The Art of David Tudor preview

 

The Art of David Tudor  is a new 7 CD boxed set released from the ever great New World Records. The most exciting release IMO since their epic Music for Merce. Of course while there was much music of interest to me on Music for Merce it was the David Tudor pieces, especially the unreleased material, that was particularly of interest. In my series of posts covering that box set I time and time again bemoaned that the bulk of the Tudor pieces were only excerpts and more than once mentioned that there should be a boxed set of his pieces. Miraculously New World has provided.  This set can now be ordered, though I’m not sure if it’s in anybodies hands yet.  It will apparently be available for download on at least iTunes though the link is not currently active. However the liner notes for the set are currently available (major props to New World for putting these online – makes quotes and such from them a lot easier) and I’ve given it a looksee.  So before I have this set in hand let us consider what we are going to be getting.

 

The Art of David Tudor

Variations II  (John Cage)
For 1, 2, or 3 People  (Christian Wolff)
Bandoneon ! (A Combine)  (David Tudor)
Anima Pepsi  (David Tudor)
Pepsibird  (David Tudor)
Pepscillator  (David Tudor)
Mesostics re Merce Cunningham/Untitled (John Cage, David Tudor)
Weatherings  (David Tudor)
Phonemes  (David Tudor)
Rainforest IV  (David Tudor)
Webwork  (David Tudor)
Rainforest IV  (David Tudor)
Virtual Focus  (David Tudor)
Neural Network Plus  (David Tudor)

Quite a few of these pieces have been previously released either in whole or in excerpt. But these pieces were performed live and often performed with the Merce Cunnigham Dance Company or in concerts and due to the nature of live electronics can be quite variable. So in the cases where there are new performances or different versions it is certainly a cause for celebration.  The full versions of the pieces released only in excerpts are of course especially welcome.  Let us now consider each of these pieces in brief.

Variations II can be heard on the David Tudor Edition RZ set plus a different version on vol. 1 of the John Cage Shock set from EM Records, Edition Omega Point. This version is from the ONCE Festival and is I believe a third recording of the piece. I’m all for more versions of this piece as they all vary due to the nature of working with feedback.

For 1, 2, or 3 People  is currently available on Edition RZ’s Christian Wolff set as well as an excerpt on the Music for Merce set. These two versions are the same IIRC and this one is listed as also from tour with the Merce Cunningham Dance company. So could be the same one or a different performance.

Bandoneon ! (A Combine)  This has been released in excerpt on the DVD documentary series on the E.A.T. 9 Evenings series. This is not listed here as an excerpt but at just over 14 minutes it almost certainly is. In my review of the DVD I note that the length of the performance is not known, but I do go into the available data. This is a longer excerpt than found on the DVD by about 5 minutes which is welcome, but one still awaits the full piece.

Anima Pepsi was released on the album  Live Electronic Music (Electronic Music Foundation) and this appears to be the same version (both are 23’37” which is a pretty good clue).

Pepsibird  & Pepscillator These two pieces were along with Anima Pepsi were recorded at Recorded in the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan but only Anima Pepsi has been released. So these are two new tracks that presumably will be in a similar vein of Anima Pepsi.

Mesostics re Merce Cunningham/Untitled  Untitled, a definitive Tudor composition, has been released in a couple of forms but was originally performed with John Cage’s vocal performance of Mesostics re Merce Cunningham. As far as I know this version has not been released (a version with Takehisa Kosugi on vocals is on the album Three Works For Live Electronics released by Lovely Music).

Weatherings  This was released in excerpt on the Music for Merce set and assuming this is an entire performance, this would be the first complete recording of this piece.

Phonemes  This was released in excerpt on the Music for Merce set and a complete version can be found on  Three Works For Live Electronics released by Lovely Music. However this is a full live performance of the piece, whereas the  Three Works For Live Electronics version is a layered version of many recordings. So this will be a full, live, single version which is a welcome addition to the recordings of this piece.

Rainforest IV  There are two versions of Rainforest IV on this set both credited to Composers Inside Electronics during the period when Tudor was performing with them (they are still a going concern). As Rainforest IV is a sculpture based piece that was constructed anew on numerous occasions and thus was often different this is certainly justified. However the Rainforest pieces are of course Tudor’s most well know and most well documented. Mode has a disc with Rainforest IV (as well as Rainforest I) on it and there was an German instance of the installation in 1980 which has been released on an LP  by Edition Block and on CD by Lovely. One of the versions of on this set is this German installation the other from a Stockholm version. While most likely the German versions are all from the same source it could be a different excerpt or even a different recording. The Stockholm one appears to be a new release.

Webwork – This was presented in excerpt form on Music for Merce so a complete performance is of course highly anticipated. This has only otherwise been released as a 7? excerpt  on the John Cage tribute CD A Chance Operation. 

Virtual Focus  This very interesting piece excerpted on Music for Merce so a complete performance is definitely a huge plus here. There has otherwise been unreleased barring a 3? of excerpt on Musicworks 73.

Neural Network Plus  Again excerpted on Music for Merce but in this set a whole disc is dedicated to a 55″ version.  While Lovely Music has put out a double CD of the related Neural Sythesis pieces and Atonal Records put out a disc split between Neural Synthesis No.2 and a Cage piece this is the only recording of Neural Network Plus which includes Kosugi on violin. Even the extract was intense and wild so really can’t wait for this complete performance

Basically the pieces from Expo ’70 are the most novel of the set but the complete performances of the later live electronics pieces are of course the big draw. There is still quite a bit from David Tudor’s oeuvre that is still unavailable. His first piece, Fluorescent Sound is of course the first one that springs to mind (though perhaps no recording exists) but just scan through his list of compositions on DavidTudor.org and you can see that many are not represented here or anywhere. One hopes that of those that recordings exist that some day these will come out in some form.  With all the variation and iteration in his live performances one hopes that in the future these will all be available for download. This is I think the direction that any music that is so varied in performance needs to. It is a shame that these recordings just languish in vaults.  Still I can’t wait to get this set and and it is a vital edition to the David Tudor legacy. I commend New World for putting it out and will write more here once I’ve had a chance to absorb it.

2012 Retrospecticus

I barely listened to any music for a good half of this year and I also, in the interest in not having huge amount of unlistened to plastic objects littering my abode, tried to only buy things I knew I’d listen to a lot. I have to say that I did quite well in that regard thanks to various music blogs and Alastair Wilson’s top drawer Admirable Restraint radio programme. Thanks Alastair! Thus any sort of “best of” music list, even in the micro-domains that hold my interest, is even more useless than normal.  But I found there to be quite a bit of captivating music – nearly everything I bought – this year and there is certainly some value in writing a bit about it. There won’t be many (maybe any) shockers here for those that trade in these realms – the usual suspects are all here – but I’ll try to make up for that with a few words on each. Not really reviews –  you should buy them already! – and not really critical commentary either; perhaps it’s just rambling.  Whatever it is, this is what I’ve got for you this year.

Music I liked in 2012

 

Keith Rowe September (Erstwhile Records, EL011)

Whenever Keith releases a solo album on Erstwhile Records it tends to supplant the last one as the definitive statement in improvised music. The Room, ErstLive 007 and now September seem like a teleological continuum rendering the previous statement mute.  But on revisiting these piece The Room retains it’s power, its place as the definitive declaration (at least until The Room Extended) of Rowe’s philosophy and music, even as it’s language feels increasingly arcane.  The two Erstlives are more of piece utilizing the framing device of composed pieces from the classical tradition to which Rowe’s improvisation, radio grabs aids, abets and deconstructs.  The previous of these two pieces is well explained by Keith him self in a post on the Erstwords blog as is the nature of this framing device:

The concept for my solo performance was only formed the night previous to the performance itself. Thinking about the forthcoming solo, I felt the need to somehow make clear “who I was”: what my background is, what are my concerns? Something about my interest, the music I love, the sounds that have influenced me, during the performance I came to realise these could be regarded as “Cultural Templates”. – Keith Rowe, EL007

In September of 2011 Jon Abbey (Erstwhile Records) put on the most ambitious to date of his Amplify festivals: AMPLIFY 2011: Stones – two weeks at The Stone in New York City followed up by several days at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn. On September 11^th, 2011, the  ten year anniversary of al-Qaeda attacks on US power structures (more here if you are somehow unaware of this), the nights activities included this solo performance. Keith Rowe certainly had a burden of expectations placed upon him by his audience. A burden that he could choose to ignore as a British expat living in France, but one that he rose to embrace as a citizen of a world that has been transformed by the American lashing out in the aftermath of these attacks.

Of course we don’t have the benefit of a minute examination from Keith of September like we do for EL007 and certainly speculation on this piece likely reveals more of the speculator then of the musicians intentions – just compare the reception of EL007 that came out before Keith’s exegesis (for instance read my thoughts here: Amplify 2008: light – day 2 [though of course I had the benefit of being able to talk extensively with Keith at this concert]).  I didn’t have the luxury of discussing this performance with Keith, but Brian Olewnick did and from his excellent review of this piece this note is particularly helpful:

For Rowe, the Dvorak Piano Quintet had come to embody certain ideas about memory, including nostalgia, loss and false memories. Knowing that he was scheduled to perform in New York, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, it seemed an appropriate piece to utilize. – Brian Olewnick on September

Unlike EL007, September utilizes just the Dvorak piece as it’s framing device, but he works much more with extended radio grabs. These being from NYC on September 11^th, 2011 create a similar aural zeitgeist as you would have found in 2001 but shifted by ten years of a pop and media media landscape that had been irrevocably transformed not just by the passage of time but by the events of that day and the aftermath. The pop music, much of which is even older than the ten year shift, can perhaps evoke in the listener the phrase “the banality of evil”, but is that not too a projection on the part of the listener? In many ways the whole enterprise is — memory, nostalgia, loss and false memories.  I noted in my review of the concert eventually released as EL007 that Keith was playing with, complementing, even reinforcing the classical pieces he used as his framing device. With September the Dvorak is likewise not directly abused or deconstructed; the piece isn’t about the Dvorak. Instead it is held up in contrast, wistfully, as an exemplar of a world that never was, that can not be except in our imaginations and channeled into our art. And perhaps even there that world is lost to us. False memories of a world that never was, a world for which we feel such an intense loss and are nearly immobilized by our nostalgia.

Michael Pisaro/Toshiya Tsunoda crosshatches (Erstwhile Records)

My listening has been highly backloaded this year; I spent much of year on a cross country bicycle tour and when I returned to Washington State there was a lot to listen to.  This set came out while I was on tour and was one of the first things I acquired upon my return.  I never listen to headphones when I’m bicycling because apart from being patently unsafe it puts you at a remove from the environment and denies one a a true pleasure in my mind: listening to the sounds that you are immersed in.  One who’s ears are open hears a lot and if there is one thing I’ve learned over my years of listening to experimental music is how to piece together disconnected sounds into an immersive experience. This ability has meant that my relationship with field recordings is somewhat complicated.  I’ve worked with them myself for a decade now as detailed in this post on World Listening Day and I of course love many recordings that.  I tend to feel that field recordings can make great material and in certain cases can stand on their own, but are often used lazily or as a type of cultural tourism.

Toshiyua Tsunoda has long been a favorite musician, one of the few who is able to release “pure” field recordings that are absolutely captivating. This skill is akin to photography in that a skillful photog can make a piece of art out of the same scene that your average shooter can not merely with camera placement, framing and working with the available light.  A field recordist  can control mic placement, when to start and when to stop the recording and some bare settings on their recorder.  Both a photographer and a field recordist can apply effects, edits, overlays and the like upon a finished piece but it is then no longer “pure”.  I for one don’t have much of a problem of this impure results, but it is a different thing, use the recordings as “material” as opposed to as a thing in and of itself.  Michael Pisaro in his compositions often uses field recordings as material and also as an ‘environment’ in which his compositions take place (akin to the notion behind my “out of doors” series). The combination of these two musicians was something I was highly anticipating and I have to say I was not let down.

This set has been hard for me to write about, it has a presence and immediacy that just seems to exist.  It is hard to talk in the same way that field recordings can be hard to talk about, but this is much more a piece of music. I haven’t seen much written about it, essays or statements from the artists and the reviews I’ve seen have seemed to share the difficulties that I have. Simply describing the sounds used, or guessing at them, talking about Pisaro’s contributions versus Tsunoda’s and all of that just seems of little merit. I was immediately captivated by this set and it immediately became my favorite thing I heard this year.  As I began to catch up on other releases and acquired some new ones, nothing ever did displace this though the previous and the following releases joined it as my favorite music from this year. So really all I feel I can say about this, is that you need to hear it. It is absolutely engaging and interesting and challenging and musical. Perhaps my favorite thing from two artists of whom I like many, many things. I’ll have to think about that some – I do like so much from these two. But this is certainly the collaboratively project I’ve like the best from these two.

 

Morton Feldman Music for Piano and Strings volume 2 (Matchless Recordings) performed by John Tilbury and the Smith Quartet

The first volume of the this three volume set from Matchless Recordings was a favorite release from last year and I fully expect volume three to make next years list.  But volume two is certainly going to be my favorite of the three.  I wrote at length in this post, For Morton Feldman, about my love of Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello and this particular recording of it. Simply having a recording of this piece, given at the pace it requires, from John Tilbury, my favorite interpreter of Feldman is enough to put this right at the top of this years favorites.  I won’t write more of this particular piece – see the linked post if you want my thoughts and history with the piece.

Patterns in a Chromatic Field is the other piece on this DVD which is also given the best performance of this piece I’ve heard.  Now my relationship with this piece is complicated. I’ve listened to it many times in two other versions. The first of these was performed by Charles Curtis (cello) and  Aleck Karis (piano) released on Tzadik. Curtis is an excellent cello player and I think his work here is top drawer. This piece launches right into it with a frantic, sickly cello line as the piano plays big bass clusters. Shorter realizations of this piece find this initial cello part too frantic the piano part rushed.  Now it is not supposed to be languid but even just a few extra minutes can let this breath and let that opening not dominate the piece.

I soon moved on the version of the piece released much earlier on hat[now]ART as performed by Rohan de Saram (cello) and Marianne Schroeder (piano) which at around 1’45” is the longest version I’ve heard of this piece. No one can accuse this performance of rushing the piece.  I dearly love Rohan de Saram’s playing and if I had a dream version of this piece it was with him sawing the cello and John Tilbury tinkling the ivories. While this is a very cello forward piece the piano, as always is the case with Feldman, is vital and the performance demands that ineffable touch. As has been said by myself along with many others, Tilbury has that touch.  While I think many are good at performing Feldman, and I’d place the pianists of both of these other performances in that category, few are are great at it. Tilbury is and his magnificent touch is on display here. Even those opening clusters you can hear him pressing down on the keys with a velocity that hovers at some point. There is somehow still a softness to it amidst the big sounds.

Feldman’s string pieces with piano always have an interesting relationship to the piano. From Piano and String Quartet which the piano only place arpeggios to Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello where the strings are like the effects on a prepared piano there is never the attempts at a merged soundworld. The Smith Quartet do an excellent job at all of the string parts and while one may think of Irwin Arditti or Rohan de Saram as string players you’d love to hear in conjunction with John Tilbury I can find no fault in the musicianship here. These three DVD-A sets, which allows these pieces to unfold uninterrupted at around an hour and half each are sure to be considered among the very best realizations of these pieces and absolutely essential for an understanding and appreciation of these great compositions.

Jakob Ullmann fremde zeit addendum (Edition RZ)

I’ve long been a huge fan of Ullmann’s A Catalogue of Sounds (also on Edition RZ) and furthermore enjoyed  a string quartet of his recorded by the Arditti’s.  But another piece of his, voice, books and FIRE 3 (again on Edition RZ) I consider one of my biggest disappointments of all time. It was because of how much I loved A Catalogue of Sounds – a piece I’d place somewhere on my favorite pieces of all time list – and how much I didn’t care for it. So I really hesitated on picking up this set. This is  set of three CDs and Edition RZ stuff is always expensive, so what with the disappointment of the last piece of his they put out it was hard to take the risk. But good notices came in from people whose opinions I respect, people who also love  A Catalogue of Sounds, and ErstDist was selling it for a quite reasonable sum so I decided to take the chance.

“Loud music forgoes the subtleties of perceptible sound.” -Bernd Leukert, from the liner notes

Of course it turned out to be fantastic, probably another set tied for the top of the list. But I just haven’t had enough time to come to terms with all of the music herein to honestly make that clam.  The music is much closer in to A Catalogue of Sounds, especially on discs 2 and 3 – low dynamics, tentative brittle scrapes and percussive bits even some beautiful voice tones on disc three – the first use of voice I’ve liked from Ullmann. Disc one is pretty different with two shorter pieces instead of the disc length pieces of the other two discs. It is (of course) still pretty low dynamics, but much more varied, with a few louder interjections. The three discs are chronological with disc 1 featuring pieces from 1989 to 1993, disc 2’s single piece written between 1997-99 and disc 3’s piece the most recent composed between 2004-2007.

“We hear better because we make an effort to hear better.” -Bernd Leukert, from the liner notes

I should say that this is a very handsome set. The black on white on black of the box with it’s (seemingly) cryptic lines and dashes is really a stunner. Inside it continues to impress with the best individual disc sleeves I’ve seen. Each disc is housed in a little booklet with a pocket for the disc, the ever inscribed with disc number the same fragmented letterset of the box cover (and the Edition RZ composer series in general) and the interior featuring an image from the score.  The back contains the textural information – title, year, performers et al – each disc like an individual Edition RZ release. Really well done and by far the nicest traditional release I purchased these year.

“I can’t imagine any music upon which the shadow of a thousand years does not fall and which does not, in turn, itself cast shadows.” -Jacob Ullmann, from the liner notes

The set comes with very nice liner notes by Bernd Leukert which discuses much of the notions and material of each of these pieces as well as notions on Ullmanns goals and ideas. With the little amount of time I’ve had with the set I’m going to beg off on any further writing on it. Read these liner notes for better information than that I can provide at this moment. I’ll end by simply saying that I love the music on this set; I have listened to it a lot since getting it and it will need a lot more listens. Maybe I’ll try to write more about it at a latter date, but just thinking about trying to write something for A Catalogue of Sounds, which I’ve been listening to for half a decade I suspect I’ll never really know what to say. Perhaps that says enough.

 

Christian Wolff/Keith Rowe (Erstwhile Records, ErstLive 010)

In the spring of 2010 I had the good fortune to be able spend four days in Boston attending the Christian Wolff at NEC events. Keith Rowe was there to perform several pieces and among these was a duo improvisation with Christian Wolff. This was a pretty short (though wonderful, read about it here) performance, 10-15 minutes and thus at the AMPLIFY 2001 their duo was able to be billed as their “first full length” performance.  This CD of course is the document of that performance; perhaps the performance I was most unhappy to have missed in 2012. At the 2010 meeting I had truly wished for the performance to go on at length but it seemed that Wolff tends to prefer a shorter statement. In the performance of Edges, along with Rowe and NEC students, which is a graphic piece where you move through the material at your own discretion he was among the first, if not the first, to do so. So it is interesting to hear him improvising, in a situation with very little cover, for around 40 minutes.

Keith Rowe and Christian Wolff at NEC

Christian of course played with AMM during their most innovative and unruly period, concerts that could go on for two or more hours, so I really never doubted that he would rise to the challenge.  He operates here similarly to his performance of Edges (which was indeed written with AMM in mind) moving through various gestures and simply allowing more space, more deliberation in them. Keith is operating in his recent, more more pared down mode – which I feel is the the only time in his long career that he has bent toward the prevailing aesthetic as opposed to pioneering it. Of course one could argue that he’d pioneered it with AMM back in the 60s and it is simply a return to the form for him. And yet it is the prevailing aesthetic in the circles in which he is best known and he had not moved to embrace it until pressed to.  However once Keith moved in this direction I think he really showed how it should be done. That is he lets the silences be silences whereas I think most ‘silencers’ push the silence around (to paraphrase old Morty). The spaciousness and deliberation of both of the performers here works quite well, as does Christian seemingly moving through his gestures Edges style. Keith very slowly, at a pretty low volume, works with a few textures with again much space between them. The more upfront gestures seem to mostly come from Christian, again evoking Edges (one of the symbols is to make a loud noise). In fact considering Keith’s excellent and very subdued version of Edges on the excellent Christian Wolff double CD on Edition RZ from last year, this really could just be an unannounced duo performance of the piece. Thus you end up with a piece similar to the late Cage Number Pieces in which the events elide due to individual variations of choosing spaces.  A wonderfully taught piece, with sounds from the Stone and the City nearly on equal footing with the performers own. Without a doubt the most engaging bit of duo improv (a diminishing genre in these circles) I heard this year.

John Cage ?John Cage Shock  (EM Records, Edition Omega Point)

This year was the John Cage Centenary and there was many great Cage releases and re-issues put out this year.  Too many for me to keep track of or acquire all of (I really regret not hearing the four CD set of Etudes Australes performed by Sabine Liebner for instance) but good to see both in recordings and concerts Cage’s legacy seriously tackled.  Among the most interesting of all the releases is this historical document of John Cage and David Tudor in Japan. The impact of their tour was described as John Cage Shock which was used as the title for this three CD set.

