Ross Alex. The rest is noice
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
361
and then gone into Mexican exile, saw a world of possibility in Cowell’s
suggestion, and relied on his mechanical instrument to execute insanely
intricate rhythmic designs that only a many-armed robot pianist could have
played. In the notorious Study No. 33, for example, tempos are superimposed
according to the ratio 2/2. This music was maximal rather than minimal, but its
jazzy, hyperkinetic energy put it far outside the postwar modernist mainstream.
Harry Partch, the other great West Coast nonconformist of the twenties and
thirties, wanted to “find a way outside”—to jettison the entire discourse of
European music as it had been practiced since at least the time of Bach.
Partch was a true child of the Wild West. He spent much of his childhood in the
railway outpost of Benson, Arizona, where his father was a government
inspector. According to Bob Gilmore’s biography, young Harry caught glimpses
of old-school outlaws on the edge of town. Moving to Los Angeles in 1919,
Partch studied at the University of Southern California and made money as a
movie-house pianist. Stylish, handsome, and gay—homosexuality is a common
thread among composers of this time and place—Partch fell in love with a
struggling actor named Ramón Samaniego, whom he met when both men were
ushers at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Samaniego ended the affair shortly
after changing his name to Ramon Novarro and finding world fame as a silent-
movie idol. That experience apparently cemented Partch’s determination to
reject the mainstream in favor of the companionship of outcasts.
One day Partch asked himself why there are twelve notes in an octave, and
couldn’t find a satisfactory answer. He buried himself in a study of the history of
tuning, paying particular attention to Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone. He
emerged with the conviction that the modern Western system of equal-
tempered tuning had to go. In its place, Partch would revive the tuning
principles of the ancient Greeks, who, at least in theory, derived all musical
pitches from the clean integer ratios of the natural harmonic series.
To this end, Partch invented a scale made up not of twelve notes but of forty-
three. Extant instruments were incapable of producing such microtonal
shadings, so Partch invented his own; he started by building an Adapted Viola
and eventually fashioned an entire private orchestra of bowed, plucked, and
keyboard instruments, together with Cloud-Chamber Bowls (Pyrex carboys
obtained from the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory), the Kithara (modeled on a
harp-like instrument seen on Greek vases), and the awesome Marimba Eroica
(whose lowest notes boom forth from five-foot-high blocks). By the same token,
Partch rejected modern styles of singing, which he considered artificial. Like
Leoš Janáček, he sought to close the gap between song and speech, and his
annotations of overheard American conversations bear a striking resemblance
to Janáček’s transcriptions of Czech. A Western tradition clotted with studied
abstractions—what Partch called the “Faustian” strain—would give way to
“corporeal music,” an art at one with the body and the soul.
On a trip to Europe in the early thirties, Partch aroused the interest of William
Butler Yeats, who watched as the young American composer chanted Psalm
137, “By the Rivers of Babylon,” while sawing on the Adapted Viola. Yeats was
362
charmed, but the musical establishments of Europe and America ignored or
mocked Partch’s ideas. By the time he returned to America in 1935, the Great
Depression was at its height, and prospects for a conventional career seemed
poor.
Partch now made a momentous decision: instead of begging for assistance
from patrons or the WPA bureaucracy, he dropped out of civilization entirely,
and became a hobo. For several years he crisscrossed the country, riding
trains, doing manual labor, sleeping in shelters or in the wild, contracting
syphilis, working occasionally as a proofreader, and, all the while, rethinking
every parameter of music. In the desert city of Barstow, California, he found a
set of inscriptions on a highway railing, which he wrote down for future use. An
excerpt:
Car just passed by,
Make that two more, three more.
Do not think they’ll let me finish my story.
Here she comes, a truck, not a fuck, but a truck. Just a truck.
