[HOME] | [DISC 1] | [DISC 2] | [DISC 3] | [DISC 4] | [DISC 5] | [5 DISCS] | [WORKS CITED] | [COMMENTS]
I can see them coming into Ann Arbor, Michigan -- a white, howling city -- mere weeks after the highly decorated groundhog who is as much a member of the "East Coast establishment" as the most remote member of the Kennedy clan has predicted six weeks more or less of winter. February, the amputee month. Not a month in which you slumber under blankets of adipose tissue; it is a month in which the wind is a hard, long-nailed slap across your face, of snow now a cement of stalled smoke and urban moraine, of frigid sky as opaquely white as an atmospheric cataract. February is daze. Who would come so far North in winter, in a month like a mealy bone whose marrow has been blanched out, much less try to bore some warm cubbyhole of life into its hard heart?
But arrive they do, from all over the discontinuous Union. America, the land of amicable borders -- the white picket fence, the county line, the interstate. It's easy to overlook cultural divides when highway sights are dictated by the seasons rather than blandishing coordinates. Driving or being driven is the way to come in. By bus, braking with a soft sigh and a hushed squeal. By car. Chevrolets, Plymouths, DeSotos, Pontiacs, Fords. Cars you can measure in terms of tons and acreage. The cars are returning to the frigid state, if not the precise plants, of their birth. The cars -- idling in front of the Unitarian church as overcoated figures bend (at the waist, little give in the knees) into backseats to extract broad, flat oblongs of cases and crushed costumes -- look as if they are jumping in place. Or maybe they fly in on small planes that aren't landed as much as they are piloted along a vertically oscillating trajectory into a slow, graceful skid. They are the serious young artists with cigarettes inserted between thin, if not exactly bloodless, lips (for some reason, Gordon Mumma's small blonde moustache, one which makes his smile seem more gregarious and that reinforces a slight resemblance to Martin Mull, catches me by surprise). They are outfitted in the conservative dress of the day... the black needlecord or wool / synthetic blend suits, the skinny matte ties and Oxford cloth button-down shirts, the razor-narrow lapels, the trouser legs drawn down to a tight circle around the ankle... but with some aspect of personal appearance just out of skew ...the length of hair, scuff on the shoes, an upturned corner of a collar, the imitation tortoiseshell of the spectacles. They are the devotees of a new autonomy, and the framers of a new meritocracy.
How so? From page 28 of Leta E. Miller's ONCE And Again: The Evolution Of A Legendary Festival:
"By 1958, the Ann Arbor scene was ripe for a major undertaking. Karlheinz Stockhausen lectured at the University [of Michigan] that year and urged young composers to assume responsibility for performances of their own work rather than relying on institutional support."
So the mobilization that began to lace up and march forward years before has made good time in this youngish decade. CORE and SNCC are in the thick of it. Both Mario Savio and Timothy Leary still have campus gigs. McLuhan is riding the carousel of the UHF dial. Godard is catching his breath. Dylan is popping pills and, wasted by his own vigor, is tearing down the great edifices of the new American sincerity, ego by ego. But there is a stillness here in Ann Arbor that feels less like tranquility -- much less peace -- and more like a manifestation of sublime aloofness. Stomping the freeze off as they march up and down between garage levels, these young composers also carry zippered attaches that are stuffed with untried music, music heard, if heard at all and not just guessed at, only by a solitary inner ear. Their scores, often employing new systems of notation -- the five runic lozenges of Robert Ashley's Quartet (1965), the imaginary stellar navigations of George Cacioppo's Cassiopeia (1963), the super-saturated yet abstract color projections of Donald Scavarda's Filmscore for Two Pianists (1962; not documented here) -- are akin to patents that have yet to be modeled in more than two dimensions.