In this tour Cage championed new music beyond his own with pieces from Christian Wolff and Karlheinz Stockhausen being performed along with pieces from Japanese composers Toru Takemitsu and Toshi Ichiyangai.  What is most interesting to me about this set is that it documents further use of David Tudor’s Amplified Piano that was so stunning on his realization of Variations II.  Volume 1 of this set includes another version of that piece, shorter and not quite as powerful but more crunchy and even more noisy at times –  A nice addition to the version available on Edition RZ.. This colume also includes a great version of Takemitsu’s Corona for Pianists and a Wolff’s Duo for Pianist & Violinst. All three of this pieces are excellent and this is I think easily the most essential disc in the set.

The amplified piano can also be heard on volume 2 in the  realization of Cage’s 26’55.988″ for 2 Pianists & a String Player.  Alas this performance is marred in my opinion by the interjections of Yoko Ono (whom I can like just fine in other contexts). As the other piece on volume 2 is Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X which is a piece I for one don’t care much for, I find volume 2 to only be of historical interest.  The goods return with volume 3 which opens with a great, noisy realization from Cage of his 0’00”. Music for Piano #7 from Ichiyangi, a graphic score that Tudor interpreted with sudden and spaced out interjections on the piano while various electronic and concrete sounds are projected. Interesting to hear with some great sounds but not a piece I’m going to play a lot.  The disc also includes the rather indifferent and unmemorable Composition II for 2 Pianos composed by Micheal von Biel.

Musically the whole set is pretty mixed. I would have been satisfied with Variations II, 0’00”, the Takemitsu and the Wolff which could have fit on a single disc. But the set is quite nice with folde out liner notes in English and Japanese each with a nice sized picture or two on them. The set I bought also came with three postcard size photographs of Cage and Tudor from the tour. The document of the performances that created Cage Shock in Japan is certainly of a lot of interest for Cage enthusiasts along with those interested in 20th Century composition and the development of Live Electronics. While I may not connect with every piece I certainly value this entire set.

Morton Feldman Crippled Symmetry: at June in Buffalo (Frozen Reeds) performed by the Feldman Soloists: Eberhard Blum, Nils Vigeland, and Jan Williams

While this may have been John Cage’s centenary year, his fellow NY School composer Morton Feldman received a number of fantastic releases this year as well.  Few were better than this historical document of the Feldman Soloists – a group of musicians who performed Feldman’s work during his lifetime – performing Crippled Symmetry in Buffalo NY in June of 1983.

This turned out to be one of the best performances that we had ever given together. The rare and indescribable “magic moment” of occasion and ambience seems to have inspired us.” -Eberhard Blum writing on this performance.

I often turn to Morton Feldman to listen to as I fall asleep. I’ve long been burdened by insomnia and putting on music as I go to bed  often leads to me listening to the entire thing before eventually falling into slumber. Some nights though I fall asleep relatively quickly and thus I like music that is both soft and gentle but that is worth one’s attention. Feldman has long been in that category for me and thus he is often on my night stereo.  This set has gotten a huge amount of play in that regard and thus I’ve listened to this as much as anything this year. Of course it has also been played numerous times  without the hope for sleep being involved and it is just an absolute stunner. I have two other versions of this piece including one by this very same ensemble released on Hat. I’ve played these other versions many times over the years, but the energy and vitality of this live performance is just unmatched.

 

Various Artists Dotolim USB (Dotolim)

Compilations are almost always mixed affairs and this is no exception. A USB memory stick with ten uncompressed recordings from people and groups who performed at or otherwise involved with the Dotolim venue in Seoul South Korea. The memory stick itself is quite cute: a little plastic square with plain text of the title and different colored rubber covers on the USB jack.  Definitely my favorite bit of packaging from this year.  Once you plug it into your computer you can run in your web browser and html page that serves as index and allows you to play the individual audio and the one video file. Of course one can just as easily copy the files over to your computer and play them with the device of your choice which was the method I chose.

The set features five solos from Joe Foster, Kevin Parks, Jason Kahn, Tetuzi Akiyama and Ryu Hankil’s solos. I really dug those from Foster, Parks, Kahn and Hankil but found the Akiyama rather short and slight.  There are noisier pieces from Astronoise and Transistorhead that didn’t do much for me at all, but of course your mileage may vary there. But to me the highlight of the set was the quartet of  Hong Chulki, Choi Joonyong, Joe Foster & Jin Santa and the duo of Olaf Hochherz & Jamie Drouin of whom I was previously only minimally familiar  The quartet with its fluttery metallic sounds, rotated metal, crumpled amplifications and spaciousness feels like a lot of familiar ideas pushed one step beyond flirting with a structureless structure and is just completely riveting.  The Drouin and Hochherz almost sounds like a duo of Sachiko M & Sachiko M with the pure tone and the fluttery side of her work playing together along with a sprinkling of the contact mic she sometimes deploys. Yet the context and the structure of this piece is all it’s own and there are sounds that Sachiko doesn’t try for. Thus it is a rare exploration into that soundworld and one I found completely captivating.

 

My personal copy of the set

 

In a period where composition seems to be leading the way, at least capturing the bulk of the attention, improvisation is alive and strong in Korea. There is a lot of risk in the work coming from there and it often doesn’t entirely succeed. But the risk is necessary and the payoff is high. If one’s attention isn’t solely on composed work at this juncture you can do no better than to tune your ears to the small but thriving scene in Korea.

 

Michael Pisaro fields have ears (6) (Gravity Wave)

Fields have ears has a long history of it’s development, iteration and performance which Pisaro details in this fascinating post on the Gravity Wave blog: Some Some thoughts on the “fields have ears” series.

The series of pieces named fields have ears represent my attempts to come to compositional terms with different notions of “fields”: how we hear them, how they might hear themselves, and what there is to hear.

 – Michael Pisaro, from the aforementioned blog post.

I happened to be at the August 2011 performance of the the piece for guitar and sine waves in Seattle,  (and met Michael in person for the first time as well) which I quite enjoyed and is interesting to contemplate in relation to this later version of the piece, in which the Seattle performance is incorporated. After that performance I picked up the realizations of the related pieces released on Another Timbre, which records several different iterations of the piece from several different ensembles.  This I have to say is also a quite enjoyable disc and that I really liked the different realizations herein.  These pieces have a lot more in common with the live performance I witnessed in their spare structure and delicacy which makes this disc an ideal companion for this new recording and along with the textual material allows the listener to really engage with this piece and it’s history.

One thing I’ve found is that is a lot of the Wandelweiser and related musics work far better in live performance than recorded. That is the music seems to be activated by their surroundings and since they often use space and silence these surroundings are oft given quite a prominence of place. I think that Pisaro has been the most successful of these related groups of musicians at translating his pieces to the recorded medium primarily because, I suspect, he takes the medium in account. That is the pieces released are often more layered, incorporate field recordings or specially take the limitations and differences of playing back a piece into account. Whereas a live recording of a performance such as the one I experienced in Seattle might seem slight or overly thin this really is a limitation of open air recording versus the listening experience.  The way that we shift our focus from all the sounds that surround us and the effects of the space from two ears separated by the skull is quite different from what can be recorded. The listener constructs the piece as much as the muscian and the environment. It is this that I think is the difference between the versions of fields have ears: in the realization of (6) for the Gravity Wave disc Pisaro layered together different performances and recordings of various versions of the piece and added some site specific field recordings. This takes advantage of that effect, that John Cage understood so well with all of his simultaneous performances, happenings and “musicircuses”, of the layered event. The brain automatically fits sounds (and images too – watch any video the sound off and the music of your choice playing and note out it “syncs” up) together and creates it’s own context.  For is this not how we experience sound all the time in nature?

So what began as something like a well-regulated garden became a space filled with all kinds of material, now resembling a rather unruly city park.” -Michael Pisaro, from the fields have ears (6) liner notes.

 

John Cage Sonatas & Interludes, James Tenney,Piano (hat[now]ART)

The John Cage piece that even those who don’t like John Cage enjoy. This relatively early (1946-48) piece, one of the last before Cage had fully embraced chance operations, is one of the pinnacle of Cage’s prepared piano works. This piece listened to in it’s entirety, develops as it goes along with a gentle tension and release and a wonderful percussive aspect that more fully explores the prepared piano than any other of Cage’s pieces to utilize the instrument. This is the most recorded of Cage’s pieces and is widely available from the original performance by Maro Ajemian to my personal favorite by John Tilbury. With so many versions out there one may wonder why it is this one is essential to add to one’s collection.  The answer is that James Tenney, a fellow composer in the experimentalist tradition, adds much to one’s appreciation and understanding of this piece with his realization. Tenney heard Cage himself performing this piece at the age of 16 and that turned his head enough that he pursued music along with science and engineering. These dual interests informed Tenney’s experimentalism – his scores often worked with acoustical properties and explored mathematical functions. Furthermore he performed the Sonatas & Interludes throughout his life and this familiarity, expertise and love of the piece combined with his engineers precision in the preparations lead to a faithful yet unique realization. The preparations, which Cage detailed in his typically precise yet idiosyncratic way (for instance he uses measurements for the placement of the preparations that are based on a specific piano instead of being scale independent), were hand selected by Tenney based on he thought it should sound. So while he followed Cage’s instructions his primary driver was the sound. His performance was informed by his compositional interests in sound and relationships of sound and thus he performed the pieces a bit more brusquely than is typical. Listening to this with an ear toward the interactions of the sounds as opposed to the melodic and rhythmic is truly rewarding.  While I may turn to the Tilbury two out of three times this version will be that other play.  Beyond the historical interest of the Maro Aiemian recording these two recordings of the piece will suffice.

Other Favorites

Seijiro Murayama/Kazushige Kinoshita 59:01.68 (Ftarri/IMJ)
Antoine Beuger  s’approcher s’éloigner s’absenter  (Erstwhile Records)
Andrea Neumann/Bonnie Jones green just as I could see  (Erstwhile Records)
Andrew Lafkas Making Words  (Sacred Realism)
Codeine When I see the Sun (Numero Group)
Earle Brown Abstract Sound Objects (Wergo)

These six records are all as different as can be and are all ones I enjoyed quite a bit. The Kinoshita/Murayama (which I especially love the cover) I perhaps received too recently to really fully absorb. While I think that Kinoshita’s work is marvelous here I found that Murayama, while in the main adding very interesting and compatible sounds sometimes lets loose with sounds from his drums that pull me out. Too on the nose as it were. Overall solid and worth hearing, but just shy of greatness I feel.

Beuger has often left me cold and while I have enjoyed several of his compositions, it is this one that I feel I have truly connected with.  There is a lot more diversity to the sound and dynamics here and a playfulness – perhaps brought by the performers – that I’ve found lacking in his work. This disc is definitely recommended for those that may have shared my skepticism, but also for those who feel like I do that Wandelweiser stuff is best live and in recordings that capture that aspect.

Neumann and Jones put out the only other outstanding duo improv I heard this year. Admittedly I didn’t seek out everything and thus you can take that for what it’s worth, but I heard enough clips and read enough reviews that I only bought things that I felt would appeal. And this one surely did.  I’ve enjoyed both  of these musicians work for years and I was really excited to hear this recording. I was a little disconcerted by reports of singing and text recitation which is often overly affected and earnest in experimental contexts but this small bit of that here works effectively.  Lafkas’ large ensemble piece is a sprawling work that drones and chatters but always seems well considered. Another disc I got too late to absorb fully but one I’ll definitely return to many times.

At the end of my cross country bicycle tour my thoughts increasingly turned to the music of Codiene, the “slow core” band from the early 90s that were a mainstay of my later college years. On arriving in Bar Harbor I found out that they put out a set including their three albums along with three CDs of unreleased material (and also toured briefly). Quelle Coincidence! Owning the originally albums I didn’t feel much need to buy the whole set (plus I no longer have a turntable) but I was delighted to find I could purchase the unreleased material from iTunes. And so I did. These tracks, plus the original albums once I was back home, got many, many plays.

It’s been a great year for the New York School with absolutely vital discs  featuring John Cage, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff released. Happily Earle Brown wasn’t neglected either with Wergo putting out this top notch set performed by my second favorite pianist Sabine Liebner. This set has piano versions of all of the expected “hits” plus many more, much more obscure pieces. All of these absolutely beautifully and creatively rendered by Lieber. Brown’s graphic and open works demand this creativity and likewise require many versions to get any sort of handle upon. Thus this is a most welcome addition to my collection of Brown realizations.

Music for Merce part 5

Merce Cunningham (April 16, 1919 - July 26, 2009)

 

Music for Merce (1952-2009)

 

Merce Cunnigham’s impact on the dance world seems without question, but his legacy extends far beyond that with his championing of contemporary art and new music. The list of artists he collaborated with is staggering especially when you consider how many of them had such an impact themselves on their various fields: Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Frank Stella, Morton Feldman, Maryanne Amacher, Bruce Nauman, David Tudor, Pauline Oliveros, Jasper Johns, Toshi Ichiyangi and on and on. His continual promotion of new music,the subject of this set, even at critical cost to the company is frankly quite amazing. Doing research on modern dance for these posts, the really pedestrian music that most dance companies utilize, no matter how cutting edge their choreography may be, highlights just how forward thinking Cunningham was and how willing to place himself, his dances and his legacy at risk in support of  this music.

 

Cunningham and Cage

Being allied with John Cage was clearly a massive boon in keeping abrest of the current trends in modern music and his long tenure as music director ensured that the companies music stayed on the forefront of the cutting edge. The very judicious additions of new regular musicians and use of guest musicians and composers kept continuity and kept things fresh. Cage’s legacy as musical director is in keeping with the rest of his career: also exploring, always experimental always looking for new sounds and new ways to use materials.  Tudor’s tenure as music  director was so short that he really had no time to make much impact. The company seemed to stick with the current regular musicians and composers and in fact there are no pieces on this set from that period.  The final music directory, from 1997 until the end of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Legacy Tour in December 2011 is Takehisa Kosugi.

 

Takehisa Kosugi at Subtropics (photo by alesh houdek)

Kosugi has of course been a member of the Company’s pit since the sixties and had composed, or improvised many a piece for the company in the intervening years. I’ve expressed numerous time in these posts my mixed reactions to his work here – enjoying his violin and live electronics at times, his vocal work pretty much not at all. However to consider his work as musical director is a different matter as it is hard to say how much influence was Cunninghams.  Cunningham was certainly well connected in artist circles and I’m sure met people that he’d like to work with and passed on suggestions. Equally so is Kosugi connected in the musical world, especially in NYC and certainly brought in a lot of the new voices.  There has has been a Music Committee (currently Christian Wolff, David Behrman, John King) for quite some time in the company and they certainly have had some influence as well. Regardless of whomever may be ultimately responsible it is undeniable that the 13 year period after Tudor’s passing seems to be musicaly the weakest; the least cutting edge.

 

Robert Chase Heishman, etc,
printed backdrop for Merce Cunningham's Split-Sides, 2003

The use of musicians associated with  (or sympathetic to) the downtown scene such as Jim O’Rourke, Ikue Mori, Marina Rosenfeld, George Lewis, Christian Marclay seems most likely to come from Kosugi who certainly has intersected with that crowd. The use of more avant pop musicians such Radiohead and Sigur Rós (for Split-Sides, 2003), seems like a move from Merce; perhaps responding to what his younger dancers were listening to. This set dedicates only one disc to the music between 1998 and 2009 and with the exception of Annea Lockwood all are from longtime collaborators with the company. This disc is also by far the least interesting in the set with only a repurposed Cage composition of much interest. The second disc covers Events, which feature improvised music and many of the aforementioned downtown musicians;  more on Events in the disc ten section of this post. It is hard really to assess the final decade of the company based on what is here – the set is always misleadingly incomplete (the aforementioned Radiohead and Sigur Rós being a late example not included music). There was definitely a lot more revivals in the companies final decade, which I think is reasonable – the dances could be “lost” without this oral transmission. Kosugi and the rest of the pit clearly did an admirable job on recreating the old pieces, or at least playing recordings of them for these revivals. Cunningham continued to make new dances and innovate with the use of his DanceForms software but at an understandably diminished rate. Cunningham’s legacy is as I’ve said undeniable and even if its final years weren’t as strong as its earlier years, he was still not spinning his wheels.

Disc Nine (68′ 58″)

The final disc of pieces composed for the Company is a letdown.  It begins well with a very nice, though short, extract from a late Cage number piece but its all downhill from there. Disappointing pieces from King and Behrman, form the core of the disc and the final piece, by Annea Lockwood is nice enough, but spineless.  Lockwood’s piece though is the most forward looking of these concluding pieces in that they commissioned a new (ish) composer who is clearly more hungry for exposure. The Cage piece is from 1991, one of several of his older pieces that was put to use to accompany new dances.  King and Berhman are of course company regulars (and music committee members) and shows Kosugi not straying too far from associates in his choice of whom to commission. As I’ll discuss in the disc ten section below, he does seem to bring in a lot more new musicians for the Events, so frankly this could be a lot worse. But it does seem to be out of touch with more interesting musical work occurring during the last decade of the company.

Merce Cunningham, Interscape (2000)

1) John Cage (1912-1992)  108 and One⁸ (1991) [excerpt] 14:18
Dance: Interscape (2000)
Loren Dempster, cello; Orchestra del Teatro La Fenice, Arturo Tamayo, conductor
Recorded September 29, 2000, Venice

This is the only truly great piece on this disc; Cunningham utilzing a late Cage number piece for one of his later dances. It’s interesting to contrast how well they are able to get the orchestra to perform, considering the open rebellion Cage recevied from orchestra’s early in his career. But now he’s a household name, the practices of the experimentalists are, while not really embraced, at least understood.   One⁸ was written for Michael Bach, who invented his own bow and commissioned a number  of rather virtuosic cello pieces from Cage.

Besides the musical notation itself, perhaps the most informative part of the score, the key to its understanding, is the phrase “for Michael Bach.” I am reminded here of the composer Sylvano Bussotti’s 5 piano pieces for David Tudor: that the title was not so much a dedication as an instrumental designation. The same is true of Cage’s score, since Michael Bach is not just a cellist, but an inventor of playing techniques.

That One⁸ was composed for him tells us much about the way the music is to be played. First, there is the use of his unique curved bow – the BACH.Bogen®. This bow, first developed by Michael Bach in 1989, not only has a curved shape, but also has a mechanism for adjusting the tension on the bow hairs. These two features together allows the cellist to play three or even all four strings of the instrument simultaneously, something which is impossible with a traditional straight bow. – James Pritchett⁽⁶⁾

Many of the number pieces could be performed along with other number pieces, even the large orchestral pieces – 108 indicates the number of musicians. The description of this piece from the John Cage database describes all of the various options:

“108 can be played with or without One⁸ for violoncello solo and/or with One⁹ for sho and/or Two³ for sho and conch-shells. “- 108 in the John Cage Database

The piece itself is typical for the late time brackets pieces, with pitches indicated to be played within ranges of time as well as a variety of instructions on technique, tonality, dynamics and the like:

The composition uses flexible time-brackets with single tones, which should be played in a single bow, single breath, or a simulation of that (by circular breathing or imperceptible bow changes). Tones can be short or long, since the beginnings and endings of the brackets overlap. Long sounds should be soft, short ones may be louder. The piece is split up in parts with silence and parts with sounds: 0’00”-1’30”, 14’00”-18’00”, 32’30”-34’30”, 35’00”-39’00” and 42’00”- 43’30” are silent periods, the others are periods of activity. In the case of a cello concerto the violoncello is heard in the silent periods. In this case it is called One⁸ and 108.”
– 108 in the John Cage Database

The recording begins with skittery cello, sounding almost electronic.  Then the darker sounds of the orchestra coming in, each instrument in long low lines. Often brooding, some real dense parts, lots of horns.  The cello cutting through now and again.   Dempster here as the featured cellist is really great, this excerpt is probably the best version I’ve heard of 108; wish this whole disc was this performance.

 

Merce Cunningham Fluid Canvas (2002)

2) John King (b. 1953)  longtermparking (2002)  [excerpt] 15:31
Dance: Fluid Canvas (2002)
John King, laptop
Recorded September 10, 2002, London

Early laptop piece, has a sort of “digital live electronics” feel a first but becomes increasingly typical of Max/MSP music of the time – grain based synthesist, sequenced rhythms, moving around the stereo field. Later sampled, looped piano that becomes pretty spectral and then a terrible sequenced digital percussion bit.  Digital ping ponging and ponderous piano at the end. Overall a pretty lame piece and one where the excerpt could have been a lot shorter.

 

3) David Behrman (b. 1937)  Long Throw (2007) [excerpt] 18:25
Dance: eyeSpace (2007)
David Behrman, laptop; Takehisa Kosugi, electric violin; John King, electric guitar, viola;  Christian Wolff, prepared piano
Recorded October 22, 2007, Melbourne

“The music reflects the six-decade time span from 1947 to 2007 by combining a piano part, with preparations similar to those used by Cage in his “Duchamp” piece, with 21st-century music software and sound-sensing technology.

