seattle Opera’s production of Verdi’s “Nabucco.” Racine also had the company cov

Aug 5th 2015

What originally got Philip Glass going as a composer was the realization that he was “living in a world where all the composers were dead. Even the living ones were dead.” He decided to do something about it.

Aug 4th 2015

WHEN I TOLD a snarky friend I was writing about the new Philip Glass autobiography, Words Without Music, she asked, “Does it go like this: I, I, I, I, I, I, was, was, was, was, was, born, born, born, born …?” Snarky.

Jul 2nd 2015

The International Tchaikovsky Competition in St. Petersburg and Moscow ended last night (July 1) in a virtual American sweep in the piano category, with gold and bronze prizes going to American-trained Russian boys and the silver to a Chinese-American player from Boston.

Jul 1st 2015

With mixed results, the San Francisco Symphony performed Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” using projected imagery and movement on June 11th [2015] at Davies Symphony Hall.

Jun 7th 2015

The Bordeaux Opéra Nationale has been packing its 18th-century Grand Théâtre for a week of sellout performances of Norma, the great Vincenzo Bellini opera on which much of his reputation rests.