If only these inventions could be manufactured in mass quantities and made to appear "as advertised", we all might experience revolution in our very own living rooms. But aren't revolutions long-term projects? Revolution is not to be found in revolutionary violence. Those convulsions soon subside, or, more to the point, propagate, their frequencies stretching into the most red of spectra: the future. What happens to music that is only ever premiered, that is only ever played one time? (I know, I know... all instances of music are, really, singular events, even when multiple performances of the music itself do exist.) The music flares up more in the manner of a rebellion that never manages to secure enough guns or numbers. Its impact is muted and resounds only faintly, locally; the music cannot reach the larger order of things that is its target. Such music becomes a sensational rumor, like the noises cranked out by Luigi Russolo's intonarumori, an anomaly, a "report" in scholarly works. (I first heard about this ONCE music by over-hearing discussion about it.) In the minds of those who witnessed its performance, the lasting impressions made by such music twist like some mobile in which the wires from which each bauble depends are meant to be invisible. Such music could also grow over the years into a massive yet indistinct allegory; individual instances of unheard music become composite characters in a cultural melodrama about things set free only to be lost. Or the music can be rediscovered, revived, even restored to audibility, as these works, suddenly, are. "Live recordings taped during the ONCE Festivals and ancillary ONCE events by WUOM, University of Michigan Radio. The tapes are archived at the Northwestern University Music Library ONCE Festival Archive and are used with their kind permission" (136). These are broadcasts once released to the celestial and now brought back to earth and terrestrial complications after many years wandering in realms ethereal: many of these compositions are now branded with a 2003 copyright date. Nothing is more novel these days than the latest anachronism. Which is not to say that this box set functions merely as a curious period piece. Works such as David Behrman's Track (1965) and Donald Scavarda's Matrix For Clarinetist (1962) are more contemporary -- in terms of design, assuredly, each piece sunk deep in its chosen foundations but still, ultimately, friable (in a lovely manner derived from Webern); more to the point, in terms of sound, that noun here intended to glisten with as much sensual connotation as possible. i.e., not necessarily aiming to say "in the way they sound"... -- than a two year-old threnody (or symphony, or tone poem...) that has already been accepted into the literature. Is already in heavy rotation. This ONCE music is more insidiously "new" than the rough mixes of the latest Timbaland production making the rounds on the peer-to-peer networks that have sprouted in the hinterlands of the adult world.
As aesthetic referents, of course, "new" and "passé" -- what has not existed before and that which refuses to grace us with passing from existence -- are governed by laws of relativity. This is groaningly obvious, I know, but it is worth reiterating at many turns because the problem of the "new" in art is too commonly confused with the dilemma of "taste", which isn't rational by definition anyway. Your own acknowledgement -- withheld or whatever -- that Mahler is considered and treated as an innovator, not just in his explorations of chromatic harmony but, more germane to the point I wish to make, in his almost collage-like approach to symphonic construction is not significant in that said acknowledgement may, as if by magic, render you able to sit through a performance of his 8th or 9th without fidgeting, yawning, or stoppering your ears. On the contrary; the historical facts of Mahler career have no real bearing on your most private appreciation of the music. But the fact that other composers have acquiesced to Mahler's "genius", and have created their own music within these confines, is something that is very, very useful to have a grip on this one hopes to strengthen one's tastes and make real opinions out of them. History, above all cultural history, isn't very rational either, I'm afraid. But what is more important about cultural history from this point-of-view is that it can put on a very convincing show of its credibility, and even its own ineluctability.
Meanwhile, the preferences of a minority -- say, the predilection for non-narrative, non-representational cinema shared by ONCE composers such as Gordon Mumma and Donald Scavarda -- start to resemble a mode of dissent. And such tastes, once they find a sympathetic audience, are transformed into veritable causes, programs, missions. This process, in which an establishment, whether in the form of grotesquely fleshy figurehead or an outlandishly robotic schematic of financial, political, prudish and nepotistic forces in conspiracy, is endowed with a generous portion of whatever power the movement itself has so far amassed, can be seen playing out in cases as diverse as the "Bach revival" and the rock critic sanctifying of the greatest example of "negative theology" we have in rock music, The Velvet Underground. All of which puts me in mind of one of the issues of high culture around which the literary research of the Oulipo (the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) -- something else that "happened" (qua Heller) in the 1960's -- cohered. As poet and mathematician Jacques Roubard wrote: "the first sonnet, at the moment of becoming a sonnet, is not a sonnet but a Sicilian variant of the Provençal cobla. It is only with the thousandth sonnet (or more or less -- in any case after many sonnets) that the sonnet appears." ("Mathematics In The Method Of Raymond Queneau", 1977) Or as Oulipo historian Warren F. Motte, Jr. has stated:
"[Raymond Queneau's combinatoric Cente Mille Milliards de poèmes] responds amply to the 'analytic' intent, the desire to recuperate and revivify traditional constraining forms. If the sonnet is a far less ancient form than, say, rhopalic verse... it imposes nonethless a multiplicity of constraints that are, of course, arbitrary at the outset but become highly codified through use (and it is precisely this 'use' that separates the normative text from the experimental)." [emphasis mine] (Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature; 4)
You might take exception; these are profound if less than dazzling observations. Experience instructs me that "form" is actually less an attribute, resilient and traceable by the eye, than it is an act of retrospection, itself easily confounded or, perhaps, even forgotten.