Long Throw was made with performance roles for the core musicians of the Cunningham Company in mind: Christian Wolff, Takehisa Kosugi, John King and Stephan Moore. In addition to the prepared piano part, the piece also calls for performances by several musicians playing violin, viola, and electric guitar. Its software was designed by the composer.”⁽¹⁾

Piano, with swirling laptop initially. The piano from Wolff is really nice. The guitar comes in and is slide and harmonics; a bit silly. The piece has a sort of loping feel to it; like a Bill Frisell piece.  Percussion from the prepared piano, gentle americana from the electric guitar and violin and a sort of brooding wash from the laptop. Solo piano part in the middle is nice, rather Wolff-ish in nature (beyond being played by him) but again with a touch of jazz – ragtime almost.  I wanted to like this piece a lot more; while it has its moments it’s rather thin on the ground. Becomes kind of ping-pongy digitally toward the end.

Merce Cunningham eyeSpace (2007)

4) Annea Lockwood (b. 1939)  Jitterbug (2007) [excerpt] 20:19
Dance: eyeSpace (2007)
John King, electric guitar, viola, live electronics; David Behrman, laptop, zither; Stephan Moore,  live electronics
Recorded January 26, 2008, Stanford, California

Kind of a popping electrical sound, repeated guitar string taps, the sound of rushing water, metal on strings and so on. It goes through many different “movements” each with a different feel, but gives the piece a lack of unity (perhaps evoking the title). Best bit has this almost flatulent electronics that fades in and out along with a sound like a far away bull roarer and dripping water.  All of this evokes frogs, insects and other flora and fauna pond. Like a sylvan version of Rainforest made for one of those “meditation” tapes.  Lots of good moments like this but  I can’t help but feel that every time I hear a Lockwood piece that while she may have innovated the style there are those that, even in imitation, do it some much more interestingly.  This is an enjoyable enough piece but, frankly it’s background music.

—

A 2008 Event at Dia:Beacon

Disc Ten (77’30”)

“Presented without intermission, Events consist of excerpts of dances from the reportory and new sequences arranged for the particular performance and place…”  -Merce Cunningham

Dancers need space in which to dance, to run on and off stage, to be able to generate the needed velocity for leaps and bounds; but space was not always a given in the early days of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.  On their first World Tour in 1964 they took whatever space was offered to them and in one such space realized they couldn’t perform any of their current repertoire. Looking back to the “happening” at Black Mountain College where simultaneous music, theater, dance etc was performed in a cafeteria the Events were born. In these events the dancers would perform parts of dances, or improvise within a limited area, or perform simultaneous solos and the like.  In the first Events, John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis was the music performed, but in later Events the pit musicians would primarily improvise. Disc Ten of this is presents thirteen short extracts (and really short as these would usually be an hour and a half)  from these improvisations.

“In Vienna, we were scheduled to perform in the Museum of the Twentieth Century, but it had no theater. In order to present our work in this unconventional space, Merce and John created a special format, reminiscent of Cage’s 1952 Black Mountain Happening. This format would serve Merce well over the next forty-plus years, allowing the company to perform in almost any situation, from New York’s Grand Central Terminal to Ghiradelli Square in San Francisco to the Piazza San Marco in Venice to North Cotteloe Beach in Perth, Australia. For want of a better title, he called the performance in Vienna Museum Event #1. In November 2004, forty years later, Event #725 took place in Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London. ” – Carolyn Brown^{(4, p.387)}

This disc is sadly ahistorical as it begins in 1993 when hundreds of Events had taken place (they’ve done more than 800 of these so far) and it would be interesting to have heard parts from across the entire history. But apart from that, this was a disc I was quite interested in, as the Company musicians were primarily composer/performers and they primarily played their’s  and others compositions.  The Events also seemed to be a proving ground of sort for musicians -new and younger musicians would play in these pieces in the pit and some might later become regulars or be commissioned to compose for the Company. Perhaps it is to display the wide variety of musicians who were asked to play for these Events that they cover the era past John Cage’s tenure as music director.  The first of these is the only one with Tudor and is easily the best of them; I for one would have enjoyed hearing some events from the heyday of the live electronics pit.

 

A 2002 Event

The disc of Events turns out to be the absolute worst disc of the set and its biggest disappointment.  The downtown (and others) musicians they bring in are uniformly terrible here, performing horrific laptoppery, banal turntablism, uninspired and dated electronics, wanky guitar, overly muscular sax and so on and is just in general a complete and utter mess. Kosugi, who performs in the bulk of these, often displays his worst tendencies: terrible vocalisms, overuse of delay and so 0n but is often the best aspect of these performances. There are some exceptions, the first short one that is simply a Tudor/Kosugi duo and some of the latter pieces which are primarily old hands: Christian Wolff, David Berhman et al. But primarily they are unfocused, misdirected excess that really disappoint. It is a cliché that composers and musicians who primarily play composed works are poor improvisers but cliché’s often arise from the repetition of a truth (and it should be noted that improvisers that play composed works are also often equally lacking; a situation which we get to hear a lot of these days). But really it is the “professional” improvisors here that are really terrible; those members of the downtown and related scenes: Mori, Marclay, Lewis, Scanner and so on.  The absolutely terrible nature of much of this music lends credence to the notion that Kosugi’s tenure as music director was the end of the long run of creative music that the company promoted and supported.

The dances during the Events on the other hand, seem to be of considerable interest. Especially as they are performed in galleries, sculpture parks and other unique locations. I’ve sprinkled the short descriptions of the Events recordings (I can’t really bear to listen to these enough to do more) with photos I’ve found on the web of various Events from the last decade. They don’t correspond to the music but they demonstrate some of the great settings and costumes used for these events.  While this disc is a rather depressing way to go out, it doesn’t diminish at all to me the amazing legacy of music that Merce Cunnigham help facilitate nor the greatness of this set. Do I wish that some of the excerpts were longer and this disc to have simply not been part of the set? Yes. But then of course one would lose the historical record (no matter how incomplete) of what this music was like. Excerpts, or even better complete performances of all of the Events as digital downloads would be in my mind the best way to preserve this historical record without creating the vast amount of plastic that I suspect will be rarely played. In fact I hope that the MCDC moves in that direction to preserve the legacy – there is so much material and no amount of physical releases will ever represent it all. The MCDC has been very forward thinking with its use of online video, pictures and other materials, I hope that only increases in the future.

August 2009 Event

After his death the Company members did a performance of Events in Central Park of which the above photo is one of many on Flickr. It was a believe without music and just the dancers, performing his choreography. A beautiful tribute.

Rest in Peace Merce Cunningham, thanks for all the amazing work. And a big thanks to New World Records for putting out this amazing set.

EVENTS (1993-2009)

 

Takehisa Kosugi's rig

1) Event””February 16, 1993, Red Wing, Minnesota 5:58
David Tudor, live electronics; Takehisa Kosugi, electric violin

The only one of the Events in this set to include David Tudor –  a super rare opportunity to hear him improvise. Thankfully Kosugi keeps his mouth shut and this is overall a great, if short, piece.  Electronic drops, scrapes, stutters and echoed string plucks. Nicely spare, perhaps a pointer to how Tudor would have improvised into the modern era. Nice sputters and splatters of live electronics as Kosugi does short, soft attacks on the strings. Several good spaces at the end.

2) Event””September 14, 1996, Annemasse, France 5:53
David Behrman, laptop, percussion; Takehisa Kosugi, electric violin, live electronics; Fast Forward, steel pan, objects

Bubbly laptop, metallic rattly percussion (sort of Beins like) then washes and rushes from Kosugi. Big synth pads and weepy violin lines at the close. Rather cheesy overall.

3) Event””June 5, 1997, Frankfurt 7:30
David Behrman, laptop, voice; Takehisa Kosugi, electric violin; Steve Lacy, soprano saxophone

Steve Lacy. Soprano Saxophone. Need I say anymore? Begins with Lacy, melodic at first and then honking. Berhman comes in with cheesy pads, Kosugi with high lines.  Moaning singing from Berhman, even worse then the Lacy. Overall terrible, so of course nearlry the longest of the Events excerpted here.

 

A 2002 Event in NYC

4) Event””September 12, 1998, Minneapolis 5:22
Takehisa Kosugi, live electronics; Jim O’Rourke, laptop; Christian Marclay, turntables

Rather refreshingly noisy after the previous cheese.  While rarely a fan of Marclay and O’Rourke this piece harkens to the energy, if not quite the quality of sounds, of the early Live Electronics.  Bits of samples from the turntables, rushes of analog wash, digital bleeps and bloops; not stunning music but again good energy and above average for the disc.

5) Event””September 29, 2002, Oslo 4:12
Takehisa Kosugi, live electronics, percussion, voice; James Woodrow, electric guitar, live electronics

Sort of loping guitar, buzzing electronics and then Kosugi’s usual echo-laden live electronics and popping percussion. And particularly bad Kosugi voice performance – guttural syllabic and cut off. Horrid. Sort of hard to believe this is what they were doing in 2002, at this point the music for the MCDC, always so ahead of its time, sounds positively archaic.

 

A 2009 Event at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid Spain

6) Event””October 30, 2002, Munich 6:51
Takehisa Kosugi, voice, live electronics; Christian Wolff, piano, melodica, percussion

Almost ragtimish piano with more dominant (At first) electronic skittery sounds. It builds in intensity, both piano and electronics and then the piano drops out while the electronics continue apace. Real percussive oscillations from the electronics becoming a blurring wash.  Moaning from Kosugi mixed in I think, but low threshold. This eventually fades away and its just short piano lines.  Kosugi comes in with distorted vocal moaning/singing ruining an okay if not very special performance.

7) Event””December 14, 2004, New York City 3:54
David Behrman, laptop, violin, psalter; John King, electric guitar, live electronics; George Lewis, trombone, laptop

George Lewis electronics. meh. One of those pieces with bits and bloops coming everywhere – short percussive belts, long trombone moans and trumpet like wails. Shimmery laptoppery and so on. Pretty lame.

 

A 2008 Event at Dia:Beacon

8) Event””December 15, 2004, New York City  6:56
Christian Wolff, piano, melodica, percussion; Marina Rosenfeld, turntables, live electronics; Ikue Mori, laptop

Shimmery laptoppery from Ikue Mori which is typically meh but the excerpt includes some nice percussive, wandering piano lines from Wolff. Electronics become increasingly sequenced percussion which is pretty terrible. Wolff then jazzes it up a bit and frankly the whole thing falls into self parody. Alas.

9) Event””December 18, 2004, New York City 6:35
John King, electric guitar, live electronics; George Lewis, trombone, laptop

King and Lewis – not my favorite combo, but this is particularly terrible with distant rocking out guitar and electronic percussion and looped voices.  Atrocious.

10) Event””June 14, 2005, London 5:21
John King, electric guitar, live electronics; Philip Selway, drum machine, live electronics; Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner), laptop

Drum machines are horrific here- bouncy and popping sort of like an academic attempt at techno that totally fails. This along with a sort of bludgeoning drone and higher tone digital cheese. Lame. I think Scanner is pretty much of his time and place but I’ve definitely heard a lot better from him.

 

A 2008 Event at Dia:Beacon

11) Event””June 17, 2005, London 8:44
John King, electric guitar, live electronics; John Paul Jones, electric triple-neck mandolin, live electronics; Stephen Montague, prepared piano, percussion

More bad rhythmic laptoppery and rather crap disjointed playing from Jones and aimless piano work. Also some truly banal percussive bits – just shaking things for a bit and then a bunch of rather recognizable near quotations on the piano. Jones becomes a bit more showy with his staccato playing oscillating back and forth. For the longest of the Events, pretty uninteresting and rather rubbish.

12) Event””June 23, 2007, New Caanan, Connecticut 3:09
David Behrman, laptop, recorder, guitar; John King, electric guitar, live electronics; Christian Wolff, electric guitar, melodica

Oscillating tone to begin, then a space, then sort of tuning up back ground sound and dot matrix printery sounds. Nothing super special but pretty listenable and for the Events – not bad.

 

A 2009 Event at Dia:Beacon

13) Event””February 22, 2009, Beacon, New York 5:17
Brenda Hutchinson, longtube, voice, live electronics; Ikue Mori, laptop; Robyn Schulkowsky, percussion; Christian Wolff, electric guitar, melodica

Lots of sound of movement. Melodica sort of distant then various squealing sounds. Got kind of percussive and drum circle-esque. A bit spineless, but not terrible.

 

References and further reading

1) Music for Merce (1952-2009) Liner notes (New World Records)
2) German Celant (editor), Merce Cunningham Milano, Edizioni Charta, 2000 ISBN 88-8158-258-9
3) Christian Wolff, Cues: Writings & Conversations Edition MusikTexte, Köln 1999, ISBN 3-9803151-3-4
4) Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham Northwestern University Press, 2009 ISBN 9780810125131
5)  James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Music in the Twentieth Century), 1996 Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521565448
6) James Pritchett, John Cage: One⁸
7) Maryanne Amacher City-Links, exhibition booklet, Ludlow 38 Künstlerhaus Stuttgart Goethe Institut New York
8) Calvin Tompkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde Penguin, 1976 ISBN 9780140043136

Websites

1) Merce Cunningham Dance Company (Wikipedia)
2) John Cage (Wikipedia)
3) David Tudor (Wikipedia)
4) Christian Wolff (Wikipedia)
5)  Gordon Mumma (Wikipedia)
6) David Behrman (Wikipedia)
7) Takehisa Kosgui (Wikipedia)
8) Annea Lockwood (Wikipedia)
9) Stuart  Dempster (Wikipedia)

—

Music for Merce part 4

Music for Merce (1952-2009)

John Cage died in 1992 and David Tudor in 1994. Cage was of course the music director of the Cunningham Company for forty years and a prolific composer of which many of his works were created or repurposed for specific dances, 80 of them according to the liner notes⁽¹⁾. This set features 9 pieces by Cage which I think demonstrates pretty clearly how incomplete it really is for covering the music used by the dance company. Of course it also demonstrates how much of Cages music, so derided for so long, is now available on recordings as they tended to avoid available pieces. Appropriately enough the set includes more pieces composed by John Cage than any other composers, though at 9 pieces it is far from the 80 he composed for the company. David Tudor had been the primary performer in the company from its beginnings in 1952 and took over as music director after John Cage. His tenure was short as in 1996 he suffered a series of strokes shortly followed his death, after which Takehisa Kosugi took over as music director until Merce Cunninghams death in 2009. Tudor of course also being a composer/performer of live electronics and created many pieces, the second most for the company. Likewise he is next most represented in this set with 7 pieces, but if you include him as performer he is involved in probably 75% of the music.

This two disc set covers pieces composed between 1989 and 1997 during which time both Cage and Tudor passed away. Cage had primarily been working on his number pieces during the last years of his life, many of which were used as the accompaniment for Cunninghams dances. This set contains two of them as well as Sculpture Musicalis which while not a time bracket piece is a prime example of the instruction based pieces he was also doing during this time. Cunningham would continue to use Cage’s music after his death which considering how much Cage composed and Cunningham having disconnected music and dance is not surprising. Tudor’s compositions were inimically tied with his electronics setup and his own virtuosity as a performer and after his death at least some of the pieces would be played back from recordings as opposed to performed live.  While he did some work outside of the company it was usually also in collaboration with other artists so none of his pieces were used for dances after his final pieces he made specifically for the company.

2008 Performance of Merce Cunningham’s Ocean in a quarry.

Ocean, a piece that Cage was working on when he died that was completed (or at least realized) by Andrew Culver, which also had an electronic part composed by Tudor and is as far as I know not available is strangely absent from the set. A multimedia extravaganza along with the dance, perhaps it is forthcoming in a video format that would better serve it (this short documentary on YouTube about a staging of Ocean is worth checking out). Tudor’s composition required that  “Each performer uses different sound materials, derived from peripheral “ocean” sources: sea mammals, Arctic ice, fish, telemetry and sonar, ship noises.”⁽⁹⁾ which were then electronically and electro-acoustically altered. He only worked on one other piece after this, which was a multimedia collaboration with Sophia Ogielska presenting his working process utilizing his earlier piece Toneburst. So this would be about the final Cage and Tudor piece which it seems like it’d be a fitting piece for this overview but for whatever reason is absent.

Disc Seven  (77′ 22″)

In my initial overview of this set I described the bulk of the discs as mixed, with perhaps three of the discs being pretty solid in and of themselves (1, 2 and 5). Disc seven is a fairly good example of this in that four of its five tracks are quite good (great even) but the initial Kosugi track, at over 20 minutes being one of the more unbearable of the set. However the final two Tudor compositions in the set and two of the last four Cage pieces in the set make for an overall rewarding disc once you skip that initial track.

Merce Cunningham Cargo X (1989)

1) Takehisa Kosugi (b. 1938)  Spectra (1989) 20:29
Dance: Cargo X (1989)
Takehisa Kosugi, live electronics, percussion with contact mics, voice; David Tudor, Michael Pugliese, live electronics, percussion with contact mics
Recorded July 26, 1989, Cannes

“One pleasure inherent in the dances of Merce Cunningham is the way they allow the viewer to enter and roam within them. The specifics are clear in “Cargo X,” a 1989 piece set to music by Takehisa Kosugi and performed by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on Thursday night. The set, designed by Dove Bradshaw, consists of a high ladder and sprigs of rather overblown and brightly colored flowers. There are seven performers. They are dressed in unitards whose colors are as intense as those that drench the backdrop behind them. And Mr. Cunningham has given the dancers rooted movement, quick footwork by bodies pushing down in resilient plies, for instance, in relatively circumscribed individual spaces.

But Mr. Kosugi’s thundering electronic score sounds at times like a formidable old auntie singing in the shower. The ladder defines the stage landscape. And the dancers, darting out across the stage or ranged about that odd, familiar utilitarian object, push down into the floor as strikingly as the ladder rises from it.” – Jennifer Dunning, NY Times March 21st, 1994

Lots of delay and echo, networks of it.  White noise percussive sounds probably from Pugliese. Terrible, absolutely abysmal moaning/singing from Kosugi, probably the most unbearable of his vocal pieces on this set. At a point this echo-y percussive electronics goes away for a bit and electronics more akin to Tudor – more burbly, less fixed come in.  Then there is a mix of the two, Pugliese and Tudor in their respective modes.  Kosugi drops out now and again but always comes back with the horrific vocalizations.  Really a disappointment for me, this and nearly all of the other Kosugi pieces where he does this. There is a bit later on where it sounds like the washes of electronics are trying to obliterate the voice. But also some bits of just effected voice which are particularly bad.

 

2) John Cage (1912-1992)  Sculptures Musicales (1989) [excerpt] 12:14
Dance: Inventions (1989)
Takehisa Kosugi, David Tudor, Michael Pugliese, various acoustic and electronic constant sounds
Recorded June 23, 1991, Zurich

“Sounds lasting and leaving from different points and forming a sounding sculpture which lasts….”
(Sculptures Musicales entry at johncage.info)

Sculptures Musicales is a reference to a note that Marcel Duchamp included in the Green Box. where he refers to the Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even as a musical sculpture. Cage took that and create this text based score which calls for large amounts of silence. This realization is another welcome piece on this set and another one that one would appreciate a complete version. Various electronic sounds from drill like, to watery, to low ringing hums and so on interspersed with variable long silences.  A great piece alas all too short here. There have been numerous other recordings of the piece of varying quality; I can recommend the version released on OgreOgress.

 

3) David Tudor (1926-1996) Virtual Focus (1990) [excerpt] 15:15
Dance: Polarity (1990)
David Tudor, live electronics
Recorded October 6, 1990, Paris

Virtual Focus is an interesting piece; one that sounds quite different from the bulk of Tudor’s work and one of the pieces I was most intersted in hearing in this set.  The excellent Canadian music magazine Musicworks put out a series of issues on David Tudor after his death and one of these included an article by Matt Rogalsky on this piece as well as audio excerpts of the piece performed by both Tudor and himself.  The extremly short Tudor extract (3’3″) is from the same performance as this one which Rogalsky describes thusly:

“I looked through the dubs I had made of  Cunningham performances, and found one of Tudor performing the piece in mid-October 1990, in Paris. It is a relatively sedate performance, slow and textural, with percussive material entering only towards the end of if it’s twenty-six minutes.” – Matt Rogalsky^{(6, p.23)}

For anyone interested in the music of David Tudor this article is extremely interesting. Rogalsky was able to work with Tudor a bit toward the end of his life as well as being in charge of preparing many of his devices and such for archiving. He has thus had access to much of the essential material and the essential people. In this article he points out that Tudor and his acolytes were rather secretive about process and documentation and rather enjoyed cultivating an air of mystery. That combined with the fact that Tudor made, modified or subverted much of the electronics he used, not to mention that he was such a virtuoso perform makes recreating his pieces quite difficult.

Virtual Focus it turns out was made as an art installation with Tudor’s frequent collaborator the sculpture Jackie Matisse-Monnier. The full table of electronics along with the corresponding mobile were left in near pristine condition in a pair of art collectors hands.  It is “activated” by a dual cassette deck (Tudor often used pre-recorded material in conjunction with the live electronics as there are sounds that can’t be recreated on stage) which was missing the essential tapes. Rogalsky was able to check out this table, figure out how it works and then in the Tudor archives find a likely candidate for the cassette tapes for it. He then performed and recorded with it which makes up the much longer Virtual Focus piece on the Musicworks 73 CD.  Do check out the (quite short) video link above of Matt Rogalsky recreating the piece, as you can see part of what makes it so unique (another short video, from what looks like an opening id here).