Hoping to get the hell out, here’s my name—
Johnnie Reinwald, nine-fifteen South Westlake Avenue, Los Angeles
These words reappeared in the 1941 cycle Barstow, for baritone and Adapted
Guitar. The landscape is nothing like Copland’s idealized heartland, where the
wheat is plentiful and golden. Partch’s songs captured the roughness of life
during the Great Depression—you can practically smell rye on the breath of the
singer. A lot of people would be hard-pressed to identify Barstow as “classical
music” at all. It comes closer to the twisted white blues of Frank Zappa, Captain
Beefheart, and Tom Waits. The tenuous situation of classical music in America
was, for this composer, not a deficit but an advantage. In one essay he wrote:
“There is, thank God, a large segment of our population that never heard of J.
S. Bach.”
Harry Partch passed through the University of Southern California a few years
too early to meet Arnold Schoenberg. This was probably just as well, because
the grand old man of modern music would almost certainly have taken a dim
view of Partch’s crusade against equal-temperament tuning. In general,
Schoenberg was poorly equipped to comprehend the emergent West Coast
aesthetic. For him, the ultimate sin was to repeat an idea unnecessarily (“Hi-yo,
Silver!”), whereas the California composers were discovering the joys of
insistent repetition and gradual change. Yet Schoenberg became an unlikely
mentor for two other major figures of the California avant-garde: Lou Harrison
and John Cage.
Harrison, a gentle soul in a century of sacred monsters, was born in 1917, the
son of a West Coast Chrysler salesman. His mentors were a formidable group:
he studied first with Cowell in San Francisco and then with Schoenberg in Los
Angeles, and, during a generally unhappy New York period, he worked closely
with Charles Ives and Carl Ruggles. From the ultra-moderns, Harrison acquired
a flair for stark, prophetic utterances—questing rivers of chant, machinelike
ostinatos, erupting dissonances, enveloping silences. From Cowell he picked up
363
a lifelong love of non-Western traditions, especially the Javanese gamelan. And
a reading of Partch’s Genesis of a Music in 1949 sparked an interest in just
intonation, as pure-ratio tuning is known.
Ingrained in Harrison’s personality was a love of musical merriment, of
hummable song and rollicking dance. He managed to assimilate these diverse
strains into forms of Baroque poise and precision; his favorite composer was
Handel. “Use only the essentials,” Schoenberg once said to his pupil. Harrison’s
career was a creative misinterpretation of that remark; it gave him permission to
vacate the overcrowded city space of modern music and to camp out in a desert
landscape of long drones and lulling patterns.
As for Cage, he found the seeds for many of his most extreme inspirations on
the West Coast. Cowell passed along his cherished ideas about flexibility of
form and the interchangeability of music and noise. Cage took Cowell’s classes
on non-Western music in New York in 1934 and drove across the country with
him at the end of that year; American music was never the same afterward.
Harrison helped Cage refine his writing for percussion; the two men organized
annual concerts in the San Francisco Bay Area starting in 1939. The California
spirit persists in the music that Cage wrote after moving permanently to New
York—notably in the string-of-pearl sounds of the prepared-piano pieces and in
the “nearly stationary” textures of the String Quartet in Four Parts.
Although Cage avoided tonality and repetition in his music from 1950 onward,
he hovered over the radical end of American music as a liberating spirit. He had
done the preliminary work of dismantling the European “vogue of profundity,” as
he called it. In 1952, he scandalized a crowd at Black Mountain College by
saying that Beethoven had misled generations of composers by structuring
music in goal-oriented harmonic narratives instead of letting it unfold moment by
moment. At a New York gathering, he was heard to say, “Beethoven was
wrong!” The poet John Ashbery overheard the remark, and for years afterward
wondered what Cage had meant. Eventually, Ashbery approached Cage again.
“I once heard you say something about Beethoven,” the poet began, “and I’ve
always wondered—” Cage’s eyes lit up. “Beethoven was wrong!” he exclaimed.
“Beethoven was wrong!” And he walked away.
Cage’s definitive refutation of Beethoven came in the form of an epic, almost
daylong performance of Erik Satie’s piano piece Vexations. The original score is
only a page long and would normally take just a minute or two to play, but at the
top appears this instruction: “In order to play this motif 840 times, one would
have to prepare oneself in advance, and in the utmost silence, through serious
immobilities.” Cage took this sentence at face value, and, on September 9 and
10, 1963, at the Pocket Theatre in New York, he presented Vexations complete.