[HOME] | [DISC 1] | [DISC 2] | [DISC 3] | [DISC 4] | [DISC 5] | [5 DISCS] | [WORKS CITED] | [COMMENTS]
You weren't there, were you. (Question mark optional.) Unless, maybe, you are one of the "unknown" brides or grooms and / or mourners in the still from Mary and Robert Ashley's 1965 Happening, Combination Wedding and Funeral (see page 107 of the accompanying booklet). Can you help me conjugate this "ONCE" Festival? The component events are never truly, fully repeated, though they may be repeatable. Yet the outline of the festival itself recurs annually, regularly, within the purview of expectations. More than once. I have no evidence that each subsequent festival took any sort of theme, assumed any sort of distinctive title, or was assembled out of any desire by the organizers to better, to best, the prior festival's "wow factor". I can see that they saw the concert series as being more indispensable to their work and their methods of collaboration than any sort of infatuation with agenda or "progress" than any of the above insinuates. The ONCE Festival was not a sort of World's Fair. The movable city displaces the movable feast. It is easy to scoff at squatters and their rights, especially when you are playing to the squatters' heels as they flee, trailing a red-and-white checkered tablecloth and pans black with frying. ("Beautification" almost invariably entails displacing homeless populations.) Hurry, hurry, come and see the amassed wonders of human civilization, one of the chief wonders being this prefabricated, swiftly erected setting, too transient ever to suffer decay or know posterity, that can contain all the world' wares. Don't be fooled by imitations; this is not your standard-issue microcosm. This is a visitation of the future upon your very present condition, your misery, your hopes, your -- yes indeed -- your apple-pie ennui. This, my friends, is what will be accomplished for you. And so the walls are pulley-ed up and the diagrams are printed and the souvenirs are unloaded, crate upon crate of them, inflating this skin of wishes and speculations with even more tokens of immensity. ONCE was not connotatively festive, though I'm sure the more theatrical among its participants might have enjoyed the idea of having ONCE barkers (William S. Burroughs would have been splendid choice for such a role), a ONCE midway, ONCE funnel cakes and corny dogs, ONCE pavilions enshrining, if temporarily, the marvels of modernity: the elevator; the washing machine; the stereoscopic camera; the tape recorder.
I've decided that the ONCE Festivals whose characteristics and achievements I gather together in my mind so far after the fact -- if the 1960's were indeed factual in form -- were much more akin to professional conferences. Each discipline and each industry has its own gathering that is neither wholly work nor utterly holiday. So that, as much as these convention-goers have presentations to present and bombshells to drop ("Did you hear what Roy Tennant said at the keynote address this morning?"), they also assume the hardships of attendance in order to congest the foot traffic from one performance to the next with excitable talk of solutions to shared problems. Or, at the tables set for pre- dinners and post- parties, proposals are passed from seated hand to seated hand along with a jug of wine and the basket of bread. Here is Gordon Mumma:
"The composer and visual artist Donald Scavarda invited me to compose a soundtrack for his short film titled Greys. Admiring his compositions, I followed a characteristic of his work: limiting my sound materials and developing them with restricted but complex procedures. Thus, my electronic music for Greys employs very few sound sources but develops with an overlapping process from an unusual tape-recording technique. I disconnected the tape-recorder 'erase-head' function, combining the sound sources with magnetic-overlapping rather than the standard 'mixing.' Donald and I had not discussed our individual creative procedures for Greys, and knew nothing of what each of us was doing, except for an agreement on the duration of the piece. It wasn't until after the premiere, when I asked him how he had made his mysteriously hypnotic light-images, that our unknown parallel thinking was revealed." (119 - 120)
The work documented here reveals its grubby, impoverished-fringe birthright somewhat in that the piano, the box orchestra accessible to these students and former students, is so central to the early works; the 1962 disc is all but dominated by piano literature. Simultaneously, then, ONCE (the Festivals judged individually as well as collectively) was a masterpiece of shoulder-rubbing. John Cage, Morton Feldman, David Tudor, LaMonte Young, Pauline Oliveros, Luciano Berio, Lukas Foss, Bertram Turetzky were all invited to participate in ONCE programs, and did. There is no direct corollary, however, between one's musical significance and the size, shape, and vertical alignment of one's shoulders. The idiom makes requisite a certain equivalence in stature, and delineates a sidling motion. On page 75 of the box set's accompanying booklet, Gordon Mumma is pictured in conversation with Morton Feldman. Mumma appears to be sitting, quite literally, on the edge of his seat (one of those metal folding chairs that populate just about every grammar school auditorium across the nation), turned out on the lever of his outstretched arm to address Feldman, who reclines, his hand in mid-stroke just under his mouth. This is the Feldman of Guston's famous impasto caricature, sans cigarette. Here is that elongated and bloodied ear on the colossal block of his head, from jaw to upswept hair, yet with little of his face (generous nose, nearly voluptuous lips) visible. It is the very picture of Midwestern eagerness cornering East Coast sophistication. Mumma had a relationship with Feldman's ideas long before he ever had a relationship with Feldman; Feldman, in turn, had, by 1964, only met a few young people who had, in any demonstrable way, allowed his ideas to care for them in any capacity. It is a casual snapshot that feels nevertheless as if it contained in its planes -- Feldman's white hand, plump but not ungraceful against the here-and-there bunched black rod of Mumma's coat sleeve -- and angles -- shoulders not adjacent but occupying the same line (and a knee, or perhaps it is the underside of a thigh, raised by crossed legs, floats at the bottom left-hand corner of the image; the joint could belong to either man) -- some pivotal exchange. A transference enabled by listening.