“One of the sonar units provides high-frequency output, the other low. The radar units make low, flatulent noises. Another sound source is a cheap electronic drum-pad with contact microphones plugged into its trigger input. The microphone is mounted on a panel of Monnier’s sculpture in order to be triggered by the panel’s collisions as it turns in the air”
– Matt Rogalsky^{(6, p.23)}

The use of sonar and radar in this piece is what creates its characteristic popping, percussive sound. The music in this recording begins right off with squiggly high tones and a very low nearly subsonic scrunching in the background that occasional rises out.  The oscillator towns become more ringing as it develops and the scrunching sound more defined less subsonic and begins to vacillate in the soundfield. Some really nice crackly bits come up occasionally, but the piece is mostly whispery filtered oscillator sound moved around the sounded along with that lower scrunchy sound.

A great piece, one of the most interesting of the “new” Tudor pieces in this set, it is also one of the pieces of Tudors that I think shows how forward thinking he continued to be.  His use of the radar, sonar and contact microphones is very similar to work that electronic improvisors would be doing a decade later. The tapes used in this piece apparently were recordings of contact microphones on kite strings – not too far from the contact mics on fences and wires that we’d hear from Alan Lamb and Jeph Jerman in the next two decades. One can easily imagine this already fairly spare piece (especially for Tudor), becoming increasingly more spare – Tudor after all did perform Cage pieces with quite long silences — and with its focus on more limited material we’d have much of the bases covered for the live electronics of the last decade.

 

Merce Cunningham Beach Birds (1991)

4) John Cage Four³ (1991) [excerpt] 15:24
Dance: Beach Birds (1991)
Takehisa Kosugi, rainsticks, oscillator; David Tudor, piano, rainsticks; Michael Pugliese, piano,  rainsticks; John D.S. Adams, rainsticks
Recorded June 26, 1992, McGill Recording Studios, Montreal (studio recording)

Wandering Satie like piano and then very slow rainsticks.  Good use of space in this piece, it sometimes becomes completely silent,  but much of the time it is simply at very low density with just a few grains of sand rustling through the rainstick. The second piano seems much further away in space and places even sparser. Occasionally as the piece goes on there are denser rainstick sections though never full on new age levels. When the oscillator comes in it is very Sachiko M – not super high volume, not too super high pitched and with very deliberate rainsticks has a sound that wouldn’t be out of place in say a Sachiko/Meehan collaboration.  This excerpt concludes with what sounds like a quote of Satie’s Vexations (and is it turns out).

 

5) David Tudor Neural Network Plus (1992) [excerpt] 13:28
Dance: Enter (1992)
David Tudor, Takehisa Kosugi, live electronics
Recorded June 5, 1994, Lisbon, Portugal

“The concept for the neural-network synthesizer grew out of a collaborative effort that began in 1989 at Berkeley where David was performing with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. I listened from the front row as David moved among interconnected electronic devices that filled two tables. He created a stream of remarkable sounds, overlaid them, filtered them, and fed them back upon themselves until the stream became a river. His attention moved from device to device, tasting and adjusting the mixture of sound like a chef composing a fine sauce of the most aromatic ingredients. I was spellbound. At the intermission I proposed to him that we create a computer system capable of enveloping and integrating the sounds of his performances.” “” Forrest Warthman, from the Neural Synthesis liner notes

The Neural Network pieces deserve their own post, especially considering my own study of neural networks, and their relationship to my own Network Instrument theory. Perhaps someday I’ll do so, but for now this is another welcome entry in the avalable recordings of this piece, espeically as the Neural Network Plus variant has not had a specific release. These two pieces which both utilized the Neural Network Synthesizer and were both based off the same “score” differed in that Neural Network Plus was a duo piece with Takeshisa Kosugi joining in on Live Electronics.  The documentation points toward the complexity and inherent instability of the Neural Network Synthesis which perhaps was unwieldy in live performance  and having another pair of hands to work on the surrounding electronics was a necessity.

The sound of the duo is not too far from the available Neural Synthesis recordings though this particular instance is a fairly different animal from those released  on Lovely and Ear-Rational beyond just the solo versus duo performance. Similar to Phonemes, Tudor chose to have recordings of the piece be fairly heavily manipulated in order to attempt to capture fundamental aspects of its live performance which utilized 16 channels. This recording however is simply a stereo recording of a specific performance of the piece and thus presents a more unaltered, if necessarily inaccurate picture of the piece.  Along with the typical squeaking and feedback oscillators of the Neural Network Synthesizer there are big roars in this piece that could be from the tape.  Juddering tones, metallic skronks and chittering feedback along with static crunches and grinding bleats all arise during the course of the piece.

It is really nice to have this, a good compliment to the other Neural Network Synthesizer recordings and a really welcome part of this set.. This recording from 1994 has to be among the final Tudor performances and is a strong one.

Disc Eight ( 67’20”)

Disc Eight is decidedly mixed, with its rather banal John King piece (though it has some good playing from Tudor in it), classic drone pieces from Stuart Dempster and Takehisa Kosugi, a pretty terrible realization of an otherwise great Cage number piece and finishing off with the final Wolff piece of the set. Nothing holds this disc together at all barring the continuity of the performers and of course Cunningham continuing to work with them. This disc concludes the nearly constant presence of David Tudor as performer of music for the company as well as his short tenure as music director. Appropriately enough the solo Kosugi piece from 1997 would mark the beginning of his taking on of this role.

Merce Cunningham CRWDSPCR (1993) 2007 revival

1) John King (b. 1953)  blues ’99 (1993) [excerpt] 19:10
Dance: CRWDSPCR (1993)
John King, pre-recorded dobro guitar, live electronics; David Tudor, live electronics
Recorded February 26, 1994, Madison, Wisconsin

Metallic and delayed sounds from the dobro run through the electronics and Tudors sounds coming in and out. A little over reliance on delay but some good popping percussive sounds from Tudor. Becomes really fast, with high velocity smeared out sounds whipping across the stereo space. Overall this piece doesn’t do much for me and I can’t find much else to say about it.

 

The Cistern Chapel at Fort Warden in Port Townsend WA

2) Stuart Dempster (b. 1936) Underground Overlays (1995) [excerpt] 15:22
Dance: Ground Level Overlay (1995)
Stuart Dempster, garden hose, conch; Chad Kirby, conch; Takehisa Kosugi, conch
Recorded May 2, 1996, Seattle, Washington

“Ground Level Overlay (1995) featured music by Stuart Dempster, in which “10 trombone players descended 14 feet into the 186-foot-diameter cistern and spread out around the circumference”. A huge textile sculpture by Leonardo Drew looked like hanging entrails upstage, and a cast of fourteen dancers began the barrage of walking patterns, quick arm gestures, lunges, and tilts. This was a “DanceForms” dance, and it looked it. The stage seemed at times like an aquarium at meal-time, with all the fish darting, circling, stirring up the water. Cunningham’s movement has often been jerky and mechanical-looking, but what made this piece look computer-generated was the seemingly impossible order of events on the dancers’ bodies, and their resulting struggle to accomplish the task. Here, human bodies never exchange weight in any gradual way, everything stops and goes; it’s all a sequence of 0’s and 1’s.” – CultureVulture.net review

Overapping overtones from hose, and multiple conchs.  Great great piece, one of the all time drone classics. Well worth hearing the full version on Stuart Dempster’s Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel (New Albion). Drone music is deceptively easy to make, that is to say one can make passable drone music with very little effort. But it never has an depth and one tires of it quickly. To really make lasting drone music you have to connect with some essential slow movement at the heart of things, to capture something about the very essence of being alive: long slow rhythms such as waves rolling in, pulses whose timings may be the changing of the seasons – deep connections that we inherently connect to. This piece is one of those that makes those connections and endures.  The Cistern Chapel itself is an interesting footnote:  “The reverberation length is so long (approximately 45 seconds) inside the 186-foot diameter cistern at Fort Worden, about 70 miles northwest of Seattle, that the composer describes the feeling as “this is where you have been forever and will always be forever”.”  (from “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s allmusic review). A challenging space to work in and one that demands you work within it’s limits, this piece demonstrates the rewards of doing so.

John Cage Four6 (1992)

3) John Cage (1912-1992)  Four⁶ (1992) [excerpt] 11:17
Dance: Rondo (1996)
Paul DeMarinis, laptop; Takehisa Kosugi, percussion, contact mic, tape, live electronics, voice;  Jim O’Rourke, laptop; Stuart Dempster, trombone
Recorded April 4, 1998, Berkeley, California

Four⁶ is rather frequently recorded (especially by improvisers) as it doesn’t specifiy pitches in it’s time brackets, simply when sounds of the performers choice are meant to be sounded. As is often the case when this choice is presented to the performers you get results dependent on the sensitivities and seriousness of the performers. Cunningham continued to push ahead on the forefront of music utilizing such musicians as Jim O’Rourke, who has to be one of the earliest laptop performers. While O’Rourke may have been ahead of his time, no one has particularly accused him of being a particularly sensitive musician – very little of his music holds up in the long run, though he undeniably broke new ground for years. This particular instance of this piece begins with kosugi knocking rocks together in a rather metrical fashion, joined by long lines from Dempsters trombone and at times rather cheesy laptoperry from O’Rourke and DeMarinis.  While this is rather early for laptop performance which you definitely have to give DeMarinis and O’Rourke credit for, the sounds just don’t hold up as well as the live electronics.  Something about the digitally generated sounds, low bit depth samples or whatever but Kosugi’s live electronics stands in distinct contrast and are pretty great here. As usual though vocalizations are another story once he begins rather terrible cawing sounds  Overlall I can’t say I particularly dig this version of Four⁶ though there are some nice parts here and there.

4) Takehisa Kosugi (b. 1938)  Wave Code A-Z (1997) [excerpt] 14:42

Dance: Scenario (1997)
Takehisa Kosugi, electric violin, live electronics
Recorded November 27, 1999, Lyon

Much more in Catch-Wave territory with the violin looped rather Frippertronics style.  This is the kind of Kosugi piece I appreciate and am glad to hear here. This particular piece has some real low end tone generated from the layers of loop violin as well as some rather swoopy accelerated rising tones as well as some rather lyrical violin improvisations over the loops. These pieces from Kosugi, like the earlier Dempster piece, seem to tap into a slow pattern, such as blood flowing through our veins that I think connects to us in a fundamental way.

 

One of Merce Cunngingham's Rune Charts

5) Christian Wolff (b. 1934)  Or 4 People (1994) [excerpt] 6:16
Dance: Rune (1959)
Christian Wolff, piano, melodica; Takehisa Kosugi, live electronics, violin, harmonica; Jim  O’Rourke, laptop; Stuart Dempster, trombone
Recorded July 23, 1999, New York City

“In Groningen David [Tudor], Takehisa Kosugi, Nicolas Collins and I put together a piece (Or Four People) I’d made for us and the occasion — we had just half a day to prepare it. For rehearsal we each worked on our parts independently and simultaneously, making quite a lot of sound. At the concert the performance was spaced and long, almost an hour, with lots of silence. At one point there was a wonderful repeated thudding sound. DAvid hadn’t seemed to be playing much, but I thought he was the only one who could have produced it. Afterwards I found out that the sound was some kids kicking a soccer ball against the outside back wall of the Auditorium.” – Christian Wolff ^{(3, p.382)}

Or Four People is a direct reference to Wolff’s earlier For 1,2 or 3 People : “This new work used some of the same graphic notation of the original piece, and was meant to be played by one to four performers using a variety of sound sources, possibly including, according to the composer, violin (or other stringed instrument), trombone, electronics, and keyboards.” ⁽¹⁾ Tiny sound events, quiet and very spare. short sounds from the Violin, cello in the beginning then longer tones from the laptop and cello. Piano, quiet and in the background with that percussive aspect of preparations. While there are a moments of more intensify actives and the occasional louder bit it most has a rather introspective feel to it.  Very typical of a Wolff piece in that it feels greater then the sum of its parts and seems to defy easy analysis. A new piece for me and one I’m happy to have heard. Even the more dated sounded digital squeals from O’Rourke’s laptop meld into the whole well enough.

 

References and further reading

1) Music for Merce (1952-2009) Liner notes (New World Records)
2) German Celant (editor), Merce Cunningham Milano, Edizioni Charta, 2000 ISBN 88-8158-258-9
3) Christian Wolff, Cues: Writings & Conversations Edition MusikTexte, Köln 1999, ISBN 3-9803151-3-4
4) Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham Northwestern University Press, 2009 ISBN 9780810125131
5)  James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Music in the Twentieth Century), 1996 Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521565448
6) Matt Rogalsky, David Tudor’s Virtual Focus, Musicworks 73, Spring 1999
7) Maryanne Amacher City-Links, exhibition booklet, Ludlow 38 Künstlerhaus Stuttgart Goethe Institut New York
8) Calvin Tompkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde Penguin, 1976 ISBN 9780140043136
9) David Tudor, Sounds: Ocean Diary score from DavidTudor.org

Websites

1) Merce Cunningham Dance Company (Wikipedia)
2) John Cage (Wikipedia)
3) David Tudor (Wikipedia)
4) Christian Wolff (Wikipedia)
5)  Gordon Mumma (Wikipedia)
6) David Behrman (Wikipedia)
7) Takehisa Kosgui (Wikipedia)
8) Stuart  Dempster (Wikipedia)

 

Music for Merce part 3

 

Music for Merce (1952-2009)

 

While the historical record of the pieces performed in accompaniment to Merce Cunningham’s dances is of interest in and of itself the real treasure of this set is its cornucopia of unreleased David Tudor pieces. Tudor’s live electronics was always ahead of its time and interest in it has never been higher than it is now.  There is a resurgence of sorts in live electronics right now that takes the form in myriad of directions from ultra-minamalistic to ultra-maximalist and everywhere in between. But the core techniques and ideas are almost always to be found in the live electronics of Tudor and some of the others of the time such as Cage, Mumma, Behrman and so on. Use of contact mics (Cage’s Cartridge Music), electronically modified acoustic instruments (Tudor’s realization of Cage Variations II, Tudors Bandoneon !, Mumma’s Mesa), mixture of text and electronics (Cage’s Indeterminacy, Cage and Tudor’s simultaneous performances such as Mureau/Rainforest), exploration of room resonance (Tudor’s Microphone, various Lucier pieces), event activated electronics (Cage’s Variations V, Mumma’s Telepos) and so on. These notions and others have been minutely explored, iterated upon, taken to new places, combined in myriad of ways and fused with other forms to a degree that they can sometimes completely obscure these sources, but the ideas can be traced to this work.

Tudor performed with the Cunningham Dance company from its inception in the early 50s, until his death in the 90s and during this time composed numerous pieces and was the companies music director after John Cage’s death in 1992.  While a decent selection of Tudor’s pieces has been released there remains more pieces unreleased than currently available. Considering that these pieces were performed numerous times for dances and that due to the inherent unpredictability of live electronics each performance had its unique characteristics there is a vast archive of this material available.  This set includes welcome new performances of several previously released Tudor compositions (Toneburst, Phonemes) but most valuably it contains four pieces that have heretofore not been released (Weatherings, Sextet for Seven, Neural Network Plus and the collaborative piece with Cage and Mumma 52/3) and longer excerpts from two pieces that have had very short excerpts released (7″ of Webwork appear on A Chance Operation and about 3″ of Virtual Focus on Musicworks 73). These are mostly presented in excerpts, which considering their unreleased nature is a real shame, but as the dances were often fairly long at this point it would be a box set in an of itself to release these pieces complete (which frankly there should be. As I said interest in Tudor’s work is at an all time high and I think such a set would be immensely valuable as well as presenting great music). The bulk of these pieces are presented over the next three discs and while the other pieces interspersed with them are mostly duds this makes for a pretty incredible run of music.

Disc Five (68’52”)

“Electronic music resources appeared in the work of Merce Cunningham as early as 1952. The use of electronic music increased into the 1970s by which time electronic music had become predominant in the Cunningham Dance Company performances. A major impetus for the development of electronic music resources in the Cunningham Dance Company milieu came from music director John Cage.” – Gordon Mumma ^{(2, 202)}

The music commissioned by the Cunnignham Dance Company by the end of the sixties until Merce Cunningham’s death in 2009 has primarily been electronic music. As I have stated earlier this was often to the displeasure of the dancers and the audience in the early days. It is interesting, especially considering that John Cage, then musical director, while instrumental in the introduction and development of electronics had, by the late 70s, primarily moved moved away from them. This is, I think, further proof of Cunningham’s commitment to the new and experimental. For again it was the composers he chose to work with that chose this direction; Cunningham would often provide only a time length and some vague description of what the dance is trying to achieve.

“Tudor’s contribution as a composer with electronic resources has developed from the now-legendary Rainforest into a formidable repertory of pioneering works. After Sounddance (1975, Tudor’s Toneburst), a new work employing  a complex electronic system appeared a three-year intervals.” – Gordon Mumma ^{(2, 206)}

Disc five is nearly all David Tudor pieces with a single piece by Yasunao Tone among three of his pieces. Two of these pieces have never been released and the other, Phonemes, is one of his major pieces presented in a different version then that previously issued. While the Tone piece isn’t very interesting in my opinion this is otherwise nearly a full David Tudor disc and one of the strongest, if not the strongest, in the set.

1) David Tudor (1926-1996) Weatherings (1978) [excerpt] 14:54
Dance: Exchange (1978)
David Tudor, live electronics
Recorded September 14, 1991, Paris

“The same 15 dancers, without Mr. Cunningham, made “Exchange” a much darker and more sinister dance than one remembered. The exchange of the title occurs between two separate groups of dancers who mesh only toward the end. There are playful highlights such as the duet between Mr. Komar and Miss Bartosik, but David Tudor’s score, bearing down like a freight train, created an oppressive context. Jasper Johns’s seaweed-green and gray leotards and bursts of light seemed all the more life-giving.” – NY Times review by Anna Kisselgoff, March 20th, 1992

The first real new David Tudor piece released in years and while perhaps not quite at the level of his best pieces, this is still a strong work. The piece begins with that trademarked percussive, chopped up feedback that Tudor was working with in the late 70s in pieces such as Toneburst and Untitled.  Weatherings is a highly spatial piece, moving around the stereo sound field as if it might have whipped around the performance space. Made up of a jittering metallic sound and an swirling washing it has a strong feel of movement. A bit of an echoing phasing sound comes through as well.  There seems to be several streams of sound and bits of it fade in and out with residue left echoing or squiggling in tight loops. It has a pretty wide dynamic range, with low density parts made up of just this aforementioned residue, whereas others are this huge roar whipping around the sound feled. If you have ever been in an intense windstorm that is the feel that the piece evokes: then whistling parts with the sound of trees swaying and a sense of waiting and then this freight train of approaching wind that on its arrival whips all around you.  This piece more than most of Tudors belies its electronic nature and some of the sounds have a more clearly electronic nature as opposed to the otherworldly nature of a lot of the sounds he generates. It gets pretty intense at the end of this excerpt with streaming burbles of modified feedback and wallowing squiggles in the background. Another great piece and really nice to finally hear.

Merce Cunningham working on Roadrunners (1979)

2) Yasunao Tone (b. 1935) Geography and Music (1979) [excerpt] 21:18
Dance: Roadrunners (1979)
John Cage, Takehisa Kosugi, voice; David Tudor, piano; Martin Kalve, qin;
Chinese text read aloud by Yoshiharu Suenobu
Recorded October 20, 1983, Leuven, Belgium

“On this recording we hear the Company musicians (Kosugi, Cage, Tudor, and Kalve) reading what is initially a self-referential text (“Introduction: The following texts are mostly taken from the geography section from Tàiping Yùlan, one thousand volumes of Chinese encyclopedias, published in 983 A.D. and the rest of them are excerpts from Taiping Quanxi, published in 981 A.D., and both volumes were edited by the same editor, Li Phuan . . .”), accompanied by the qin, and followed by the recording in Chinese.” – Music for Merce Liner notes ⁽¹⁾

This is the only piece from Fluxus artist Yasunao Tone included in this set. Personally I’ve always found the work from Tone, who is still actively making music today, to be highly mixed. At the very least his concerns seems to be pretty far from mine.  However there are some gems among his pieces, but this one in my opinion is not one of them. Twangy qin played sedately as Cage reads the introductory text slowly ala Indeterminacy. Later Chinese texts are read in a similar manner and there is some piano along with the qin. Lots of laughter from the audience though so must have been a fairly amusing dance. While not a piece that does much for me, this is one of the few pieces that has been previously released. In this case it was released as a 3″ disc as part of a catalog for his first live performances in Japan after 28 years. The 50 page booklet includes an interview, criticism and biography all in japanese, but a list of compositions and discography are in English as well as Japanese. This version, which perhaps due to it having been limited to Japan (though you can get it from Mimaroglu Music Sales) is the exact same performance as that on this set.