A team of twelve pianists played from 6:00 p.m. until 12:40 p.m. the following
day. The New York Times responded by sending a gang of eight critics to cover
the event, one of whom ended up performing. In the audience for part of the
time was Andy Warhol, who remembered the experience when he made an
eight-hour film of the Empire State Building the following year.
364
The venue was equipped with a time clock, which patrons punched on entering
and leaving. Listeners were reimbursed five cents for each twenty minutes they
spent in the hall. Those who saw the entire performance received a twenty-cent
bonus. Karl Schenzer, an off-Broadway actor, was the only one to get a full
refund, having sat in the hall for nearly nineteen hours. “I feel exhilarated, not at
all tired,” Schenzer told the Times. “Time? What is time? In this music the
dichotomy between various aspects of art forms dissolves.”
It was after a New York Philharmonic performance of Anton Webern’s
Symphony, on January 26, 1950, that John Cage met a six-foot-tall, nearly
three-hundred-pound Jewish guy named Morton Feldman. Both men had
walked out of Carnegie Hall early—according to Feldman, because they were
dismayed by the hostile response that Webern’s music had inspired in
Philharmonic listeners; according to Cage, because they wanted to avoid
hearing Rachmaninov’s
Feldman
Symphonic Dances,
The two composers were often mentioned in the same breath, as part of the
New York experimental school that also included Christian Wolff and Earle
Brown. But Feldman was a singular character—in Steve Reich’s words, “an
absolutely unforgettable human being.” As a conversationalist, he was verbose,
egotistical, domineering, insulting, playful, flirtatious, and richly poetic—one of
the great talkers in the modern history of New York City. As a composer, he
was inward and withdrawn, seldom raising his musical voice above a whisper.
His preoccupation with vast, quiet, agonizingly beautiful worlds of sound opened
up yet another unmapped space in American music.
which ended the program. When
their paths crossed by the door, Feldman turned to Cage and asked, “Wasn’t
that beautiful?” A lifelong friendship began.
Feldman, whom everyone called Morty, was born in 1926, the son of a
manufacturer of children’s coats. He came of age in the cosmopolitan New York
of the thirties and forties, when Fiorello La Guardia championed high art for the
working man and European émigrés crowded the streets. In these years a
resourceful youth could pick up a world-class education simply by hanging out
in seminars and bars across the city. In 1944, Feldman enrolled at NYU, but
dropped out after a day or two. Instead, he took a job at his father’s factory, and
also worked part-time at his uncle’s dry cleaners. He held one or another of
these jobs until he was forty-four.
Two independent artists from Berlin and Paris—Stefan Wolpe and Edgard
Varèse—served as Feldman’s mentors. Wolpe had come to New York by way
of Palestine, holding fast to his far-left political convictions even as he adopted a
hard-driving form of twelve-tone writing. Teacher and student would have long
arguments about music’s role in society; once, when Wolpe pointed out the
window of his Greenwich Village studio and exclaimed that one must write for
the man in the street, Feldman looked down and saw, to his ironic delight,
365
Jackson Pollock walking by. Feldman learned much from Wolpe’s tensile,
shape-shifting atonal scores, but he was closer in spirit to Varèse, the master
sculptor of abstract sound. Varèse would tell his young admirer to think of music
as an arrangement of objects in space, and to keep in mind how long it takes for
any sound to travel through the hall.
Feldman’s early works take off from Schoenberg and Bartók, but they move at
an unpredictable, fitful pace; in accordance with Varèse’s instruction, Feldman
periodically stops to let his sonorities reverberate for a while in the listener’s
mind. Then came the galvanizing meeting with Cage, which led Feldman to
invent graphic notation and thereby to inaugurate the age of chance,
indeterminacy, and improvisation. More important for his own future
development, he launched a parallel series of conventionally notated pieces
called Intermissions and Extensions,
What Feldman did was to slow the pace of events in the Viennese universe.