"Friction" may be a portable description of the active space that exists between charged bodies in proximity. Meanwhile, "trend" is not an arrow pointing one way, but a circle along whose single contour the overturned "V" of the pointer has been copied many times over by revolving's rate. Stop anywhere on this circulation, and blades will appear to be bearing down upon you while you yourself are that much further from your chosen vanishing point.
"Trend" is a process of reciprocation. The mandarins cannot sustain themselves entirely; they always subsist, in part, on the debasements they inspire -- their own works being the first debasements, of course. Deliberately so; the secret is that the expression of a significant idea is the withholding of an even grander conception, ravishing and paradoxically pristine in its disuse. Original works and the original works they inspire murmur commiserations to one another... "yes, in order to preserve that, we will build this, here..." Of course. You never quite hear the celebratory timbre of this plotting and engineering, but it's there -- an overtone, not a subtone.
[HOME] | [DISC 1] | [DISC 2] | [DISC 3] | [DISC 4] | [DISC 5] | [5 DISCS] | [WORKS CITED] | [COMMENTS]
If I try to convey just how oddly restful a sunny Saturday afternoon spent in the company of this music is, I'll make a complete hash of it. Sample, if you have the time and the inclination, the richly textured drones of Robert Sheff's -- aka "Blue" Gene Tyranny's -- Diotima (1963). Anne Aitchison's flute sounds alternately pillowy and obdurate, calling to mind downy feathers, crumbly, dryly aromatic (like a creek bed exposed to the sun) sticks of blackboard chalk, an open book whose pages are alternately corrugated and smoothed by the breeze, tap dancer's sand, empty green glass bottles. Knowing that Diotima was inspired by a Socratic dialogue I'm prompted to say that she's an Aeolian Ben Webster. Yet broad bands of silence -- or of drastically reduced musical activity at the very least -- effect the pace of these moods Sheff assigns to his heroine, thus altering, in a strict sense, their sequential significance. The composer's stated intent is that each tape-realized section of the piece "erase itself", not literally, but, I suppose, by having its thematic interdependencies obscured by the passage of time as well as of "dead air". These silences, much as they do in so much contemporary improvised music, break the wheel of comparing. But love, the theme of Plato's Diotima, here neither grows nor diminishes. Rather, love is only accumulated, the way one accumulates memorable encounters with total strangers. It is relativistic love, each experience of it as circumstantially valid as it is contradictory of other, equally valid experiences of itself. Naturally, such sensualism is seeded with melancholy. In keeping with his piano repertoire, which can almost be called Jarrett-esque, Sheff's Diotima is delicious noise, but that makes the piece neither very notable nor at all ennobling. For noise is always ripe, even "austere" noises like test tones and the sound of coins striking the stomach lining of a piggy bank. Noise is juice and pith: sugary-grainy, glistening, flowing. Over-stimulating. Let me mull mingling identities again: the music, the day of the week, the weather. Diotima is a haunting piece of music, sure, animated as much by doubt as by confidence inspired by affection (as Mississippi Fred McDowell said), but I think Saturday is always a queasy quiescence. If you will.
Perhaps I have been deluded all these years, years I have thought some lesson. Perhaps music alone can no more communicate truths about the human condition than a seashell whispers descriptions of the ocean no matter if it is cradled next to an ear or whether it proceeds to sink, tide by tide, into the sand. There are those that believe nature is proof of a divine imagination. Music is certainly evidence of imagination active in the world. (I subsume intelligence within imagination.) Yet music is not mere nebulous potential. Music is an event and, as a result, has configurations both internal and external. The problem may be how rapidly and even perniciously those external configurations tend to proliferate. Hence I detect among some fellow listeners a nearly desperate longing for music of great purity, of "organic" character, of an almost alien "unheard-of"-ness -- in short, of radical emptiness. Never before in my life have I felt misanthropy elevated to the level of aesthetic virtue. Music that, as Lawrence J. Steefel Jr. has written of Duchamp's rotoreliefs, "rotate[s] elliptically without ultimate gain or loss." ("Marcel Duchamp and the Machine"; 78). Blankness, numbness are extremities, and have to be attacked in order to be achieved. And I feel this rising desire for music rather facilely purged of the human element as a pressure. Of course, I should not chastise this attitude for an obstinacy it itself cannot apprehend.