 

 

3) David Tudor Phonemes (1981) [excerpt] 14:00
Dance: Channels/Inserts (1981)
David Tudor, live electronics
Recorded November 29, 1992, Tel Aviv

“I use the principle of making the sound outputs different enough that you could not recognize them as being generated by the same signal, in all the later pieces. For instance, one of them was called “Phonemes“, which was also a dance score for Merce Cunningham. There I took two sound modifiers. One of them was a vocoder which could chop sound into small pieces. The second device I took was a percussion generator, somewhat like a percussion synthesizer which permitted me to lengthen the attack to several seconds. So then, I thought, ‘now… if I take short sounds and lengthen them and I use long sounds on the vocoder and shorten them, I have two processes which can overlap’… and so I began experimenting. Listening to the combinations, it reminded me of speech. The sounds were very short, so I called the piece “Phonemes“.”  – David Tudor ⁽⁶⁾

Another previously released Tudor piece (David Tudor Three Works for Live Electronics. (Lovely Music)) but in a different presentation. On that disc Tudor had multiple performances of the piece (possibly including this one) mixed together utilizing a specialized routing system so that it was almost a new piece composed out of Phonemes – a meta-Phonemes as it were. This demonstrates quite clearly that way that live electronics pieces are a composition in their construction in that the form of the piece remains the same even if the realizations are always unique. This is one of the strongest Tudor pieces and one that while it evokes speech as Tudor notes, it also has an alien aspect to it and is the kind of electronics that Tudor was almost alone in exploring. This performance of the piece begins with a rising rather guttural tone with a good space between it and the next guttural rising tone. The repeats for a while: rising tone, silence. After the third or fourth of these it becomes percussive with gated clipped staticy sounds. These become increasingly wet and burbly and while style percussive arhythmic. Other parts sound like distant garbled speech but the percussive nature is pervasive throughout the piece.

It is interesting that this performance of the piece is from a decade after its composition. Again, not to belabor this point, this demonstrates the configuration is the score – if you can replicate the configuration you will end up with something akin to the original composition. This, as I’ve discussed somewhat in my Network Instrument posts, is something that is highly interesting to myself as a sort of physical realization of a type of graphic score.

 

Quartet (1982)

4) David Tudor Sextet for Seven (1982) 18:15
Dance: Quartet (1982)
David Tudor, live electronics
Recorded March 24, 1990, New York City

Another brand new Tudor piece and the most sedate of his live electronics pieces I’ve heard. It has a sound of distant metal flexing in the heat and and a background hum and develops into almost melodic tones. The background sounds become a bit more swirling and the metallic sounds a bit more insistent though less frequent. The faint melodic tones become a kind of tuneless whistling as if the wind occasionally picks up and blows through a hole in a piece of steel. Almost can hear distant sounds that Tudor’s Rainforest at times, with very subtle colorings in the far background. After about eight minutes of this it then suddenly assaults one with a much louder staccato electronics which quickly goes away and returns to the previous events.  It comes back though. Again it falls away to the swirling background sound which is again punctured this time by what sounds like an electronic whale, whose plaintive and deranged calls continue on for some time while a seriously low end rumble shakes far below. The piece continues on this way with its low level but complex base into which these big dramatic aural assaults take place. In several places it fades away so completely as to leave almost no trace, but always events of some sort – dramatic and dense, or sedate and swirling, rise up from it. A great piece heard in its entirety here and really a highlight of the set.

“WHEN does a quartet have five people? When it’s Merce Cunningham’s ”Quartet,” which was performed for the first time this season by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company last Wednesday night at the City Center. The unusual work for five proved to be both a working out of formal problems and an implicitly dramatic, though plotless, dance evoking isolation and loneliness.

However, Mr. Cunningham’s movements remained either crooked or floppy. He teetered and tried to reach toward the other dancers. But they always ignored him. The deliberate awkwardness of his steps and the forlorn way he danced them made him seem a modern equivalent of Petrouchka, the woebegone puppet in Stravinsky’s ballet who has come to symbolize the eternal outsider. At last, Mr. Cunningham walked off, yielding the stage to the quartet.” – Jack Anderson, NY Times, March 24th, 1982

The dance for this piece is Quartet which is for five dancers and following that lead Tudor composed his Sextet for Seven. As noted by the Cunningham Dance Company the piece is made up of “six homogeneous voices and one wandering voice.” emulating the dance with its quartet of dancers and Merce’s interventions.

Disc Six (74’12”)

Disc six in contrast to the nearly unified nature of disc five is one of the more mixed and varied of the set. It begins with probably the only Takehisa Kosugi piece that I can really get behind in the whole set. I feel I should pause a moment to clarify my disappointment in the Kosugi material on this set.  This disappointment comes from being a long time fan of his work from Group Ongaku (recently reissued on LP!), Taj Mahal Travellers, solo pieces such as Catch Wave and various and sundry collaborations and performances that I have heard. However it turns out that while I have enjoyed his violin and live electronics work I’m not at all a fan of his vocalizations and “singing”. He seems to utilize this rather unfortunate aspect of his performance more often than not and as there are a quite a few pieces and performances from him on this set (his being a member of the Company’s music crew since the late 70s and the musical director since Tudor’s death) it begins to seem like those other works were more the outlier. He also it turns out over-relies on delays, which while in his earliest work (especially with Taj Mahal Travellers) was rather innovative and charming, clearly became a crutch. I’d still consider myself a fan of his work as there are so many pieces of his that I love, but this set has definitely brought on a major reconsideration of his performance practice for me.

The other pieces on disc six range from Tudor’s great Webwork, Cage’s strange Voiceless Essay, King’s rather uninspired electronic violin, to the banal new age-isms of Michael Pugliese’s Peace Talks.

 

1) Takehisa Kosugi (b. 1938) Spacings (1984) 23:52
Dance: Doubles (1984)
Takehisa Kosugi, live electronics
Recorded March 20, 1988, New York City

Rather 8-bit bleepy soundy, with a repeating pattern that speeds up after a bit. A whoozy also rather 8-bit whine oscillates in the background. Heavy use of delay and ping ponging between left and right channels (which could be indicative of a multichannel system recorded to stereo). While a bit cheesy this part which goes on for some time is not without its charms.  As it progresses Kosugi begins to really overuse the delays and adding more and more sounds that are still pretty simple in and of themselves. More synthy type sounds come in though still rather low bit sounding (early 80s synths perhaps).  While a bit cheesy it’s definitely the best of the new Kosugi on this set primarily because he keeps his mouth shut!

2) John King (b. 1953) gliss in sighs (1985) 16:19
Dance: Native Green (1985)
John King, pre-recorded and live electric prepared violin
Recorded March 12, 1985, New York City

Immediately begins with scritchy rather mechanical grinding violin and then layers of what sounds like sped up tape of violin. The tape contain a wide variety of sounds from tapping on the body to an almost human moaning sound as well as tape effects that sound like slewing, phasing and ping ponging. Pretty busy overall and while not a bad piece per say it’s one that doesn’t do much for me.  It rather reminds me John Gibson’s flute and electronics piece on disc four, in that it works with layers from an electronically treated classical instrument, but it displays no creative use of electronics or of modifying the instruments sound.  These two don’t seem really committed to the electronics and are perhaps using them because its the thing to do when composing for the company.  When you contrast this to something like Mesa, where the bandoneon is completely transformed yet retains its inherent nature in driving the piece these pieces really fall flat.

Points in Space (1986)

3) John Cage (1912-1992) Voiceless Essay (1986) [excerpt]10:58
Dance: Points in Space (1986)
Tape
Recorded March 17, 1988, New York City

“The digital computer has become an important resource. LArge, mainframe computers have been used for composition and sound processing, as in the music for Points in Space (1986,  John Cage’s Voiceless Essay) in which the sounds of the composer’s speaking voice were removed, leaving only Cage’s unvoiced phonemes as the essential musical vocabulary.” – Gordon Mumma ^{(2, 206)}

As is probably clear to the reader of these pages I often have trouble with voclazations. This is an aspect of Cage’s composition and performance, that while I can enjoy at times I can not always get behind. I love readings such as Indeterminacy as much as the next person but the pieces that are just fragments of words, odd vocalizations and isolated sounds I sometimes have a real hard time with. I absolutely can’t deal with such pieces on headphones and do always make sure to give them a try on the stereo.  This piece is right on the edge for me, it is really interesting as a process and the sounds at times – whisperings layered together on tape with the starts of words and such – but sometimes its almost nails on chalkboard to me.  However I found that when played on the stereo at lower volume so the sibilients fade away a bit it’s pretty haunting. While it will probably never be a favorite, I can say I like the piece and find it intriguing and well worth hearing.

4) David Tudor (1926-1996) Webwork (1987) [excerpt] 10:46
Dance: Shards (1987)
David Tudor, live electronics
Recorded March 17, 1988, New York City

“Nothing typifies Tudor’s work during this period more than the process of taking unique pre-recorded material, changing and layering it in real time and playing it through a multichannel sound system.” – D’Arcy Philip Gray⁽¹⁰⁾

Begins interestingly burbly, perhaps resonance from filters alternating with a sort of popping skittering sound. This is followed by a more bleating metallic section. This becomes very spare with an almost liquid kissing sound which evolves into a percussive bit with a wooden affect.  For a live electronics piece this one has a much more organic sound then most, perhaps what Tudor was after in the beginning. White, hisses with short delays moving it more into more expected territory. Alas this excerpt really does seem to short to catch what this heretofore unreleased piece is all about. Its an interesting one though, different from much of Tudor’s other live electronics and intriguing.

The world of Merce Cunningham’s ”Shards,” performed by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on Friday at the City Center, seems timeless and immutable until the surprise of its final moments. The eight dancers, clad in simple, dull green and black leotards and tights, might almost be fish hovering in still waters made dim by William Anastasi’s lighting and his earth-colored, scrawled backdrop. David Tudor’s contemplative electronic score brings an extra sense of privacy to this hushed and quiet world. – Jennifer Dunning, NYTimes, March 26th, 1992

Interestingly enough in the 1990s Tudor’s music, while certainly a lot less chaotic than the 70s material but still pretty far out for dance music, doesn’t elicit complaints from reviewers who now spend a lot more time describing the choreography, the dancers, the costumes and sets.

5) Michael Pugliese (1956-1997) Peace Talks (1989) [excerpt] 11:44
Dance: August Pace (1989)
Takehisa Kosugi, sitar, percussion; Michael Pugliese, percussion
Recorded November 13, 1990, Bangalore, India

“Movement material is, of course, what ”August Pace” is really about. More than some other Cunningham pieces, it has the dancers striking up a clearly outlined position and then holding it. The emphasis is on the hold.

Yet the sound of the piece is anything but tranquil. Michael Pugliese’s score ”Peace Talks” is mainly percussion. The vivid drumming, especially when it escalates, permeates the entire theater. Whether the audience will hear the same sound every time in ”August Pace” is debatable in the Cunningham canon, and whether the percussion is electronically produced or live makes no difference as it sounds electronic by the time it comes out of the amplifiers”. – NY Times review by Anna Kisselgoff, March 15th, 1990

 

Sitar, tabla, rainsticks and performed in India – I gotta say I find it all a bit campy.  Even for 1989 it seems a bit new age, world music stereotyped. Really not much to say about this piece – not one I care for much and as I say, totally cheesy.

 

References and further reading

1) Music for Merce (1952-2009) Liner notes (New World Records)
2) German Celant (editor), Merce Cunningham Milano, Edizioni Charta, 2000 ISBN 88-8158-258-9
3) Christian Wolff, Cues: Writings & Conversations Edition MusikTexte, Köln 1999, ISBN 3-9803151-3-4
4) Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham Northwestern University Press, 2009 ISBN 9780810125131
5)  James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Music in the Twentieth Century), 1996 Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521565448
6) An Interview with David Tudor by Teddy Hultberg in Dusseldorf May 17,18 1988, The David Tudor pages
7) Maryanne Amacher City-Links, exhibition booklet, Ludlow 38 Künstlerhaus Stuttgart Goethe Institut New York
8) Calvin Tompkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde Penguin, 1976 ISBN 9780140043136
9) The Art of David Tudor, Getty Research Institute
10) D’Arcy Philip Gray, David Tudor in the Late 1980s: Understanding a Secret Voice, Leonardo Music Journal 14, 2004

Websites

1) Merce Cunningham Dance Company (Wikipedia)
2) John Cage (Wikipedia)
3) David Tudor (Wikipedia)
4) Christian Wolff (Wikipedia)
5)  Gordon Mumma (Wikipedia)
6) David Behrman (Wikipedia)
7) Takehisa Kosgui (Wikipedia)
8) Yasunao Tone (Wikipedia)

 

Music for Merce part 2

Jasper Johns Set Elements for Walkaround Time (1968)

 

Music for Merce (1952-2009)

 

I mentioned in the previous post that rarely do these discs hold up as statements in and of themselves but that it is necessary to focus on the individual pieces.  Those first couple of discs then go on to be the exception that proves the rule in that their structure and the pieces contained therein almost all work.  However this situation does not last and in this second two disc set we definitely find a high degree of discontinuity between the pieces and what for me are some real duds in the set.  Now while disappointing to listen to I do think that the inclusion of these pieces is still with value w/r/t the historical nature of the set. That is to say the company danced with these pieces, sometimes for years, and thus they are as much part of the Dance Companies repertoire as the pieces that worked.  What disappointed me was the number of pieces from composers that I really liked that I found myself really hating here, especially from Takehisa Kosugi. Now again personally I think that anybody who champions any composers entire body of work is a fan boy not really a music fan, for everybody fails at times or composes for a different aesthetic. So taking that into consideration the disappointment here is that of course one always wants to find that great new piece and when someone who has the potential to deliver it fails to do so, well that always is a bit of a let down. But I mention this simply to state that nearly all the composers here have work I love and any criticism is simply of these pieces and performances and not of them. Of course there also are pieces by composers and performers that I simply do not care for and a couple of those make their appearance in this particular set (the Bo Nilsson from the previous set fits into this category more or less, but the music itself I was just rather indifferent toward).  This is simply taste; I’m sure there are those who would enjoy them. I don’t tend to spend much time on these piece except for describing them a bit and perhaps explaining what it is that fails to connect for me.

Disc Three (77’58”)

Walkaround Time (1968)

1) David Behrman (b. 1937) “¦ for nearly an hour”¦ (1968) [excerpt] 3:23
Dance: Walkaround Time (1968)
Valda Setterfield, Carolyn Brown, Barbara Dilley Lloyd, Beverly Emmons, voices
Recorded in 1968 in Buffalo, New York

Walkaround Time has to be one of the most visually striking of all of Cunninham’s dances with it’s Jasper Johns created inflatable extracts from Marcel Duchamp’s stunning Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. While I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing the dance, it has been filmed by Charles Atlas of which I have seen excerpts from (this should be another candidate for DVD release) and the sets and dance are pretty stunning. The music, by David Behrman of whom I’ve previously enjoyed several pieces from, is part and parcel with the piece in that it is made up of  overlapping recordings of readings from and about Duchamp, notably extracts from The Green Box, which Duchamp considered an integral part of the Large Glass. Among the various texts read that are included in this excerpt is a detailed physical description of the Large Glass. While this is without a doubt a multimedia masterpiece I don’t find the excerpt from this piece in isolation remarkably interesting, but I have no doubts that it adds to the entire experience in context. Text pieces, especially ones such as this which are solely constructed out of text, can quickly wear on me, so for this set a short excerpt is actually preferred in that it gives one the feel for the piece but doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. However this one is really well made, at least in this short extract and the overlapping is exceedingly well done. I definitely think that in context it would add to the proceedings and not become overly wearing.

2) Pauline Oliveros (b. 1932) In Memoriam: Nikola Tesla, Cosmic Engineer (1969) [excerpt] 9:44
Dance: Canfield (1969)
John Cage, Gordon Mumma, Jean Rigg, David Tudor, voices, live electronics, acoustical-space sound-activators
Recorded on tour in 1972

Canfield had no musical score. The Composition “In Memoriam: Nikola Tesla, Cosmic Engineer” by Pauline Oliveros consisted of three pages of instructions for the musicians. Tesla once –so legend goes–adjusted an oscillator to the resonances of his studio and nearly brought the building down. In Canfield, the musicians’ ultimate task was to discover the resonant frequency of the building in which the dance was performed but not to go so far as to bring the building down. (A most unlikely possibility.) They had a series of steps to follow, including the describing–in an immediate and personal way, via walkie-talkies and the public address system–the actual performance space, comparing it to other spaces; recording the conversation and the environment as they explored the theater, including backstage, the basement, the lobby; and finally playing back the accumulated sound material along with oscillator-genereted resonant-frequency sounds.-Carolyn Brown ^{(4, p. 531)}

Another piece that probably was more interesting in context but doesn’t make for a very compelling recording. It is as Brown describes above,  a bit of really simple electronics – a low level wash from the oscillator, a bit of the telltale squawk and buzzing of live electronics and the occasional rising feedback tone probably from inadvertent microphone feedback whilst the engineers read setup instructions and report acoustical properties over various forms of lo-fi broadcasts. The background live electronics are not without their charm and some of the more degraded broadcasts are of note, but the continuous nature of the instructions reading may ultimately render it fairly uninteresting  as a piece of music, but it clearly was fun to perform as Carolyn Brown relates; citing a particularly memorable performance where the audience seemed to have lost it’s collective mind during the performance:

“John, David, and Gordon always had a field day carrying out Paulie Oliveros’s directions for Canfield, but never had they been the target of such malevolence. In the end, they wreaked their own not-so-subtle revenge. Of course, one can readily understand any audiences’ angry reactions to the pedestrian, inane chatter of the musicians as they discuss the acoustical environment of the theater and ostensibly determine the resonant frequency of the building as they roam about, talking to one another over walkie-talkies. What the audience did not know was that the bad-mouthing and obscenties had all been recorded as they occurred. Then, in the last third of the dance, it was all played back at the audience. Soon realizing it had been caught willy-nilly to become part of the music, the audience –according to Der Zeit–was silenced, embarrassed by its own aggression.”.-Carolyn Brown ^{(4, p. 584)}

 

Christian Wolff For 1, 2, or 3 People (1964) [excerpt]

3) Christian Wolff (b. 1934)  For 1, 2, or 3 People (1964) [excerpt] 12:07
Dance: Tread (1970)
David Tudor, baroque organ, live electronics
Recorded on tour in 1972

“The music is drawn from the interaction of the people playing it.. It requires for its performance independent self-discipline (unpoliced by a score defining fixed relationships and timings) and a capacity and special alertness for responding to what one’s fellow performers are doing, the sounds they re making or changing and their silences. The responding can be variously deliberate (there is time and you are free ) or must be quick and sudden (there are precise requirements which appear unpredictably). At the time (1964) I was concerned to make a lively situation for the performers and shift about the difficult and the free areas of their playing (for example, the more unusual difficulty of articulating timbre change in a situation where you are busy coordinating with others’ unpredictably appearing sounds; or, the freedom to choose any pitch at your leisure). The resulting sounds and silences were to be the music, and the fact of its emerging in this way was to be the source of its expressiveness.” -Christian Wolff ^{(3, p. 492)}

This is a great piece and a fantastic realization of it, that I’d previously heard on the Tudor LP A Second Wind for Organ. Overlapped recordings of the baroque organ with a really wide range of sounds extracted from it. Ranges from subtle whistling to massive organ blasts with typical Wolff spacing and silences. There are sounds that evoke a rattling, clacking mechanical device  while others the longer breathy tones you’d expect from an organ.  Really a lot more expressive then one would expect from an organ with Tudor really working the instrument for all available sounds. Previously released on A Second Wind for Organ though this is a slightly longer excerpt (wish the whole thing was released). This is a live recording presumably different from that on A Second Wind for Organ; you can hear the dance and audience. Presumably Tudor is playing with a tape, in the liner notes for A Second Wind for Organ it describes Tudor as playing a superimposed version of him playing the inside of the organ with live recording and this is presumably how they’d do it live.

From the Second Wind for Organ Liner notes:

For 1, 2 or 3 People was written in 1964. was written in 1964. Any instrument(s) may be used. This performance was made on a Schlicker Baroque Organ belonging to the sculptor Richard Lippold. Taking advantage of the special resources of the recording medium, David Tudor has superimposed two versions of the same material, one played on the keyboard and one from the interior of the organ. The selection of material for the superimposition was made in a way which remains faithful to the requirements of the score and admirably realizes the composer’s conceptions.

4) Christian Wolff Burdocks (1971) [excerpt] 16:59
Dance: Borst Park (1972)
David Behrman, viola; John Cage, percussion; Gordon Mumma, horn, cornet; David Tudor, bandoneon; Garrett List, trombone; Frederic Rzewski, piano
Recorded on tour in 1972

“Burdocks is for one or more groupings of players. It’s a collection (from which one can choose what to play) of different, distinctive compositional ideas in ten parts. The ten parts include specific notations on staves; notations indication only durations, often depending on other sounds a player hears; and various verbal directions both explicit and suggestive. Various numbers of performers (no upward limit) can play, using any means of making sounds. Any number of the ten parts can be played simultaneously or overlapped.”-Christian Wolff ^{(3, p. 496)}

A more jaunty piece than the previous and one of the Christian Wollf pieces that is more frequently heard. It has little short segments that can be repeated at the performers discretion so you often hear this little bits over and over as if they are scales being practiced.  Very spacious performance of this piece, with several long segments made up of isolated small events of a very subdued nature. There are a number of sounds derived from extended techniques on these instruments, making for a varied collection of sounds among the more recognizable. Lots of laughter from the audience, presumably in reaction to the dance. The live nature of these recordings adds to them I think.  Applause comes at varying times including the finale whilst the music is still playing.