Schoenberg was, above all, an impatient man, who had to keep scurrying on to
the next combination of sounds. Feldman was patient. He let each chord say
what it had to say. He breathed. Then he moved on to the next. The textures
are daringly sparse. One page of
which, in the spirit of works such as
Webern’s Symphony, find a world of meaning in a rigorously limited smattering
of notes. In Europe at this time, twelve-tone writing was being used as the
blueprint for a congested new serialist order. Feldman, like Cage, understood
music of the Second Viennese School as an invitingly strange, quasi-sacred
space from which everything extraneous has been scrubbed away. His music is
inconceivable without the precedent of the “Colors” movement of Schoenberg’s
Five Pieces for Orchestra, with its rotating transpositions of one muted chord, or
the funeral march of Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, with its misty layers of
winds and brass over drumrolls.
Extensions 3
Feldman also emulated the New York painters of the forties and fifties, most of
whom he knew personally. His scores are close in spirit to Rauschenberg’s all-
white and ill-black canvases, Barnett Newman’s gleaming lines, and Rothko’s
glowing fogbanks of color. Feldman said that New York painting led him to
attempt a music “more direct, more immediate, more physical than anything that
had existed heretofore.” Just as the Abstract Expressionists wanted viewers to
focus on paint itself, on its texture and pigment, Feldman wanted listeners to
absorb the basic facts of resonant sound. Wilfrid Mellers, in his classic book
has a mere fifty-seven notes in
forty bars. In confining himself to so little material, Feldman releases the
expressive power of the space around the notes. The sounds animate the
surrounding silence. Rhythms are irregular and overlapping, so that the music
floats above the beat. Harmonies dwell in a no-man’s-land between
consonance and dissonance, paradise and oblivion.
Music in a New Found Land, eloquently summed up Feldman’s early style:
“Music seems to have vanished almost to the point of extinction; yet the little
that is left is, like all of Feldman’s work, of exquisite musicality; and it certainly
presents the American obsession with emptiness completely absolved from
fear.”
366
Yet the unearthly sphere of Feldman’s music was not entirely free of fears and
memories. The Holocaust had a dominating effect on his consciousness. He
once explained that the title of his percussion piece The King of Denmark
Another time, when a German new-music expert asked Feldman whether his
music was in mourning for the Holocaust, he said that it wasn’t, but then he
added, in sentences punctuated by long pauses, “There’s an aspect of my
attitude about being a composer that is like mourning. Say, for example, the
death of art … something that has to do with, say, Schubert leaving me.”
was
inspired by King Christian X, who occupied the Danish throne when the
Germans invaded his country in 1940. Feldman proceeded to tell the story, now
considered apocryphal, of King Christian responding to German anti-Semitism
by walking the streets with a yellow star pinned to his chest. It was a “silent
protest,” Feldman said. All of his music was a silent protest, cutting loose from
the ghost-ridden European world. Once, during a visit to Berlin, the American
composer Alvin Curran asked him why he didn’t move to Germany, since
audiences there responded so avidly to his music. Feldman stopped in the
middle of the street, pointed down, and said, “Can’t you hear them? They’re
screaming! Still screaming out from under the pavements!”
Feldman made his mourning palpable in the 1971 piece Rothko Chapel. The
title comes from an octagonal array of Rothko paintings that had been installed
in a nondenominational religious space in Houston. Rothko had committed
suicide the previous year, and Feldman, a close friend, responded with the most
personal, affecting work of his life. It is scored for viola, solo soprano, chorus,
percussion, and celesta. There are voices but no words. Chords and melodic
fragments float along like shrouded forms, surrounded by thick silence. The
viola offers wide-ranging, rising-and-falling phrases. The drums roll and tap at
the edge of audibility. Celesta and vibraphone chime gentle clusters. There are
fleeting echoes of past music, as when the chorus sings distantly dissonant
chords reminiscent of the voice of God in Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, or
when the soprano sings a thin, quasi-tonal melody that echoes the vocal lines of
Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles. That passage was written on the day of
Stravinsky’s funeral, April 15, 1971—another thread of lament in the pattern.