This ONCE music is, despite all the freedoms it dispenses, a music of prohibition, as all composed music must, in one behavior or another, be. What is rather new in the ONCE music is that one of the prohibitions is against the relinquishing of the standard of "rules". For so many of these ONCE composers, any conceptual parameters, whatever symmetry or asymmetry those parameters are founded on, and no matter how the figures of those parameters are transmitted, "make" a score. Paraphrased as performance instructions, these scores exceed themselves. That is, however much these pieces bend back towards their origins, they always fall short of that goal -- which, after all, is only another digression. So Gordon Mumma's Mographs (the Large Size Mograph [1962] is heard here, played by pianist Larry Leitch) take their "rhythmic figures and durational sequences" (Miller, 60) from seismographic maps. These pieces are, like Charles Dodge's pioneering computer music piece Earth's Magnetic Field (1970) or some passages from Janáček, a revelation of the musical potential of natural processes which occur on scales and within spheres remote from us by virtue of our biology. But, from another, equally valid perspective, the Mographs are a fractious dialogue with the implements of Cold War surveillance. The vibrations recorded (doubly so) are representative not just of continental evolution, but of underground nuclear blasts: devastation both real but slow to anger, and simulated but monstrously swift. In Fives (1963), Robert Ashley purifies Bartok-inspired numerology, but in doing so he discloses a truly oppressive madness.
"[T]he score would be impossible to play... I wouldn't touch the [number tables on which the piece is based] myself today... For the ONCE Festival performance I could tell the players only to 'play what you can play, when it occurs in tempo,' and the result will be a version of one realization of the piece as though heard through a very coarse on-off filter." (111-112)
Roger Reynolds' A Portrait of Vanzetti (1963), while a much more self-consciously ideological, anti-war work than the Mographs, is more remarkable for being a prescient electroacoustic composition in the sense that it is not imperative for the listener to know what the sources of the individual sounds actually are. What is crucial is that contrasts of tone, texture and dynamics within the ensemble have been united in a larger struggle to lend urgency and new resonance to the words of one of the United States' earliest political prisoners. "Portrait" here means much less formally than it seems. For in Reynolds' Portrait the entire "system" -- that image of modern life so familiar from the fiction and cinema produced during the 1960's -- cooperates in the expression of human dignity: self-involved, threatened, and relentless. On the other hand, George Cacioppo's Bestiary I: Eingang (1962) in effect extracts the meter from a poetic text (Rilke's) so it can be juxtaposed against the anti-rhythm (effectively) insinuated by the natural decay of instrumental sounds, mostly percussive in character -- "brittle" (54) in the words of our annotator. Upon first listen, Rilke's spiritual concerns do not hover over this performance; rather a question of dramatic definition is strung around it's neck. When is a cantata not a cantata? But as one listens again, the interrogatory stretches out, shifts... what conduct identifies the sacred, identifies the secular?
All the same, the composers decidedly not memorialized with this box set's release adamantly refuse to go away. They have asserted and continue in current works to assert themselves and the major events of their lives, their methods, their errors and hesitations. Their very heterogeneity. Their assertions are arguments in opposition to Irrelevance. Consider this long, parenthetical insert from the ever-quotable Robert Ashley concerning his in memoriam... Crazy Horse (symphony) (1964):
"[The symphony] is one of a group of four pieces (a quartet, a trio concerto, a symphony, and an opera) that I hoped were pure and accurate abstractions of those musical forms as I understood them from the European tradition. (Each of these forms was given the name of a 'New World' hero from different times in our history, because it seemed from my reading of European musical history and American social history that there was a remarkably curious coincidence between the emergence of a musical form in Europe with the emergence of a 'similar' social idea represented by the American hero. It was as if the same 'idea' happened on both continents at the same time, but had to be represented differently in the two places, because the form of the idea had to come from what was available to be changed: in Europe, in music; in America, in social organization.)" (112)
Granted, Crazy Horse may be the denoted hero. But the connoted hero is the musical form Ashley is describing as a persona of the composer. This becomes more apparent as Ashley continues with a description of the symphony's essential construction:
"When I started working with graphic notation, I learned a simple but important (at least to me) fact: One kind of music could be notated only in a circular graph; another (the other) kind of music could be notated only in a linear graph of synchronous events (like an orchestra score). in memoriam... Crazy Horse (symphony) is of the circular kind, with 64 points on the circle, each point with a notation indicating how to play ('relate') as a member of a four-piece ensemble (of which there can be any number over five) and where to go (to what point on the circle) next. The circle is divided, in agreement among the four members of the ensemble, into two equal parts. If your assignment takes you to a point on one part of the circle, your job as a member of the ensemble is -- starting to play without knowing what any other member is going to play -- to distinguish yourself as completely as possible from the other four. If your assignment takes you to the other half of the circle, your job -- again, starting without knowing -- is to make yourself as indistinguishable as possible from the other members of the ensemble... There are 32 different performance parts for four-piece ensembles. Thus a minimum full orchestra of 128 players is in a constant 'process' of adjustment towards an idealized goal. This is not aleatoric music in any way that was understood then -- as I have tried to explain to many interviewers. It is purposefulness to an almost impossible level of achievement... A peculiarity of the score, much too difficult to explain, but coming from the fact of the circle having 64 points, is that within less than eight 'moves' -- changes of assignment to different points on the circle -- every ensemble gets into a repetition of moves -- that is, to a repetition of moving from one point on the circle to another. In short, repeating what one has been doing for, say, the first five moves. At this point, the piece becomes a set of giant 'wheels' (ensembles) all turning in synchronization. This is the point at which I think the fun might begin." [emphasis mine] (112-113)