 

David Tudor and John Cage electronics setup from around this time

5) John Cage (1912-1992), Gordon Mumma (b. 1935), David Tudor (1926-1996)  52/3 (1972) [excerpt] 16:39
Dance: Landrover (1972)
John Cage, piano; Gordon Mumma, live electronics; David Tudor, live electronics
Recorded on tour in 1972

This is a really interesting piece in as that it is credited to Mumma, Tudor and Cage and they apparently had a set of agreements and simple rules between the three of them. Carolyn Brown breifly describes the music in Chance and Circumstance thusly:

“The musicians chose an equally simply format: they divided the time of Landrover (whether we did all four parts or only one) into three equal lengths, with each part contributed by one of the three composers — John, David, and Gordon–the oder changing from performance to performance so that we dancer never knew what we might be hearing. All three composers chose soft, nearly inaudible sounds, so that the dance sometimes seemed eerily silent.” – Carolyn Brown ^{(4, p.568/9)}

This led to a performance that was always different but stays fairly subdued, at least for live electronics, for most of the length of this excerpt with some greater intensity toward the end.  The inclusion of the piano adds a nice contrast from Mumma and Tudor’s electronics which tend to stay in rather staticy and bleepy territory. The piano (Cage) is clusters of varying length with generous silence between them. The electronics are really subtle at first then a dominating shimmering sound as the piano drops out It sort of sounds like Mumma on horn but that could be electronics of some sort or maybe even bowed piano. After a near silence the electronics become controlled feedback and statcy buzzes and there are some mechanical sounds that could be prepared piano or just using the piano as an instrument. It has this gauzy lo-fi feel to a lot of it, which probably is the case with the electronics but creates it’s own sort of atmosphere The piece becomes pretty intense with this chopping aspect to it from the feedback though it isn’t peircing. Some gutteral blasts drive it back into silence. This excerpt ends with almost organ or train whistle like blasts and a low rumble. Great piece, again wish this was the whole piece which apparently would have been around fifty minutes. Of course the character of the entire piece seems like it’d be different if we heard the whole thing as Gordon Mumma describes it in his essay From Where the Circus Went:

“For this contribution Cage chose to read a short fragment from his Mureau, which he would place somewhere in the large, remaining silence of his section. For the entire length of his section Tudor presented seismological signals, which he speeded up to an audible range and modified gently with electronic equalization. I made a set of verbal instructions, in the event that someone else wanted to perform my section thought I invariably performed it myself. These instructions specified “a phenomenon unarticulated insofar as possible and sustained at the threshold of perception.”  Though that phenomenon doesn’t necessarily have to be a sound, for my section of Landrover I created a kind of supersonic blanket with special electronic equipment. In accordance with instructions I adjusted this phenomenon at the threshhold of perception — my perception. Of course, since everyone’s perception thresholds are different. It was above some and below others. I could barely hear it, Cage said he never heard it, and Tudor found it obnoxiously audible. Critics described it variously as “absolute silence,” “intolerable roaring,” and “something like crickets.” – Gordon Mumma ^{(2, p.276)}

From Mumma’s description it seems pretty clear that we are hearing his or Tudor’s section of the piece. With Cage’s being spoken word amidst silence, the whole piece clearly will have a gentle outline overall but would differ from what this excerpt leads us to believe.

 

6) Gordon Mumma Telepos (1972) 18:27
Dance: TV Rerun (1972)
Gordon Mumma controlling sounds activated by dancers with telemetry-accelerometer belts
Recorded September 12, 1972, Venice

Sort of like Variations V in that the dancers trigger the action but in this case it is even more tied into their movements. Mumma’s live electronics works in a wider range then Tudor’s but sometimes includes some of the cheesier sounds that seem more dated. It is interesting how prescient Tudor seemed to be in his choice of sounds.  Overall though most of Mumma’s electronics are great, second only to Tudor in his use of them.  This piece is a bit bleepy, perhaps tied to the dancers movements but also perhaps to what is triggered by what. Some good crackly sounds sort of akin to brillo pads on guitar pickups along with the swoopy and bloopy sounds. It captures the spacious nature of the dance nicely, with these sounds seeming to move around in space and change dynamics based on activity. Sounds of the dance come through as well. The later half becomes even more interesting with a continuous high slightly distorted whistling sound and burbling of perhaps resonant filters.  Rather subdued even with continuous sound and the audience and dance more present. Nice piece overall and good to hear an entire piece of this nature.

“TV Rerun depended for its impact on the counterpoint and almost fugal correspondences of the choreographic material and Gordon Mumma’s score. A curious addition to the costumes was three “telemetry belts” (closely related to the belt Merce wore for his solo Loops) that we took turns wearing. Attached to the back of each wide white belt, designed by Gordon Mumma for his accompanying score, Telepos, was a small box of technical gadgetry. Signals were generated in the belts by a lattice of sensors that responded to acceleration and were relayed by transmitters to Gordon in the orchestra pit. He arranged the interactions of these signals for the audience, but any attempt to relate what one was hearing with what one was seeing was a futile experience.” .-Carolyn Brown ^{(4, p. 570)}

 

Disc Four (68’44”)

 

Sounddance (revival)

1) David Tudor (1926-1996)  Toneburst (1975) 17: 45
Dance: Sounddance (1975)
David Tudor, live electronics
Recorded March 12, 1976, Perth, Australia

“Eventually you discover certain critical points in a circuit, and its those that you pay attention to when things are misbehaving. The last resort is always to cut it off completely and start over – that’s perfectly acceptable. As a matter of fact, that’s part of the whole operation. I found that very rarely did I feel that there was an unacceptable situation, even though I don’t like it when feedback takes off. But after all, having so many points with which to create variation… I guess what I’m trying to say is that since it’s suppose to be an unpredictable oscillation, that’s the condition in my mind. So when it stays in a so-to-speak static state, then that’s when I have to grapple. If I get it balanced, it’s constantly producing a variety of itself. That’s the image that I have… that it should be producing this variety”. -David Tudor in interview with John Fullemann (10.31.84)

A great piece, perhaps the definitive Tudor live electronics piece. A raucous piece constructed of networks of feedback, it arrives with the intensity and drive of an approaching freight train and while retaining that drive, goes through a range of densities and sounds.  Great deep buzzing feedback at the beginning with a continuous steam engine like sound running through it. Fantastic squealing section in the middle, like a slipping belt. Good use of space with several silences coming at various times. Not even slightly dated this music is as revolutionary now as it was in the 70s. Fantastic; a set highlight.

This piece was previously released on David Tudor: Live Electronic Music (Leonardo Music Journal CD Series 14) but thankfully it is a different performance. Considering that this was always performed live and that it utilized an unpredictable feedback network it is great to hear it in another version. It has a recognizable shape but the details are different. This is the aspect that really defines a live-electrionics performance – the electronics configuration is the score but it is always indeterminate in realization.

Toneburst turned out to be a very important piece for Tudor: He described it in 1994 as being a direct translation of his mind into music. Toneburst represents the culmination of a decade of experimentation and is considered to be the definitive Tudor composition. It wraps up in one complex package the mysterious ideas and elusive philosophies behind the conception, realization and performance of his music. Toneburst is David Tudor. – John D.S. Adams ⁽⁶⁾

Squaregame (1976)
(photo from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Flickr)

2) Takehisa Kosugi (b. 1938)  S.E. Wave/E.W. Song (1976) [excerpt] 13:03
Dance: Squaregame (1976)
Takehisa Kosugi, violin, voice, live electronics
Recorded December 15, 1976, Tokyo

The first real dud on the set. Nearly every time that Kosugi opens his mouth it’s an embarrassment but none more-so then on this piece.  Basically making mouth noises into a delay it is beyond cheesy. Incredibly hard to listen to and impossible on headphones. When its just violin into the delay this piece is okay but far too much vocalizations. A case where one wishes the excerpt had been a bit more strategic and much shorter.  I’ve really liked a lot of Kosugi’s stuff that I’d heard prior to getting this set but really hate virtually everything he’s involved in here. Disappointing as I do think his instrumental stuff is solid and I was really expecting some new and interesting pieces from him..

 

3) Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) Remainder (1976) [excerpt] 14:55
Dance: Torse (1976)
Tape

“Time corresponds here to life of the space, to sense of being there. Approach and disappearance of what is sounding in the environment. Vibration in air heard 3 minutes before the actual sound of a plane is heard. Changes in air vibration as different boats approach. Seagulls sensing these changes in air – their anticipation, announcement of arrivals and disappearances, before the sound of the change is heard at the site. Patterns within air.” – Maryanne Amacher ⁽⁸⁾

Maryanne Amacher’s music is woefully underrepresented on disc so the inclusion of this piece, even in an excerpt, is quite welcome. Part of the reason so little of her music is released is that she was primarily interested in the acoustics of spaces and the psychoacoustic effects of sound, neither of which is very amendable to recording. Her music was best experienced live on sound systems that could reproduce what she was trying to do.  Often she worked with highly multi-channeled systems where she would place speakers all around a space to activate certain properties of the space directly. This piece, though was made for a touring dance company and was realized onto tape. It’s source material was the sound of Boston Harbor via a microphone transmistting over a telephone line for two and half years:

“A five year live transmission of the Boston harbor was transmitted to Amacher’s studio everyday for 2.5 years from a microphone she installed on a window at the New England Fish Exchange, overlooking the ocean at Pier 6. An open 15kc telephone link to her studio (at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute for Technology) provided continuous, live 14 hour a day transmission of the harbor sound environment.”⁽⁸⁾

She used material from this telephone work in a number of pieces including her accompaniment to John Cage’s Lecture on the Weather as well the this piece for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. It begins with a whistling, very high pitched tone contrasted with a lower pitched sound that comes in and out. The lower sound almost sounds like a rubbed snare or something but with no attack. Its almost like a Sachiko M, Sean Meehan duet but with stronger psychoacoustics.  A great piece that I bet would be all enveloping at full length.

 

4) Jon Gibson (b. 1940)  Equal Distribution (1977)  [excerpt] 12:14
Dance: Fractions 1 (1977)
Jon Gibson, flute and live electronics
Recorded October 8, 1978, New York

Flute with delay, which I have to admit doesn’t do much for me.  The flutework is phrase driven with pauses between the phrases to allow the delay to play out. Sometimes chording with himself via the delay. While conceptually this is not a priori uninteresting (later in the set Stuart Dempster will utilize a long natural delay to build up hypnotic washes of sound from trombone and conch) in execution here it seems cheesey. Interesting that my least favorite pieces of the set so far just seem to be be people screwing around with delay. As that technology became more pervasive, practicable and portable there seemed to be certain musicians who just became obsessed with it. But so much of it just sounds like a stoner sitting in his bedroom screwing around with a delay ala the earlier Kosugi piece.

 

5) John Cage (1912-1992)  Inlets (1977) [excerpt] 10:17
Dance: Inlets (1977)
John Cage, Paeder Mercier, Mel Mercier, conchshells with water; John David Fullemann,  foghorn, tape
Recorded October 27, 1983, Roubaix, France

This piece is made up primarily of conch shells, filled with water that are moved such that the water sloshes around inside them. Due to the nature of the chambers inside a conch shell the water will burble between the chambers with an unpredictable release of air and sound. The above video of a performance of the piece from a fairly recent concert demonstrates this better than any description can. It’s a great piece with its unexpected gurgles and hisses of water in the conch shells. Alone with the burbles, bloops,  bubbles and belches there is this faint staticy sound that is hard to source: from the recording process? some aspect of the performers clothes? or the echos of water in small chambers? Who knows but it sounds neat and compliments the water sounds well. Even more effective at its full length still nice to hear this original version.

 

References and further reading

1) Music for Merce (1952-2009) Liner notes (New World Records)
2) German Celant (editor), Merce Cunningham Milano, Edizioni Charta, 2000 ISBN 88-8158-258-9
3) Christian Wolff, Cues: Writings & Conversations Edition MusikTexte, Köln 1999, ISBN 3-9803151-3-4
4) Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham Northwestern University Press, 2009 ISBN 9780810125131
5)  James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Music in the Twentieth Century), 1996 Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521565448
6) John D.S. Adams, Giant Oscillations, The David Tudor pages
7) Maryanne Amacher City-Links, exhibition booklet, Ludlow 38 Künstlerhaus Stuttgart Goethe Institut New York
8) Calvin Tompkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde Penguin, 1976 ISBN 9780140043136

Websites

1) Merce Cunningham Dance Company (Wikipedia)
2) John Cage (Wikipedia)
3) David Tudor (Wikipedia)
4) Christian Wolff (Wikipedia)
5)  Gordon Mumma (Wikipedia)
6) David Behrman (Wikipedia)
7) Pauline Oliveros (Wikipedia)
8) Maryanne Amacher (Wikipedia)
9) Takehisa Kosgui (Wikipedia)

Music for Merce part 1

Though theoretically available late December 2010 New World Records epic ten disc overview of music used to accompany the Merce Cunningham Dance Company wasn’t widely available until early January. Since getting my copy I have spent the last two months listening to little else though after two initial sequential complete play-throughs (once open air and once on headphone as is my wont) , I primarily played specific discs and certain tracks (the David Tudor pieces in particular). At over eleven hours of music covering over fifty years and dozens of composers and musicians it really is an impossible task to summarize the entire set. That is to say a “review” of the set would be rather meaningless as the connecting tissue here is Merce Cunningham and the musicians he chose to work with. It is these relationships and his championing of contemporary music that is the thread throughout the years as Cunningham pioneered in dance the notion that John Cage pioneered in composition: that a dance is defined by time.With this concept he was able to disconnect dance and music. Dance is often seen as interpreting music, often in a narrative fashion and while much modern dance seems to have eschewed the narrative aspects the notion of  representing the music physically has remained a common fixture (I should state at this point that I am far from any sort of expert on modern dance and have really only come to it via the composers that Cunningham utilized. I’ve garnered a bit of a feel for its recent history, but am still woefully ignorant).  By disconnecting the dance from the music the composers Cunningham chose to work with were able to address their own concerns and not necessarily (though some did) attempt to compose for a specific dance. Which is to say that a pure examination of the dance involved also are not necessary or sufficient either as a way of summarizing this set. The only valuable approach is to consider the individual pieces as themselves or as parts of the body of work of the individual composers.

Complicating matters as a survey of the music utilized for the Company the set generally does not include pieces that are currently available or were unavailable for various reasons. This I think undercuts the impact of the set as a survey of the music used over the fifty years, though given the amount of music over such a long period of time perhaps any such comprehensive survey is impossible.  The extensive liner notes do include biographicaly material and a selective discography from the primary composers but does not include a comprehensive list of all pieces utilized by the company nor much discussion of major pieces that were excluded for whatever reason. This is somewhat understandable as the liner notes are extensive enough just to talk about the included pieces (and many of these could use whole essays in and of themselves) but this kind of complete survey is something that I do hope is forthcoming in coming years.

All of this is to say is that it is rather impossible to write a few paragraphs covering this set that would be useful to anyone. At least in anyway beyond generalities. I mean you can say that this set is a must have for David Tudor fans, Merce Cunningham fans, John Cage fans, experimental music fans and so on but that doesn’t really tell you anything. The set is very well put together; five double disc jewel boxes in a nice cardboard box with a flap on the top and a well printed and extensive set of liner notes with many heretofore unseen pictures. The music and dance may be disconnected but a DVD along with the set presenting excerpts from the dances would have been very welcome but otherwise I think this is an amazing set.  But to really present any valuable information about the set I think that a piece by piece examination is the only practicable way to proceed. Thus this is the first in a series of five posts in which I discuss each of the two disc sets. This has been a lot to absorb and there is a lot of supplementary material to take in before any sort of informed discussion can take place. This has taken time and frankly much more could be taken.  I feel that much more time could have been spent with the dance side and while I’ve read several books and articles on Cunningham and the company there is a lot more material out there to absorb.  I’ve watched a few videos of performances and am seeking out more but I still feel woefully ignorant in this area. I am happy to say that the final tour of the company, the Legacy Tour, is coming to Seattle and I’ll finally have a chance to see them dance live (they have not played in Seattle since I’ve been interested). I certainly recommend that interested readers catch the Legacy Tour if they can. Also for those in New York there is going to be concert tied into the release of this set  featuring many of the composers and musicians that should be pretty amazing:

March 20th, 2011
Music for Merce release party
Roulette, 20 Greene Street,NYC, NY
featuring perfomances by  Christian Wolff, David Bindman, Fast Forward, George Lewis, John King, Jon Gibson, Matana Roberts, Shelley Burgon, Takehisa Kosugi, Gordon Mumma.

—

Music for Merce (1952-2009)

 

While for me the specific attractions of this set is the wealth of unreleased David Tudor pieces, it is of course packed with other pieces I was highly looking forward to by John Cage, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, David Beherman, Takehisa Kosugi, Maryanne Amacher and so on.  As I alluded to in the introduction it is somewhat of a grab bag on each two disc set and hard to think of them as complete albums in and of themselves. But that being said this initial set is easily the best in that regard.  After a rarely heard tape piece from Christian Wolff the first disc is all piano pieces, all played by David Tudor (with John Cage on his Music for Piano). This lends to a continuity that makes this disc really work as few others do.The second disc in the set again begins with piano, Tudor and Cage again, playing the piano reduction of Feldman’s Ixion which is a real treat, but the rest of the disc charts of the very beginnings of use of Live Electronics in the pit of the Cunningham Dance Company.

Disc One (60’53”)

Merce Cunningham Suite by Chance (Space Chart Entrance and Exit)
(image courtesy of MoMA) 

1) Christian Wolff (b. 1934) For Magnetic Tape (1952) [pt. 1 of 4] 5:24
Dance: Suite by Chance (1952)

Classic sounds coming in and out of the sound field tape piece. Tones slide up and down, sounds rushing in and out, short little tones and squeaks at other times sustained tones, whistles, buzzes and silences. This piece as well as the dance it accompanied was quite controversial back in the day among the dancers as well as the audience. Carolyn Brown, a dancer in the company and the wife of Earle Brown who was heavily involved in the cutting and splicing of the magnetic tape for this piece wrote in her book about her years in the company:

“To my ears, its sounds were unrelentingly harsh and ugly. Christian Wolff appeared to be an extremely sensitive, gentle and somewhat shy young man. The music offered no evidence of such qualities, and he admitted that he was both surprised and disquieted upon hearing his own composition for the first time.” ^{(4, p. 39)}

This was the piece that Wolff did while Cage created Williams Mix and Earle Brown his Octet for 8 Speakers as part of the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape.  This is I’m pretty sure the first time it’s been released on cd but its been available as an mp3 on Christian’s pages at Dartmouth which I’ve embedded below

2) Christian Wolff For Piano I (1952)  5:19
Dance: Untitled Solo (1953)
David Tudor, piano
Recorded on tour in 1972

Merce Cunningham choreographed three solos ^{(4, p.150)} in the 50s for himself that all used Christian Wolff piano pieces beginning with this piece, one of Wolff’s earliest compositions.. This piece seems typical for his composition at this time when he was working with very limited material. It’s made up of  small clusters of sounds fairly isolated with lots of silences in-between and featuring fairly wide dynamics. There is a faint sound of feet on wood in the background at times which adds this nice found sound aspect to it.  The brief use of sustained chording later in the piece, contrasts really interestingly with the more almost staccato attacks of the bulk of the piece. Like so much of Wolff’s pieces it has this unexpected aspect to it; it never becomes predictable and always surprises you.

“For Piano I was written for David Tudor with a view to his virtuosity, and first performed by him in February, 1952 in New York. The structure is made of sixteen segments of varying lengths and densities (number of notes in a given length), whose sequence, superposition and recurrence are determined by chance. The choosing of notes (out of a total of nine), durations (total thirteen) and amplitudes (nine), and their disposition within a segment was made by the composer. Only segments of zero density, that is silence, left no choice. These limitations allowed a special freedom to the composing; the restrictions once made, the range of choices, though still immense became particularly clear. The question of what to do next for how long, depending so much on idiosyncratic feeling, was settled in advance. The larger continuity of the piece formed itself, and its expressive content fell with it.”^{(3, p.486)}

 

Minutiae
(photo from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Flickr)

3) John Cage (1912-1992) Music for Piano 1-20 (1954) 16:13
Dance: Minutiae (1954)
John Cage, David Tudor, pianos
Recorded in 1954

Music for Piano is of course a well known and beloved early Cage composition that was composed using the imperfections on paper as method of generating material. James Pritchett in his excellent Music for John Cage gives a very thorough explanation of the development of this technique, with the specifics utilized for this piece described thusly:

“This point-drawing system [developed for Music for Carillion ] was adapted for use in a new series of eighty-four pieces called Music for Piano (1952-56). The primary change in the technique of these compositions was that the points were generated by observing and marking minute imperfections in the manuscript paper, rather than relying on the manipulation of templates. After marking a randomly-determined number of imperfections on a blank page, Cage drew musical staves on the sheet, thus turning the points into notes. Coin tosses and I Ching hexagram numbers would determine such matters as clefs, accidentals, and playing techniques (e.g., plucked or muster strings). As in the Music for Carillon, the durations of notes were left open.”^{(5, p.94)}

Even with two pianists the music is quite spare, beginning with soft isolated notes, clearly separated between the two pianos. It varies a lot though with frantic little bursts at times, discordant little sequences, unexpected melancholy chords and short little almost melodies.  This recording from 1954 with Cage and Tudor performing the piece in a slightly scratchy recording evokes the uncompromising nature of this music.  Even as the Cunningham company began to achieve accolades for their dancing the music was routinely dismissed and jeered. That this piece, fraught with beauty and tension, garnered such criticism only goes to shows how different an era it is now. The low fidelity of the recording I think makes for an interesting addition to the piece as the decay of held notes seems to fade out into static and  tape compression artifacts added a degree of mystery. A very welcome addition to the many fine recordings of this piece.