But the emotional sphere of Rothko Chapel
Shortly before the end comes an astonishing shift. The viola begins to play a
keening, minor-key, modal song, redolent of the synagogue. Feldman had
written this music decades earlier, during the Second World War, when he was
attending the High School of Music and Art, in New York. It is a gesture
comparable to the moment in
is too large to be considered a
memorial for any individual.
Wozzeck when Berg relies on his old student
piece in D minor to provide the climax of the drama. Underneath the melody,
celesta and vibraphone play a murmuring four-note pattern, which suggests
Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms.
These allusions suggest that Feldman is creating a divine music, appropriate to
the somber spirituality of Rothko’s chapel. In a sense, he is fusing two different
divinities, representative of two major strains in twentieth-century music: the
The song is heard twice, and both times the
chorus answers with the Schoenbergian chords of God.
367
remote, Hebraic God of Schoenberg’s opera and the gentle, iconic presence of
Stravinsky’s symphony. Finally, there is the possibility that the melody itself, that
sweet, sad, Jewish-sounding tune, speaks for those whom Feldman once heard
crying beneath the cobblestones. It might be the chant of millions in a single
voice.
No less than Messiaen, Feldman was in the business of creating places of
spiritual otherness, which in his case may have had some connection to
medieval kabbalistic thought. In his last years, from 1979 to 1987, he wrote a
series of works that went on for an hour or two hours or even longer, straining
the capabilities of performers to play them and audiences to hear them.
Extreme length allowed Feldman to approach his supreme goal of making
music a life-changing force, a transcendent art form that, as he once said,
“wipes everything out” and “cleans everything away.” To sit through
performances of the two longest pieces— String Quartet (II) of 1983 and For
Philip Guston of 1984, six and five hours long respectively—is to enter into a
new consciousness. Some passages test the listener’s patience—how long can
a repeated note or a semitone dissonance be endured? Then, out of nowhere,
some very pure, almost childlike idea materializes. Most of the closing section
of For Philip Guston
Feldman’s music can be called “minimalist” if the word is understood to mean a
minimum of notes on the page. He was not unlike Partch in his refusal to
identify with what he called “Western civilization music.” And his feeling for the
positioning of music in space puts him in the company of West Coast
composers from both early and late in the twentieth century. But, ultimately, he
stands apart from his time. No twentieth-century composer, with the possible
exception of Sibelius in his last years, achieved such imperturbable
separateness; and no wonder Feldman fell in love with Sibelius’s Fourth and
Fifth symphonies.
is in modal A minor, and it is music of surpassing
tenderness, even if it inhabits a far-off place that few travelers will chance upon.
Feldman once delivered a merciless sketch of the prospects of the American
composer. He starts out as a romantic, Feldman said, a budding genius
overflowing with original ideas, or at least with ideas about originality. Then he
goes off to university and discovers that romanticism is defunct. He studies for
six years at Princeton or Yale, learning about twelve-tone writing, total serialism,
indeterminacy, and the rest. He goes to Darmstadt and samples the latest
wares of the European avant-garde. “He writes a piece occasionally,” Feldman
wrote. “It is played occasionally. There is always the possibility of a
performance on the Gunther Schuller series. His pieces are well made. He is
not without talent. The reviews aren’t bad. A few awards—a Guggenheim, an
Arts and Letters, a Fulbright—this is the official musical life of America.”
Uptown, Downtown
368
Essentially, Feldman pictured the life of an academic composer as a kind of
living death. Since he himself taught for the latter part of his life at the State
University of New York at Buffalo, his stance might be deemed hypocritical. But
he insisted that composition could not actually be taught, and in his classes he
meandered all over the map—one eccentric assignment being to analyze
Sibelius’s Fifth.
In the late sixties and early seventies, twelve-tone composers were reaching the
height of their influence. By some accounts, they effectively took control of
university composition departments across the country. Milton Babbitt, who was
usually named as the mastermind of this conspiracy, later protested that reports
of his omnipotence were exaggerated. “Would that I had known,” Babbitt wrote,
“over whom or what I held sway, for I surely couldn’t infer it from the number or
venues of my performances, publications, or recordings, or my inability to
secure a mere Guggenheim fellowship.”