In performance, here taken at a medium-slow tempo, in memoriam... Crazy Horse (symphony)'s constrictions make for quite an experience. An ordeal? It becomes a kind of allegory of empire-building. Out of an incessantly modulating groan from strings and what sound like "home" electric organs (they could also be accordions), brass and woodwinds erupt in drunken blurts or spike with shrill piping. Silence is conquered pretty quickly as positives and negatives pounce upon one another, but Ashley's reduction of arms leads only to reprisals of increasing penetration and tenacity. The appearance of sustained melody -- a simple three-note French horn lick at about the 11-minute mark -- in this context cannot help but be disconcerting, even upsetting. The orchestra's instrumental identities churn in and out of recognizability like human faces in a surging throng, but those melodies are like the imploring face of a loved one glimpsed in one long moment, only to disappear once more into the mayhem. This is not exactly the Robert Ashley who has become a sort of Garrison Keillor of the musical avant-garde -- Midwestern, colloquial, fond of parables -- or even the Ashley of the morphophonemic liberation he discovered for himself in Automatic Writing.
Art can be a horror, a terror, an anguish; it has that capacity. I want to say that it is perhaps best for us all if tyrannical impulses are played out in art rather than in the "real world". What may be good for "art" may be disastrous for society; we have a name for the problem as it plays out, actually, and that name is "fascism". But I also know that imagination cannot be fully erased from reality's surfaces without rending the basic fiber of reality itself. There are many turns of phrase with which to make an accounting of the multi-media drive of many of these ONCE productions. In some instances, the many facets the work turns to the audiences of the time -- if not us mere listeners in the year 2004 -- are evidence of a division of aesthetic labor among the forms. Integration, sublimation, synaesthesia... these affects are less vital than the actual interfaces that can only crystallize once the forms themselves have been broken, or, at least, fully admit to their insufficiencies. This tenet, if it is such, is very much in line with the philosophy of the Oulipo, even if those artists confined themselves to a single (if bifurcated... prose and verse) "discipline". Besides, Perec, Mathews, Calvino, Queneau, Arnaud, et. al. have no authority over the unleashed forces binding each writer's work to another. I would argue that the Oulipian enterprise is predicated upon two intertwined and indispensable propositions.
Oulipian literature is not just about lipograms (subtractive), rhopalic verse (additive), and all forms of alphabetical and semantic algorithms (such as Lescure's S + 7 method, "in which each substantive in a given text is replaced by the seventh substantive following it in the dictionary" [Motte, 201]). Oulipian literature is also concerned with the manner in which linguistic arrangements -- frames however screw-loose -- enclose perception. Whether "analytic" (employing established if derelict forms) or "synthetic" (positing innovative forms), "form" does not assure the writer of an escape from consciousness. Oulipian texts venerate the virtually inexhaustible potential of the transmigrating artistic consciousness.
(What we can more than likely never learn from merely listening to recordings of these ONCE works is: are there moments when the players violate the agreement to the new arbitrariness and play above the law? Sun Ra: "I tell my Arkestra that all humanity is in some kind of restricted limitation, but they're in the Ra jail, and it's the best in the world.")
I know my allegiance is to apparent complexity, not apparent simplicity. I have made peace with the fact that the void is, for me, not something to be attained, but only something to pause before, and then -- rubato -- to begin to fill. These authorial assertions I've noted, then, even if they are assertions merely of the freedom to interpret, urge the humanist in my closet (behind the coats, sitting on the shoes) to champion the composer's art. "We require an affront to the changing rules of posterity."
I'm leaning hard into the closet door, against the pounding coming from the other side. The jamb is splintering, and my temple has been bruised by the violent repetition of ajar versus shut; I don't have the strength or the time to inquire of myself whether comprehension is inevitably a form of complicity.
[HOME] | [DISC 1] | [DISC 2] | [DISC 3] | [DISC 4] | [DISC 5] | [5 DISCS] | [WORKS CITED] | [COMMENTS]
I will speak of my setting-out hopes that ONCE was an acronym. I will tell you that I read in vain through the 130-plus pages of the ONCE booklet (is this branding getting to you?) for the words curled up, like spatial dimensions in a shape known only to the most advanced geometricians, in each uppercase character. In this context, I thought ONCE might be a simple string of letters resembling by chance... felicity, really... a common, monosyllabic word. If ONCE was a word, then, it was extra-dimensional. As so it would be ill-served by being plunked down into sentences and paragraphs. ONCE could not elucidate when seen represented in that way. ONCE has to either to be magnified, or I had yet to discover the exceptionally delicate tools that would allow me to uncouple these letters. Pry the emblem open and pull out the collective meaning.