 

4) Earle Brown (1926-2002) Indices (1955) [excerpt] 20:51
piano reduction of Indices (1954) for flute, french horn, trumpet, percussion, piano, amplified guitar, violin, violoncello, double bass (ballet version)
Dance: Springweather and People (1955)
David Tudor, piano

The piece begins with several sharp attacks, spaced out. It has a kind of Webern feel which isn’t too surprising for early Brown, but a bit more spacious with just a hint of swing. You can hear the dancers footwork at times and the audience coughing. The piano keys are often forcefully depressed with a sharp attack, punctuating the more mechanical seeming sequences of notes. The work seems to open up as it develops and silences are introduced though it always retains this rather driving aspect.

Carloyn Brown writing about this piece in Chance and Circumstance recalls that it was commissioned by Merce and given to him as payment for Carolyn Browns dance lessons. She goes on to describe the process of its development:

“Throughought the miserably hot New York summer months of 1954, Earle worked on Indices, the score for Merce’s new dance.  They had together agreed on twenty-nine minutes as the length of the dance. Then Earle — using tables of random sampling numbers — determined the “intricate and terribly complex” program that included the characteristics of each sound event and when it would appear within the twenty-nione minutes. The sounds were dropped into the overall time. “The piece is not written from left to right (Start to finish) but the ‘program’ [of composing] was such that each sound was a completely self-contained ‘event’ … There were 175 pages of ruled score paper which equalled twenty-nine minutes at mm 120. According to the ‘program’ the first sound composed might have entered on page 107; the second on page 22, the third on page 136, etc.” The music used a discontinuous process that John [Cage] likened to dropping pebbles into a lake.”  ^(4,p.110)

Brown wrote the orchestral version and then immediately a “literal piano reduction” for Tudor which is what we hear in this recording.

5) Bo Nilsson (b. 1937) Quantitäten (1958) 12:31
Dance: Night Wandering (1958)
David Tudor, piano
Recorded on tour in 1968

The only piece on this disc I wasn’t previously familiar with. Again Webern-ish, with clusters of sounds of dramatically varying dynamics. A far denser piece than the earlier piano pieces but it does have its moments of spaciousness perhaps influenced by the New York School.  During this period of time Earle Brown in particular worked and played all around Europe so one could see these ideas percolating through. Some brooding sections but always punctuated by short sharp attacks. It opens up more toward the end though always with varying attacks. Even with perhaps a bit of influence from the New York school it has a far more of the flavor the piano music coming out of Europe in the 50s.

Disc Two ( 78’15”)

Summerspace (photo from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Flickr)

1) Morton Feldman (1926-1987) Ixion (1958) 20:21
Dance: Summerspace (1958)
John Cage, David Tudor, pianos
Recorded in Stockholm for rehearsal late 1950s

This is a great piece, one of the highlights of the set.  It begins with one piano, high up in the register in this rather wandering, clockwork pattern of driving single notes.  The second piano comes in and adds density and almost a contradictory line, feeling rather like modern improvisation where two musicians are playing separately but to the space. Then it becomes oddly disjointed and spare with either just one piano or the two trading parts. In contrast to late Feldman the notes are almost all pointillistic and not at all lush, there is a dry ascetic aspect to them which, as the piece becomes increasingly spare and soft, lends an alien feel to it.

excerpt from the score for Ixion

“Morton Feldman had been commissioned to write music for orchestra. Titled Ixion, it was one of Feldman’s graph pieces that indicated only how many (not which) sounds were to be played within a certain time frame, with the added direction that they were to be played in the high registers of the instruments except for on brief section in which the lower registers were indicated.  The dynamics could be freely chosen by the performer.  The music was pointillistic as well. When asked how he could write a score for a dance he would not see until the performance, with no idea what the choreographer and the designer were doing — Morty’s response was “Well, it’s like this. Say you’re getting married and I tell you the dress won’t be made until the morning of the wedding. But I also tell you it’s by Dior.” The problem was, Morty either didn’t know how to or didn’t want to transcribe his score for orchestra, so it was John [Cage] who had to do it at the last moment, while Morty sauntered off to tour the Connecticut College gardens.  After Morty left, John muttered, “The Dior of Fourteenth Street!” and set to work on Morty’s score.” – Carolyn Brown  ^(4,p.220)

 

2) John Cage (1912-1992) Variations V (1965) [excerpt] 13:41
Dance: Variations V (1965)
John Cage, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma, live electronics
Recorded November 11, 1966, Paris

This is another highlight of the set, an important Cage piece only available on a VHS of the dance.  This is a piece of live electronics where the dancers triggered the sounds via breaking light beams, radio interference and the light. It takes on overlapping rhythmic aspects perhaps reflecting the dance and also perhaps from the patterns that feedback can fall into. There is sound of radio interference, simple electronics, doppler effects and the like.  A pity this one is in an excerpt though the whole piece is I believe about 50′.

One of the many bits of insight I gained from reading Carolyn Brown’s Chance and Circumstance⁽⁴⁾ was on how little the dancers enjoyed the music that Cunningham commissioned for the company. The use of live electronics was especially disliked and Brown frequently complained in the book about extreme volumes at times. Even the earlier all acoustic pieces didn’t seem to have much favor from the dancers and Brown would often talk about how thrilled they’d be to dance to “normal” music and such. Of course in many cases the use of technology added additional burdens and stresses upon the dancers and that seems to be part of the problem that she and other of the dancers had with this piece:

“The final concept with which Merce had to deal involved twelve four-foot-tall antennae placed around the stage. In orde to trigger the sound, the dancers had wave in, out, and around them, the interaction operating much like a theremin. Klüver’s contribution consisted of “seeing eye” light beam devices that responded to the shadows made when dancers crossed in front of them, thus activating sounds from radio, tape machines, etc. The big question, of course, was, would their devices work? The simple answer to that questioned turned out to be NO!”  ^(4,p.458)

Brown’s description of the activities of the dance and how it triggered the sound though is extremely informative in getting a feel for how the sounds in this recording were made:

“Non-dance activities by the dancers contributed another layer of sound: Merce disassembled a potted plastic plant that had a cartridge microphone attached to it; later on I reassembled the plant. As if tying on a bonnet, Barabara donned a small pillow with cartridge microphone inside, then stood on her head; Gus lifted her off the floor and swung her gently back and forth. Merce and Peter sat on metal chairs and shuffled about in them; they, too, were wired for sound, as was the bicycle that Merce rode at the end. All these sounds could be manipulated electronically by four musicians seated behind a low platform at the back of the stage under a twenty-foot high white canvas that stretched across the entire back wall of Philharmonic Hall. The canvas served as a screen for films provided by Stan VanDerBeek, which incorporated distorted TV images by Nam June Paik. When the musicians stood, they became part of the film from the waist up.”  ^(4,p.458)

While the dancers may not have appreciated what was going on in these pieces and may not have always enjoyed the sounds their willingness to work within these circumstance and to rigorously perform their art is commendable. The music is highly interesting in my opinion and as it is directly related the choreography and movement of the dancers as well as the indeterminacy and inadequacies of the electronics setup the commitment of all involved was essential. This piece more than almost any other demands a DVD release.

 

David Tudor and Gordon Mumma recording Mesa

3) Gordon Mumma (b. 1935) Mesa (1966) 19:38
Dance: Place (1966)
David Tudor, bandoneon; Gordon Mumma, live-electronic cybersonic processing
Recorded November 9, 1966, Paris

A swelling grinding sound that is the processed bandoneon. There are hints here and there of the soundworld of Tudor’s piece Bandoneon ! which this piece was among the inspirations. Much more dense than any of the preceding pieces, Mumma varies this density to give parts of it a more spacious feeling. Some really great sounds in this piece: bits on the edge of feedback, swelling sounds ranging from mechanical grinding sound, to wind through a narrow space to howls of electronic noise to this amazing bit that sounds like rattling ball bearings in an amplified sieve. In some of the soft sections you can hear the dancers movements.  Some good loud noise about 2/3rds the way through and while there is a bit of characteristic primitive electronics it still sounds remarkable fresh and innovative. Ends with waves of tearing staticy feedback that is quite stunning.

This has also been released on A Second Wind for Organ in a slightly longer 23 minute studio version.

4) Toshi Ichiyanagi (b. 1933) Activities for Orchestra (1962) 24:09
Dance: Scramble (1967)
David Behrman, viola; John Cage, piano, voice, percussion; Gordon Mumma, horns, live electronics; David Tudor, piano, live electronics; Malcolm Goldstein, violin; Max Neuhaus, percussion
Recorded on tour in May 1968

A fairly ponderous piece with its combination of electronics and traditional elements. It has a bit of the “sounds rushing in and out” of more stereotyped new music pieces of the day but interesting sounds from Tudor and Mumma.  Cage, Goldstein, Neuhaus and Berhman on the traditional instruments is a pretty good pit. Electronics are a bit spacey and swoopy giving it a more cheesy flavor than the two previous more hard edged pieces. It seems to settle down though, become a bit more brooding and interesting, with often a thick sonic base in which piercing elements come in and out. There are sections of silence (only a few and not too long) and segments of just traditional instruments. As the piece goes on the ponderous feeling increases as a drum beats seem to slow the process down and the whole piece becomes somewhat unfocused. I like the last five minutes of the piece best, it becomes very spare, with an almost ritualistic feel, the electronics adding occasional  and more interesting sounds, a melencholly tattoo from a single bass drum and then this oddly abrupt ending, A piece that was indeterminate in its instrumentation one supposes that it could be more or less successful depending on who or what is being played, this version at least seems somewhat mixed in its success but definitely well worth hearing.

You can watch a short video segment of the dance as filmed for TV on YouTube.

—

References and further reading

1) Music for Merce (1952-2009) Liner notes (New World Records)
2) Calvin Tompkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde Penguin, 1976 ISBN 9780140043136
3) Christian Wolff, Cues: Writings & Conversations Edition MusikTexte, Köln 1999, ISBN 3-9803151-3-4
4) Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham Northwestern University Press, 2009 ISBN 9780810125131
5)  James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Music in the Twentieth Century), 1996 Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521565448
6) Merce Cunningham Dance Company (Wikipedia)
7) John Cage (Wikipedia)
8) David Tudor (Wikipedia)
9) Christian Wolff (Wikipedia)
10) Morton Feldman (Wikipedia)
11) Earle Brown (Wikipedia)
12)  Gordon Mumma (Wikipedia)
13) Toshi Ichiyanagi (Wikipedia)

 

December: Music for Merce preview

In what I have no doubts is the release of the year, New World Records is putting out a 10-Cd set of music composed for and performed with the Merce Cunningham dance company. John Cage is most famously associated with with Company, but Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma, Toshi Ichiyangi, David Behrman, Takehisa Kosugi and many more innovative and fantastic musicians and composers have also composed and performed music for the company.  Merce always kept up with interesting music and his innovative decoupling of the dance and the music allowed for composers to really create without artificial restrictions. This box set is coming out December 20th and will obviously take months if not years to digest. I plan to embark on a series of posts next year where I go through the treasure trove contained in this epic set. In this post though I’ll highlight what is of particular interest to me in this set.

What has me immediately excited about this set is the amount of unreleased david Tudor compositions. Readers of this site know how much I love Tudor’s Live Electronics and how instrumental it has been on my own music.  But the tragedy of it all is that most of Tudor’s compositional work and live performance remains unreleased.  This is why getting even the scrap of Bandoneon ! that was released on the 9 Evenings dvd this year was such an event – the first unreleased Tudor piece in years.  This set though outdoes itself in this as so much of Tudor’s work was down for the Cunnningham dance Company.

Disc 4
1. David Tudor Toneburst (1975) 17: 45
Dance: Sounddance (1975)
David Tudor, live electronics

Disc 5
1. David Tudor Weatherings (1978) [excerpt] 14:54
Dance: Exchange (1978)
David Tudor, live electronics

3. David Tudor Phonemes (1981) [excerpt] 14:00
Dance: Channels/Inserts (1981)
David Tudor, live electronics

4. David Tudor Sextet for Seven (1982) 18:15
Dance: Quartet (1982)
David Tudor, live electronics

Disc 6
4. David Tudor Webwork (1987) [excerpt] 10:46
Dance: Shards (1987)
David Tudor, live electronics

Disc 7
3. David Tudor Virtual Focus (1990)[excerpt] 15:15
Dance: Polarity (1990)
David Tudor, live electronics

5. David Tudor Neural Network Plus (1992) [excerpt] 13:28
Dance: Enter (1992)
David Tudor, Takehisa Kosugi, live electronics

Disc 10
Events (1993-2009)

1. Event“”February 16, 1993, Red Wing, Minnesota 5:58
David Tudor, live electronics; Takehisa Kosugi, electric violin

—

The first thing of note in this list is that Webwork, Sextet for Seven and Weatherings have not been released in any form and are thus this set is first recordings of these pieces. Most of these appear in extracts, which frankly isn’t too shocking considering that many of these pieces could be up to an hour in length and this is a 10 cd set already. Of course I’d rather have the full pieces, but these are all really generous selections so this will give a good feel for these pieces. Of the other pieces Virtual Focus has appeared as a 3 minute excerpt on a Musicworks cd⁽⁹⁾ (along with a well worth hearing 18 minute piece by Matt Rogalsky utilizing the Virtual Focus setup) so this 15′ excerpt is pretty much a new release. Neural Network Plus, is also most likely completely new as none of the five available versions of Neural Synthesis^{(6, 7)} (which I assume this is derived from) are performed with Kosugi.  The Events were basically improvisations between the current Cunningham “pit” and was something that they did for years as the pit musicians changed. This would make this a pretty rare example of Tudor improvising though of course one never knows what live electronics setup he’d use and what he’d have considered that setup to be.

David Tudor & Sophia Ogielska, Toneburst Map 4

The other Tudor pieces, Toneburst and Phonemes have been released previously^{(5, 8)} but considering that these were regularly performed to accompany dance, some of them for years these could be new recordings. It is hard to tell, the liner notes, conveniently available on the New World site here, do not specify. The excerpt of Toneburst is within a few seconds of the version released by the EMF⁽⁵⁾ so that could be the same recording (though they don’t credit this on in the liner notes, which you’d think they’d have to do).  When I’m able to go through the set checking on whether these are new performances of these pieces is something that I’ll definitely explore when I get the set.

Christian Wolff Burdocks (excerpt)

As Tudor was a primary performer with the Merce Cunningham Dance company until 1992 he performs on quite a few of the other pieces on this set. A number of these are also of quite a bit of interest to the David Tudor fan. Of course there are plenty of instance of Tudor’s fantastic pianism on pieces from Cage, Wolff, Feldman and others. Beyond the interest that these pieces themselves have, some of these are previously unreleased versions of these pieces. Highlights of these include Wolff’s fantastic For 1, 2, or 3 People is represented by Tudor’s gripping realization on barrel organ and live electronics that previously appeared on the Second Wind for Organ LP which has never been on cd. Another would be  John Cages Variations V in which dancers trigger various pieces pieces of and Live Electronics setup which previously could be heard on a VHS tape of the dance that used to be sold from the Cunningham Company but has since gone out of print. Cages Music for Piano 1-20 is a wonderful piece which I’ve loved the versions I’ve heard Tudor perform⁽¹⁰⁾ and I’m not sure that this is a new recording on not. Wolff’s For Piano I and Burdocks (which also features Cage and Mumma) are wonderful pieces that I look forward to hearing these realizations. There really is so much on here from Tudor that its really an embarrassment of riches for the Tudor aficionado.

Gordon Mumma Mesa diagram

Gordon Mumma’s pieces are also of interest to the Live Electronics enthusiast and while Mesa has been released, 52/3 hasn’t and Telepos has only been release as part of the Music with Roots in the Aether video series that Robert Ashley released. 52/3 is performed by Cage, Tudor and Mumma and Telepos is another piece triggered by the dancers and are certainly something that I can’t wait to check out. David Behrman was a member of the Sonics Arts Union (along with Mumma, Lucier and Ashley) who were also early pioneers of live electronics and is represented here by …for nearly an hour and Long Throw which I’m unfamiliar with and look forward to checking out. Takehisa Kosugi, who was associated with Fluxus, often worked with Tudor and developed his own primitive electronics that he’d often play along with his violin. He long composed and played in the pit for the Company and his pieces are often of interest. He has relatively few releases and I at least haven’t heard S.E. Wave/E.W. Song or Spacings the two pieces from him on this set. Kosugi’s fellow Fluxus member Toshi Ichiyangi’s Activities for Orchestra is another one I look forward to hearing. I wish his Sapporo, realized by Tudor and Cage on live electronics, was included in this set, that one remains only available on a VHS of the accompanying dance. The pieces from Pauline Oliveros, Annea Lockwood and Maryanne Amacher are again new to me and ones that I look forward to hearing.

—

There really is too much here that I could just go on and on and that’s without even hearing them! Reading the extensive liner notes and listening to the excerpts on the website has me salivating for this set.  I’ll definitely be spending a ton of time with this over the holidays and throughout 2011 so look for more posts to come.

References

1) Music for Merce (1952-2009) (New World Records)[Liner notes]
2) Merce Cunningham Dance Company (Wikipedia)

3) John Cage (Wikipedia)

4)  David Tudor (Wikipedia)

5) David Tudor Live Electronic Music. (Electronic Music Foundation)

6) David Tudor David Tudor plays Cage and David Tudor [Neural Synthesis No. 2] (Atonal)

7) David Tudor Neural Synthesis Nos. 6-9. (Lovely Music)

8) David Tudor Three Works for Live Electronics. (Lovely Music)
9)  David Tudor Virtual Focus (Musicworks 73)
10) David Tudor Music for Piano (Edition RZ)
11) Composers Inside Electronics From the Kitchen Archives (Orange Mountain Music)
12) Christian Wolff (Wikipedia)
13) Morton Feldman (Wikipedia)
14) Earle Brown (Wikipedia)
15)  David Behrman (Wikipedia)
16)  Gordon Mumma (Wikipedia)
17) Pauline Oliveros (Wikipedia)
18) Maryanne Amacher (Wikipedia)
19) Annea Lockwood (Wikipedia)
20) Fluxus (Wikipedia)
21) Takehisa Kosgui (Wikipedia)
22) Toshi Ichiyanagi (Wikipedia)
23) Stuart  Dempster (Wikipedia)

Christian Wolff at NEC part 3

March 17^th 2010
Christian Wolff festival day 3
New England Conservatory of Music, Boston MA

The final day of the the Christian Wolff festival at NEC was one of the days I was anticipating the most.  The afternoon concert was entirely dedicated to Burdocks (1970-71)  which is a fantastic score that I’ve heard a number of quality realizations of.  The score calls for one or more groupings of players and for this concert they had organized many groups, virtually everyone we had seen perform to date and more.  They tended to be in groups of about four and they had a whole program of how they’d come in and play, how they’d move around various “stations” in the hall and so on.  As you’d imagine the sounds were highly varied with virtually every instrumentation you’d imagine (though only a bit of electronics).  There was some bad actors (a particularly terrible bit from a professor on the piano springs to mind)  but in general there was so much going on that’d they couldn’t act as a spoiler.  I can’t deny that there was a couple of times where I had to resist the temptation to stand up and shout “This isn’t Christian Wolff” ala Morton Feldman at a Scratch Orchestra performance of this piece.  Toward the end of the piece there is a melodic section that is repeated a number of times. Given the amount of performers here and the length of the event this went on and on, coming first from one part of the room and later another part of the room. In the end there was just one group left, with a pianist, guitar and violin (IIRC) and they’d just play this melodic bit in various ways. Very charming.

Listen to the Scratch Orchestra perform Burdocks

After the show I checked out some of the pages of the score that’d had been scattered around and also found the set of directions for which group was supposed to be where at what time. I commented to Keith Rowe that the chaos had clearly been pretty well orchestrated. He quipped that back in the Scratch Orchestra days they never needed to coordinate their chaos.

Festival Director Stephen Drury playing Sticks

Continuing in the list of great pieces performed on this day the selection from the Prose Collection performed in the Christian Wolff Performance Space, was one of my all time favorites, Sticks. This is another one which I’ve played with the Seattle Improv Meeting, which you can enjoy a recording of while you read along:

Seattle Improv Meeting play Christian Wolff’s Sticks

Sticks

Make sounds with sticks of various kinds, one stick alone, several together, on other instruments, sustained as well as short. Don’t mutilate trees or shrubbery; don’t break anything other than the sticks; avoid outright fires unless they serve a practical purpose.

You can begin when you have not heard a sound from a stick for a while; two or three can begin together. You may end when your sticks or one of them are broken small enough that a handful of the pieces in your hands cupped over each other are not, if shaken and unamplified, audible beyond your immediate vicinity. Or hum continuously on a low note; having started proceed with other sounds simultaneously (but not necessarily continuously); when you can hum no longer, continue with other sounds, then stop. With several players either only one should do this or two or two pairs together (on different notes) and any number individually. ⁽⁶⁾

You can also do without sticks but play the sounds and feelings you imagine a performance with sticks would have.