No matter who was running the show, young composers with tonal yearnings
found little happiness in academia, as colorful testimonials from composers and
musicians in Michael Broyles’s book Mavericks and Other Traditions in
American Music
By the end of the sixties, the youth were rebelling against what Babbitt called
“complex, advanced, and ‘problematical’ activities.” Rochberg, who had made
his name with toughly argued abstract pieces, reverted to the harmonic
vocabulary of late-period Beethoven in his Third String Quartet. David Del
Tredici, another twelve-tone prodigy, indulged his Romantic inner self in a
series of pieces inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland stories, the later
installments orchestrated somewhat in the manner of Strauss’s
suggest. George Rochberg said: “[Twelve-tone composers]
have proclaimed an orthodox cultural church, with its hierarchy, gospels, beliefs,
and anathemas.” Michael Beckerman said: “Trying to write tonal music at a
place like Columbia University in the 1960s and ’70s was like being a dissident
in Prague in the same period, with similar professional consequences.” William
Mayer used a homelier high-school metaphor: “To be a tonal composer in the
’60s and ’70s was a deeply dispiriting experience. One was shunned as the last
teen-aged virgin.”
Symphonia
domestica. Others returned to tonality along the more roundabout path of
collage. Lukas Foss, in his 1967 Baroque Variations, distorted Handel, Scarlatti,
and Bach; George Crumb injected his sumptuously layered, timbre-driven
pieces with quotations from Bach, Schubert, Mahler, and Ravel, not to mention
all-American twangs of banjo and guitar. The boldest of neotonalists was
William Bolcom, a devoted student of Milhaud, whose evening-length William
Blake oratorio, Songs of Innocence and of Experience
These new American Romantics found common ground with surviving members
of the old populist generation, who enjoyed the unfamiliar feeling of being au
courant. Bolcom’s wild eclecticism resembled Leonard Bernstein’s in
(1956–81), devoured
everything from Shaker hymns to reggae.
Candide
and Mass, while his veneration for the French lyric tradition matched that of Ned
Rorem, who had long been writing plainspoken, pensive music in
uncompromising loyalty to his core principles.
369
For composers steeped in the experimental tradition of Cowell and Cage, this
squabble between neo-Romantic and die-hard atonal composers meant
nothing. From their vantage point, it was essentially a dispute over which aspect
of the European inheritance—the late Romantic or the high modern—should
hold sway. Such is the analysis set forward by the composer Kyle Gann in
some trenchant commentaries on late-twentieth-century music. Gann lumps
both “modernists” and “New Romantics” together in the “uptown” category,
named for the Upper West Side of New York City, home of Lincoln Center, the
Juilliard School, Carnegie Hall, Columbia University, and other richly endowed
institutions. Downtown composers are those who, in Harry Partch’s words, look
for “a way outside”—
“Downtown” as a musical construct dates back to the pioneer days of Edgard
Varèse, who took up residence in Greenwich Village and wandered the lower
end of Manhattan in search of musical noise. But it really got going after the
Second World War, when Cage and Feldman unleashed chance in a tenement
by the East River. By the late fifties, young Cageans were converging on New
York from around the country. One of them, James Tenney of Silver City, New
Mexico, moved to New York in 1961, and paid tribute to the city in the
pathbreaking computer piece
anti-European, anti-symphonic, anti-operatic. They
descend from the free spirits who had long gone their own way on the West
Coast. In New York such composers have tended to congregate in loft spaces,
art galleries, and rock clubs below Fourteenth Street.