O =
N =
C =
E =
Each character as a variable in an equation I could solve. ONCE and it's significant other, the better half moving about in the kitchen, brewing and roasting, but not yet naked to the eye. Or perhaps ONCE as a rebus: each letter is acting out a pantomime, only with gestures that resolve so quickly to stillness I was prevented from perceiving them.
But the truth is that ONCE, unlike AACM or IRCAM, is not the sturdy handle on a somewhat unwieldy textual valise, one that, like all shorthand, needs to take well to conveyance. Think of the space that opens in a record review, or a musical history, or a biography, or -- stretching a bit here -- a grant application as soon as you hit one of these acronyms. Acronyms operate according to the principle of synecdoche. Yet there is little poetry any given acronym even as it is a manifestation of those same principles. Yet, clearly, an acronym can transform an obstacle into an aid. More importantly, an acronym has the authority to represent the interests of many individuals by stepping forward into its own identity. It is disappointing to me that ONCE does, ultimately, mean nothing. The fact that a good majority of the ONCE participants revel in the field of possibilities that separate signifiers from signified makes this fact even harder to accept.
ONCE = formerly. ONCE = a single occasion. ONCE = by a single degree or step. ONCE = as soon as. If this last, then ONCE refers not to something singular, but something potential, thus multiple. Many "onces" within this lone ONCE.
Let me backtrack. I'll place this ONCE box set, black and yellow, one alongside my mighty AMPLIFY02: balance box and just groove on the vibrations called forth by their proximity to one another. I can see the distance now as the thing I've shortened, as if inadvertently. But history bears me out. The free improvisation community has fashioned a means of cultural and financial support by looking down the fatter tube-end of the telescope back at ONCE's own interpretation of the festival. I don't mean to come off as some sort of irredentist. VisionFest, Freedom of the City, Victoriaville, the Total Music Meeting, among others -- those festivals showcase music that differs radically in theory, practice and sheer sound from what you will hear on the ONCE set. (However much it is true that an essay on the similarities between ONCE music and contemporary improvised music is waiting to be written.) No, the festival ideal is to be found in the extra-musical but work-centered self-sufficiency and self-policing the ONCE artists advocated. The independence from officialdom. Overthrowing institutional patronage and reinstating collaboration with artists active in other media (in ONCE's case, the Dramatic Arts Center and the Space Theatre). Emphasizing that all aspects of the festival are to be considered works of art. Utilizing publicity to show solidarity. Utilizing publicity as a mechanism for legitimizing the artists' individual endeavors. Creating a new, open yet still exclusive, tradition that has antecedents predating the tradition itself. This last is what the Oulipians, in their inimitable Francophone way, called "plagiarism by anticipation".
These days, we might use the parlance of entrepreneurship to parse the ONCE phenomenon. ONCE was a "brash start-up". They operated under a "radical business model." They were trying to thrive on the slim pickings of the "bleeding edge." Paradigms were shifting. Does ONCE have a "killer app"? What "deliverables" can we expect? Where will you be in five years? Where do you want to go today? Ask me and I may tell you, "Heaven." And marketing, marketing, sure. You can always market a product into being if you have to. To a more than modest extent, by keeping admission prices nominal, by picking a fallow and thus very opportune time of year to stage its events, the ONCE artists influenced the cultural economics of their time. And they understood the value of basic cunning in economy. They also knew the value of a good promotional gimmick. For their 1964 poster, they employed a "nekkid" model, playing coy on a lunch counter, her head resting on a cash register, a dollar sign painted on the cake dish situated right over her hips. Standing over the model, composers Gordon Mumma, Donald Scavarda, George Cacioppo and Robert Ashley are decked out like cosa nostra hit men: black fedoras, black suits, white ties, grim countenances. (Manet's Olympia as re-staged in Kienholz’s The Beanery just as some extras from a Ben Shahn illustration are coming in for a quick bite.) The scene is truly that of an underworld, forbidden and crass, actually several underworlds in one, complete with lamia and furthermore familiar to the rock fans who are now familiar with graphic artist Kozik's poster and flyer iconography. And, above and beyond all this, ONCE provoked frothing, totally befuddled but unmistakably negative reviews. A review that vents such antipathy and outrage only casts a purplish light of allure on the target of its disgrace. ONCE is also a reminder that there is no such thing as art without commerce, that, in fact, art is one of the strangest but most graceful bases for barter ever established. Because the ONCE proceeds went into planning initiatives for additional events, concerts, festivals:
ONCE = next
The cultural economy from which the ONCE artists emerged was more or less under the sway of dividing and collating, invisible hands. On pages 90 - 1 of the exhaustive book that accompanies this music, we can read:
"[Gordon] Mumma characterizes the ONCE organizers as 'renegades', and the Festivals as a controversial endeavor reflecting a tumultuous social and political climate: 'Joseph McCarthy, the civil rights movement... a wonderful crazy time. And annual military parades in the streets of Ann Arbor. I refused to play in military bands, even [more to the point, probably, 'especially'] for money. Instead we'd set up loudspeakers in the windows of the apartments along the parade route and try to drown them out. Their marching became a mess; they'd get lost. Talk about street theater!' [Robert] Ashley disagrees. 'ONCE was not controversial,' he says. 'It was new. It became famous overnight because there was nothing like it in the whole country. It was like inventing penicillin, or the hula hoop.' In some sense, however, opposition is inevitable with any newness. The solution, wrote Reynolds in 1961, is participation: 'The acceptance of any new approach to or in art eventually becomes a public concern. The basic problem in unfamiliarity and the best solution is personal involvement.'"