There were little stashes of sticks all over the place and the students, as well as festival director Stephen Drury, moved around between the stairwell and the upper area playing these sticks. The sticks were pretty often tapped or rubbed against each other and hitting other things, instruments or objects was quite common as well.  While pretty good theater musically I felt this was the least successful of the Prose Pieces that was played as part of the festival. Too dispersed and not enough focus on the actual sticks in my opinion. I think they would have been better off sitting in a circle like they did for Fits & Starts around a pile of sticks and really tried to work with the materials. This is basically how I’ve done it when I’ve performed it and I really loved the results (check out the above recording for a sample of this.  In this performance it was much more percussive due to the focus on playing other objects and did not bring out the sounds of sticks nearly as well as one can.  Still it was fun to watch and good to see it performed and as with all performances of experimental music, lessons were learned.

—

Following the dinner break it was back to the concert hall where, as with every night, there was a tape piece playing as I walked into the hall. Tonight’s was For Magnetic Tape (1952) which was the piece that Wolff did while Cage created Williams Mix and Earle Brown his Octet for 8 Speakers as part of the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape.  I wasn’t able to concentrate too much on the piece but it was a fairly typical 50s tape piece with sounds rushing in and out, short little tones and squeaks.  You can however give this a listen yourself as an mp3 is hosted on the Dartmouth site:

Christian Wolff’s For Magnetic Tape

The program began with Duo for Violins (1950). This was the first Christian Wolff composition, at least the first one he lists on his websites list of works.  It features that highly restricted material of his earliest pieces, constructed out of longer lines, overlapping, intersecting and contrasting. A  really nice piece and I enjoyed this performance of it a lot. This was followed by Violinist and Percussionist (1996)  another nice little piece that began with plucked strings on the violin while the percussionist mostly tapped  his drum head, than proceeded into somewhat languorous bowing as the percussion became more active.

I’ve seen Keith Rowe solo on numerous occasions and while this one was of a piece with those others it was also rather unique. First off it was a bit shorter than normal at a bit less then fifteen minutes (he tends toward twenty-five or forty-five minute solos depending on the circumstance) but also there was the uniqueness of the room to consider. The room is a very important concept for Keith and it extends beyond the physical aspects of the room to contain the atmosphere, the audience and the general ambiance. All of these in this case are the conservatory and its most formal and impressive hall.  Keith’s performance began quite spiky with objects on the strings, short little attacks and quick events. Shortly thereafter he brought in the radio and other electronics: the  telephone pickup on his netbook and bluetooth interference from a mouse. The performance was compressed, but it had the contours of a Keith solo and it was a bit more harsh than I anticipated, which I think was a little bit of disruption to the formal atmosphere, bringing a bit of the experimentalist tradition to the concert hall. It was a hit among the (mostly) students in the audience and I can’t help but thinking that some few there would throw of the rigidity of the conservatory after this week.

After an intermission was the a large ensemble piece, The Exception and the Rule (2010) performed by the Callithumpian Consort under the direction of Stephen Drury. The piece they played was the musical portions of a a Bertolt Brecht play, that had been composed by Christian Wolff for the ensemble. This was for a fairly large ensemble with male and female vocalists singing the Brecht songs. This piece was performed more completely the next night so I’ll simply say that it was great musically and it really sounded good in this hall.  Rounding out the night was a performance of Edges, which is probably my favorite Wolff score (and one of the most challenging I’ve played) with Keith and Christian along with half a dozen students.

One of the great treats of the year that I spent in London was to play with AMM. I still play whenever I can with them. That free improvisation just blew me away. I just loved that. It’s not something I can imagine doing exclusively by any means, but the experience is like no other. I made one piece called Edges which was basically for that kind of a situation. That’s the nearest I’ve come to making a really improvisational piece, where you can’t do it unless you know how to improvise. There is a score, there’s visual material, but the score is just these bits of information scattered over a page which might just indicate very loud or play dirty or play in the middle, that kind of rather generic indication. But the instructions are that you don’t necessarily play the notations but you play around them or in relationship to them. In other words”””very loud”””that’s the image. There you have your Platonic idea, but you circle it, and you have a conversation with “very loud” which might include playing it very softly or thinking about dynamics but in relation to that. It’s okay occasionally to play very loud, but that’s not the primary point of realizing that notation. ⁽⁷⁾

They ensemble was widely spaced out on the stage with Christian (on piano) and Keith roughly centered.  They played in the darkness with only the lights on their music stands casting any light. The student ensemble included trumpet,  violin, clarinet, double bass and baritone horn. There was a lot of space and the sounds were mostly short events coming from the students. They were for the most part a bit tentative but Keith  brought in a bit more grit, growl and dynamics though his actions were quite spaced out. Christian also worked in a wider dynamic range playing inside and out of the piano with more compact but still fairly spaced out events. A number of times he responded to the score with big crashes on the piano, after which some of the students seemed to loosen up. I thought they all seemed to play to the score except for the baritone player who played a bit too much but thankfully  never grandstanding and or overly dramatic. Pretty good overall especially considering that they didn’t have a lot of time to practice. In my experience with this piece it took several attempts to begin to really find a way into it and I think much more practice to really become proficient at it.

Listen to Gentle Fire perform Christian Wolff’s Edges

March 18^th 2010
Christian Wolff festival day 4
Gardner Gallery Boston MA

So the final night of the week of Christian Wolff in Boston was quite a different affair. It was the aforementioned Callithumpian Consort and they were performing four pieces from a variety of twentieth century composers. The starkest difference though was that it wasn’t at NEC but was at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Gallery a few blocks away from the school.  This museum was the mansion of a Boston socialite and art collector and has a fixed collection hung salon style.  The art, primarily Italian Renaissance art, is uniformly uninteresting to myself and the museum is incredibly uptight. But in order to expand their patronage they do a number of events trying to appeak to a younger crowd. So on the night of this performance there was in the first floor courtyard a Gardner After Hours event which featured a DJ, a bar and younger yuppie types engaged in socializing and an art based scavenger hunt. At the same time as they’d try to appeal to this crowd the uptight museum staff would constantly ostracize them in various ways, constantly subverting the “fun”.  In parallel with the After Hours program was the musical performance  that I’d come to see, which was part of their Avant Gardner series in an upper tapestry room, so occasionally the sounds of the “party” would drift up during the quieter parts of the show.

The Callithumpian Consort was founded by Stephen Drury in the mid-90s and, as they put it on their website,  “is dedicated to the proposition that music is an experience.” They seem to play quite often as part of the Avant Gardner series and bringing more mainstream modern composition into the public sphere seems to be their thing.  For tonight’s program they played four pieces including the “world premier” of Christian Wolff’s The Exception and the Rule (2010).

The first was 26 Simultaneous Mosaics by Henry Cowell.  I’d seen this piece performed in Seattle as part of the Drums Along the Pacific concert series which had also featured Stephen Drury on piano. This is what I wrote about it for that performance:

The next piece, 26 Simultaneous Mosaics, from 1963 is indeterminate in form, making one wonder if the bi-directional influence between Cage and Cowell continued beyond percussion (Cowell also composed for Cage style prepared piano) though an earlier Cowell piece also allowed for a changeable structure at the group level instead of this pieces more variable indeterminacy at the  individual level. This piece for piano, percussion, violin, “˜cello and clarinet made up of  the aforementioned 26 parts which the instrumentalists can play in the order of their choosing thus causing each performance to be unique. In this realization the piece was spacious and meandering with the various mosaics taking on many different characteristics.  A nice piece with hints of romanticism here and there.

This pretty much held for this performance though it opened with a big wild run from the piano which had also occurred in Seattle though I hadn’t noted it. I thought this performance wasn’t quite as strong in the other parts, not as wild. Not bad though, but this would prove to be par for the course with the Callithumpian Consort – almost always a bit staid (except for Drury).  This piece was followed by Trio for Violin, Violoncello and Piano by Charles Ives. I’ve stated earlier in these reports that I am not much of a fan of Ives and am far from knowledgeable enough to intelligently comment on his music. So in brief I felt that the first movement was pretty great, easily the most appealing Ives I’ve heard and I was really hoping this would finally be a composition of his I liked. But then came the second movement which spoiled it all. It was typical Ives Americana but particularly bombastic even for him.  It was a “scherzo” that was a medley of popular songs of the day and it was like a bad string trio performance of Souza marches. Soul crushing.

The centerpiece of the evening was Christian Wolff piece which, while still an edited down version of the whole piece, featured actors and narration between the songs. This filled in the story which was pretty typical Brecht (i.e.  it rather belabored it’s point)  which was about a capitalist trying to cross a desert for a business opportunity during which he abuses and eventually kills his porter. The piece culminates in a trial in which the judge rules for the merchant as he had the right to self defense even if the threat was imaginary. The music of course is the most interesting part, from the program notes:

The music for The Exception and the Rule is cored for a mixed ensemble of low, dark-sounding instruments (clarinet, trombone, viola, bass), and percussion, and includes both specifically notated music as well as aleatoric sections. The singers are asked to prioritize clarity of diction and to sing straight ahead, and to think of folk or early music singing styles. There are no dynamics in the score, suggesting a mezzo, flat sound. ⁽⁹⁾

I enjoyed the music for this quite a bit and while I tend to not be too much into Lieder type singing pieces I thought this all worked well. The lack of inflection on the singing helped a lot for me. Ultimately I think I preferred the previous nights version as musically it sounded better in the hall and the play parts seem a bit superfluous.

So ends
The story of a journey
You have heard and you have seen.
You saw what is usual, what happens time and again.
But we ask of you:
What is not strange
Find it disturbing,
Strange making what is customary,
Find it inexplicable,
Find it inexplicable.
What is usual should astonish you
What is the rule recognize it as an abuse
And where you have recognized abuse
Abuse
Create a remedy
Do something about it!
Create a remedy
Do something about it!⁽¹⁰⁾

The final piece was Page 45 from Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise performed by the Consort along with Keith Rowe.  This was easily the biggest disappointment of the entire week of music; they only played for about 8 minutes which is pretty short even for just one page. They didn’t have Keith run a workshop on performing the piece, the Callithumpian Consort apparently has been working on the piece for some time, supposedly they have even recorded the whole score at length. But their interpretation, at least of this page, was terrible bringing to mind all that Cardew had complained about classical performers attempts at this piece. They played the whole thing at a very quiet dynamic with near continuous playing. This really didn’t fit the material which was a page with several isolated events. Additionally they were far too inclined toward unison playing, too worried about playing together, which really isn’t an option with a group playing the score.  Keith of course kept to the score and provided some dynamic contrast but he played to the room and thus didn’t dramatically jump out.  It seems strange to me to have Keith there and not really use him, he is by far the most expert person playing Treatise today and you’d think they’d want to take advantage of it.

After the concert we all headed down to the gallery bar, which the uptight staff of course shut down before the concert goers could get a drink (including the musicians whom they gave drink tickets to). This didn’t go over too well, but we all went to this restaurant closer to NEC and had a final beer.  While this last night was a bit of an outlier, in the main this was a fantastic week and it was an incredible opportunity to get to see so much of Wolff’s music performed. I had a great time and it was an honor and a pleasure to be able to meet Christian Wolff and Stephen Drury. As always I had many great conversations with Keith whom it was great to see again. My thanks to all involved for the terrific program.

See all of my pictures from this festival in my Christian Wolff at NEC flickr group.

References
1) Christian Wolff, Cues: Writings & Conversations Edition MusikTexte, Köln 1999, ISBN 3-9803151-3-4
2) Christian Wolff, Dartmouth page
3) Christian Wolff, Wikipedia article
4) NEC’s Christian Wolff Residency site
5) Stephen Drury’s site
6) Christian Wolff, Prose Collection, Frog Peak Music
7) Christian Wolff Interview with Damon Krukowski, BOMB 59/Spring 1997
8) Callithumpian Consort website
9) Callithumpian Consort at the Gardner museum program notes
10) Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913-1956

Christian Wolff at NEC part 2

Wolff’s music offers no eay answers. Instead, it poses difficult questions. Such as:

– Why is the music constantly being interrupted? Or, is the music interrupting something else? ⁽⁸⁾

March 16^th 2010
Christian Wolff festival day 2
New England Conservatory of Music, Boston MA

The second day of the Christian Wolff festival continued in the same fashion as the first day, with shows at five and eight with a selection from the Prose Collection in between. There was also earlier in the afternoon a short lecture from Christian Wolff and a masterclass from Keith Rowe. I tried to make it to Christian’s lecture which was to be on how looking back at ancient history can be of value to contemporary music making but I couldn’t find the building that it was in. Across the street from the rest of the NEC campus is a building that is mostly storefront on the ground level. Well it turns out that there is a door there, marked only with the building number that if you go in there there is another bit of NEC. Well I didn’t find this until well past the start time of the lecture, at which point I thought it’d be rude to enter. So I went to Symphony Sushi instead and had a very nice lunch. I also didn’t attend Keith’s masterclass since I have been to a similar type of workshop with him and I figured this was more for the students. Keith later told me it was packed with around 50 people and it wasn’t really possible for the whole group to all play.  A very thorough report of the masterclass was posted by Joe Morris on his blog and is well worth reading. I instead went to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts this afternoon, which while not having too much to offer the aficionado of modern and contemporary art did have a number of pieces worth seeing and of course plenty of early works of note. The Miró, pictured to the right there was among the most interesting to me, in that the cloud portion is unlike any Miró I’ve seen and very striking I thought. The other thing of real interest to me at the MFA is that they have the only historical cláirseach in the United States, the Bunworth harp.

The 5pm concert began with I am a Dangerous Woman (1983) a solo piano piece that was inspired by Joan Cavanagh’s feminist anti-war poem of the same name. The piece reminded me somewhat of last years Long Piano (Peace March 11) released on New World (which I wrote a bit about earlier) in that it began with a more formally structured section that was not strictly a march but in that vein. As the piece progressed this initial structure changed character several times, overridden by shorter segments that seem disconnected but eventually create a new kind of form. The piece concludes on much less strident note with a much sweeter, melodic nature. A nice piece, well performed. This was followed by Charles Ives String Quartet No.1 “From the Salvation Army” which was  pretty much Ives, beginning with a round and the music sounding (as per its source) like classified Salvation Army Band times. I’m not a huge Ives fan and am far from expert so I’ll say no more. There was no information regarding a connection, real or perceived, between Ives and Wolff.  I think you could place Wolff in an American tradition that includes Ives and certainly the use of existing folk material is a shared aspect. The group that performed this piece, the Borromeo String Quartet, has been the  Quartet-in-Residence at NEC for seventeen years and are clearly a Boston institution.  They played in that very animated style as if they were “rocking out” that I blame the Kronos Quartet for. The final piece of the afternoon was Peace March (Exercise #26) (1988) which was written for solo snare and published in Stuart Smith’s The Noble Snare collection.  Here it was played as a duo with Christian Wolff on melodica and a Trent Leasure on the snare. This was a short, charming piece with the snare mostly in a muted mode and gently played with the hands. Wolff’s melodica was as far as I can recall just tones that came in and out amongst the sounds of the snare. A nice way to end the afternoon.

The afternoons piece from the Prose Collection was Play, which I have performed myself in several different groups some of which are archived here (scroll down to the Christian Wolff section) and one of which you can listen to as you read along:

Seattle Improv Meeting performs Christian Wolff’s Play.

Play

Play, make sounds, in short bursts, clear in outline for the most part; quiet; two or three times move towards as loud as possible, but as soon as you cannot hear yourself or another player stop directly. Allow various spaces between playing (2, 5 seconds, indefinite); sometimes overlap events.  One, two, three, four or five times play a long sound or complex or sequence of sounds. Sometimes play independently, sometimes by coordinating; with other players (when they start or stop or while they play or when they move) or a player should play (start or, with long sounds, start and stop or just stop) at a signal (or within 2 or 5 seconds of a signal) over which he has no control (does not know when it will come). At some point or throughout use electricity.  ^{(6, p. 8)}

This performance was down in the stairwell below the statue of Beethoven and was a pretty diverse group of players including some electronics, a baritone sax, percussion, guitar, violin, bassoon and so on.  I thought this performance was pretty good, lots of bursts of activity, pretty playful and evocative of the score. Of the three pieces performed from the Prose Collection during this festival I think this one was the most successful: it was engaging music and it really captures the essence of the score. When I looked at my notes that made I had noted several things that directly corresponded to the score (the bursts of activity for instance) and that says a lot to me. This is one of my favorite of the Prose Collection, one of those pieces where the instructions are simple but the ideas are profound. There is also a variant of this piece, the “Color Version” which pushes the complexity and interaction between the players and interestingly for a score includes a number of questions:

Are musical sounds to other sounds as black and white is to color? ^{(6, p. 9)}

As per usual the evening began with an electronic piece, this evenings was Snowdrop (electronic version) (1970).  I’m quite familiar with the solo piano version of this piece, and this electronic realization was made up of intriguingly layered tones;  quite different from the piano version. I’d like to hear this again to directly compare the two and figure out how exactly they relate. The program began with Vanessa Wheeler playing acoustic guitar and singing Dark as a Dungeon (Merle Travis)  which is a miners song. This folk tune was used as a source for a piece of the same name by Christian Wolff for solo clarinet of which, though pretty far removed from the source,  some elements came through. This I think is another good example of social concerns working their way into Wolff’s music but without pushing it in your face. Having a trad performance of the folk tune beforehand was a nice touch and a little more direct than whatever was implied with the earlier (and forthcoming) Ives piece. Three Pieces: Rock About,  Instrument, Starving to Death on the Government Dime (1979-80) for violin and viola followed and I have to say that these really sounded great in the hall. All three were  in that uncertain melodic vein so prevalent in Wolff’s compositions and the reverberation of the hall seemed to both reinforce that aspect and yet sustain them. The three pieces all kind of blend together in my mind but my favorite moment was a solo viola section in one of the pieces that really brought out the best of the room, sounding as if it was enveloping you in its rich yet hesitant sound. Another Possibility (2004), a recent solo electric guitar piece, was which was spare, angular and oddly jazzy at times. Overall it had this effect of almost making the player seem like he was hesitantly picking out the piece, like ones first read of a score, but he clearly was really solid and experienced with the piece. He’d pause at times and turn on distortion and continue playing, giving the piece some nice pauses and placing these sections in time.

More guitar followed this,  a duo improvisation from Keith Rowe and Christian Wolff. There was some setup, a table  was brought out with two guitars, Keith’s electronics and in between the two guitars Keith’s collection of manipulators. In front of  Christian’s guitar was his melodica and on either side of the performers, matching Fender amps. They sat side by side at this table sharing the tools, but as only Keith had his electrics there was a nice divergence in sound. Wolff’s playing reminded me at times of the 60s AMM recordings where Keith used less and more primitive electronics, but even then had his own unique texture. He played Stones at one point, working with a pair of them that Keith had on the table, bringing out the sounds of stones as directed in that Prose Piece. Toward the end of their all too short performance he played a bit of melodica  while Keith worked the fan and various electronics creating digital roar that the thin, sustained lines of the melodica snaked in and out of. Keith’s playing was of course compressed into the shorter time allotted for this piece but remained unhurried and rich all the same. He matched Christian in the beginning using various manipulators and tools on the guitar but began to add more abstract sounds from the electronics as the set progressed. As Christian played Stones, Keith’s sounds became more raw, using contact mics perhaps and bringing up the radio.  By the time of the aforementioned melodica section he had the blurry wash of radio, effects, the roar of the fan all providing this striking contrast to Christian’s playing. Only about 12 minutes all told, but really engaging and a nice contrast to the other pieces we’d seen tonight.

After an intermission the largest group we’d seen yet, including a conductor, came out and performed the US premier of  Quodlibet (2007).  This piece was for a chamber group of rather diverse instrumentation including a percussionist placed a little ways away from the group.  It began with just a few people playing and it tended to shift around the ensemble with lots of moving events mostly in little subsets. At times though quite a few members would be playing but while active it was never overly dense.  I don’t really recall too much more beyond this about this piece, but there was something about it I found a bit unsatisfying, perhaps the larger group lost some of that fragility that I find so endearing in Wolff’s music.  The following piece, Tuba Song (1992), though, was among my favorites of the entire festival.  The piece was for two tubas, one slightly larger than the other (though I don’t know whether these are distinct instruments or not), widely spaced on the stage. A massive duet of rumbles, rattles and overlapping low tones. It brought to mind a ritual mating song of two alien whale-like creatures. The piece was in three movements, of which I found the first the most interesting in it’s use of the really low and abstract sounds. The other movements were also great, with a bit of that elusive Wolff melody working their way in. A truly great piece, it made me think of  those Alvin Lucier pieces made up of duo sine waves but at the opposite end of the tonal spectrum.  A beautiful way to end another really great day of music.

More pictures in my Christian Wolff at NEC flickr group.

References
1) Christian Wolff, Cues: Writings & Conversations Edition MusikTexte, Köln 1999, ISBN 3-9803151-3-4
2) Christian Wolff, Dartmouth page
3) Christian Wolff, Wikipedia article
4) NEC’s Christian Wolff Residency site
5) Stephen Drury’s site
6) Christian Wolff, Prose Collection, Frog Peak Music
7) Christian Wolff Interview with Damon Krukowski, BOMB 59/Spring 1997
8) Stephen Drury, festival director’s notes