Analog #1, an oceanic surge of sound inspired by
the noise of traffic in the Holland Tunnel. When Cage taught a class in
experimental composition at the New School, the likes of Jackson Mac Low, Al
Hansen, George Brecht, and Dick Higgins, all conceptual troublemakers who
went on to cofound the neo-Dada movement Fluxus, were taking notes. In the
name of Fluxus, violins were smashed (Nam June Paik’s One for Violin Solo,
1962), pianos were dismantled (Philip Corner’s Piano Activities,
The spirit of “downtown” also crossed the flat spaces of the Midwest, touching
down in the university towns of Oberlin, Ann Arbor, Champaign-Urbana, and
Iowa City. Gann calls experimentalists in these places the “I-80 avant-garde,”
after the interstate highway that cuts across the upper Midwest. Their chief
gathering place was the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor, which ran from 1961 to
1965. Composers “took matters into their own hands,” as ONCE’s co-founder
Gordon Mumma said, by creating a new-music center that relied on no single
institution for support. The music tended from the difficult toward the freakish:
Robert Ashley, Mumma’s chief collaborator, made a virtue of howling feedback
in his voice-and-tape piece
1962), and
Stockhausen concerts were picketed (Henry Flynt employed the slogan
“STOCKHAUSEN—PATRICIAN ‘THEORIST’ OF WHITE SUPREMACY: GO
TO HELL!” in 1964).
The Wolfman.
The Interstate 80 composers later conspired with the Boston-based ex–
neoclassical composer Alvin Lucier, who had fastened on to Cage and gone off
the deep end while teaching on the relatively demure campus of Brandeis
University. In
Media were mixed in inventive ways;
ONCE pioneered an early version of the psychedelic light show.
Music for Solo Performer (1965), Lucier made himself a kind of
mind-control test subject by attaching electrodes to his head and broadcasting
370
his brain’s alpha waves to loudspeakers around the room, the low-frequency
tones causing nearby percussion instruments to vibrate. For I am sitting in a
room
Out on the West Coast, the “downtown” aesthetic was headquartered in the San
Francisco Bay Area, where Cowell had launched the experimental tradition
decades before. The San Francisco Tape Music Center started up in 1961
under the aegis of the San Francisco Conservatory, but was thrown off the
premises after a concert in which, as Gann writes, “dancers went around
spraying the audience with perfume as a found tape was played of a woman
talking to her minister about her out-of-wedlock baby.” In 1966 the center found
a home at Mills College. Its principal personalities were Pauline Oliveros, a
Texas-born composer-accordionist who blended cool soundscapes with raw
human voices, and Morton Subotnick, an Angeleno whose all-electronic works
made products of the previous decade sound quaint. Subotnick’s 1967
synthesizer rhapsody
(1969), Lucier recorded himself reciting the following text: “I am sitting in a
room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my
speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again
until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any
semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed.”
The piece simply enacts that process. Lucier had a pronounced stutter, and one
result of the re-recording process was to systematically erase his vocal tic,
leaving only wordless tones behind. Partch’s idea of corporeal music, music
rooted in the voice and the body, was going strong.
Silver Apples of the Moon became a surprise bestseller
on the Nonesuch label, its alternately abstract and propulsive swirls of
synthesized sound entrancing college kids of the Beatles generation. But
perhaps the most significant of the Tape Center’s activities was a performance
that it hosted in 1964: the premiere of Terry Riley’s
In C.
West Coast Minimalism
Minimalism proper begins with La Monte Young, the master of the drone. He
was born in 1935 in a tiny dairy community in Idaho, and spent his childhood
listening to the secret music of the wide-open landscape—the microtonal chords
of power lines, the harsh tones of drills and lathes, the wailing of far-off trains,
the buzzing songs of grasshoppers, the sound of the wind moving over Utah
Lake and whistling through the cracks of his parents’ log cabin. In 1940 he
moved to Los Angeles with his family. As he later said, he fell in love with
California’s “sense of space, sense of time, sense of reverie, sense that things
could take a long time, that there was always time.”
It took a while for Young to bring that spaciousness to his music. Early on he
adhered to bebop jazz and twelve-tone music, which, as Gunther Schuller liked
to say, often sounded like the same thing. Young’s teacher at Los Angeles City
College was Leonard Stein, who had long served as Schoenberg’s personal
assistant. Later, at UCLA and Berkeley, Young joined the international cult of