Sep 1st 2013

Rocking the cradle of experimental music

by Michael Johnson

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

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

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

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

“Portraitures and caricatures:  Conductors, Pianist, Composers”

 here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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







     

 


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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Browse articles by author

More Music Reviews

Sep 25th 2014

Think of your favourite piece of music. Do you get shivers when the music swells or the chorus kicks in? Or are the opening few bars enough to make you feel tingly?

Despite having no obvious survival value, listening to music can be a highly rewarding activity.

Aug 18th 2014

Pianist Mordecai Shehori’s prodigious output of CDs over the past few years must be setting some kind of record. Almost every piece of the piano repertoire he has studied throughout his long career is being preserved for posterity, now amounting to 31 CDs.

Aug 14th 2014

The past may be a foreign country, but in terms of war, they do not do things differently there; death is death at any time and in any language.

No other work in the Classical repertoire could be more topical or appropriate in commemorating the centenary of the Great War than Benjamin Brit

Jul 19th 2014

An interview by Ivan Ilic. 

Jul 17th 2014

Chinese pianist Ernest So’s eclectic tastes set him apart from the current run of young Asian keyboard superstars now filling concert halls around the world. He has the technical brilliance of the best of them but more importantly he is a discerning student of the repertoire.

Jul 13th 2014

Gregg Lehrman is a composer and entrepreneur who has helped score music for a number of big TV shows and films.

Jun 9th 2014

The Bach suites for solo cello can leave you suffused, body and soul, with their plangent resonances if you allow them to. These six intimate pieces seem conceived to exploit the sensual nature of the cello.

Jun 5th 2014

When British music lecturer Julia Winterson offered composer John Cage a cup of coffee, he just looked at her. Ms. Winterson, recalling the 1989 encounter, said she thought maybe he hadn’t heard her or didn’t understand her Yorkshire accent.

Jun 1st 2014

A new CD from Ivan Ilic, the Serbian-American pianist based in France, offers a most refreshing change of pace from the current crop of young keyboard speedsters and clavier hammerers.

May 25th 2014

Frederic Rzewski's The People United Will Never be Defeated is one of those pieces that seems to have popped or plopped out whole and near perfect.

May 23rd 2014

With a selection of three rarely recorded piano pieces, the great neglected American composer Frederic Rzewski surges back into view this spring on a new CD from the Naxos “American Classics” series.  Where has he been these past few years?

May 21st 2014

Robert Beaser is one of our very strongest composers.

May 19th 2014

John Adams is one of the most frequently performed of American composers and justly so.

May 16th 2014
As an arts snob, I had never paid much attention to Irish traditional music but here, in a new CD called “Sleepsongs” (Heresy 014, U.S. distribution by Naxos), the lovely Irish singer Caitriona O’Leary’s calming voice overwhelms from the first track onward.
May 13th 2014

Of the perhaps inappropriately named New York School, I find Earle Brown's the most musically rich and articulate. Sign Sounds is for a small chamber orchestra.

May 9th 2014

My friend Stephen Albert once said that he couldn't imagine writing a string quartet after those of Bartok.

Apr 18th 2014

The $10,000 Music Pulitzer Prize went this year to Alaskan composer John Luther Adams, launching a heated debate in the music world over who was – or wasn’t – most deserving of this perpetually controversial award.

Apr 15th 2014

Contrary to many keyboard artists, pianist William Grant Naboré seems perfectly at home with Beethoven’s daunting Diabelli Variations.

Mar 11th 2014
The expatriate young pianist Mauro Bertoli, now artist in residence at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, brings his feathery Italian touch to a new CD, Italian Memories, featuring his personal collection of little-known Italian keyboard works.

His timeline stretches

Mar 3rd 2014

Every few years, music lovers should try to attend a live performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphonie. Not just to clean one’s pipes but to be reminded what a composer’s volcanic imagination can do with an orchestra.