A weak currency is a wall ripe for the toppling. I have to construe Ashley's reference to fadism not as any sort of diffidence about what ONCE was all about, but, in his own laconic fashion, an admission that, even if ONCE was not "controversial", it was a contagion in the imaginations of those who were exposed to it -- ONCE was a craze, if you will. Of course, artists aren't the only ones who study psychological vulnerabilities. Know your enemy. One of the lessons of war delivered by former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, one of the true architects of the 1960's in the United States, in the recent film The Fog Of War is "empathize with your enemy." I guess it holds true as much for artists as it does CFO's and generals.
[HOME] | [DISC 1] | [DISC 2] | [DISC 3] | [DISC 4] | [DISC 5] | [5 DISCS] | [WORKS CITED] | [COMMENTS]
Roberto Gerhard, the spiritual inspiration (the man who had patience for them; all artists need such individuals) for the ONCE achievers, wrote in 1960 (the article? "Is New Music Growing Old?"), "[i]t would seem a poor show if an epoch does not manage to its 'contemporary' ideas fully in all directions, to the utmost limits of contradiction." (33).
I envy anyone who can listen to all this ONCE music -- 5 CDs each nearly 80 minutes in length -- without bending under the enormous burden of even one iota of information about the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music, The Space Theatre, the Speech Research Institute, Allen Kaprow, Situationalism, musique concrète, Cageian indeterminacy, Varese's heartbreak, Nono, Pendericki, the military-industrial complications of American academia during the 1960's, the cultural monopoly of the coasts in American culture (the excluded, nearly autistic middle that is middle America), the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the mainstreaming of psychoanalytic principles in American life, the New Frontier and the Great Society, Haight-Asbury, Joseph Beuys. It's just so much rattle between the ears. Like keywords that seem to construct some pattern but are only a scrambled hierarchy of "concepts" to be injected into HTML META tags, the footholds of web robots, this list obscures tangents and relationships, healthy and otherwise... tape pieces, serialism -- recall that this term encompasses not just the of organization of tonal intervals, but, by the late 1950's and early 1960's, the subjecting of just about any form of musical information, for example, tonal durations, to permutational procedures whose rigor nevertheless does not eclipse the composer's own judgment -- Happenings, alea, early minimalism, choral works, solo instrumental pieces, free improvisations, works such as the Scavarda Groups for Piano (1961) that could be several of these things but whose most prominent feature -- its radically short length; at 57 seconds, it is a mere hiccup of music -- entails some other designation of what, damn it, it is. Nobody ever promised that stupidity would be lovable, but, my, it is as quintessentially human as anything else. It is universal. Ignorance is, at its core, a yearning that has never had a mirror held up to it.
A survey, even a cursory one, of this set's contents... yes, lay them out like that, scatter the component CDs to "laminal" states, let "1961" overlap "1963-64" , but pin it under "1962-63", slice the pages out of the accompanying booklet and, as a diviner would yarrow stalks, toss their sense to new coordinates. The box now a bed not in the way the place where you cradle your bones down to sleep is, but a bed, a wet, loamy place where flowers and edible roots can take purchase. From a purely historical perspective, this box set clarifies how a transitional period was the primary means by which the distinctions between "structure" and "process" in experimental American music were effaced. The more I listen, the more my convictions stiffen, thicken. The ONCE artists, all of them, those in residence such as Mumma and Ashley and Scavarda as well as the visitors, were out to revolutionize musical performance itself: the internal dynamics of the performing ensemble (including the conductor); the relationship of the composer to performer; the relationship of the audience to both composers and performers; the relationship of the audience to the work itself. One of the raw, component materials in any new form is a plastic substance we can call "listener expectations"; you can think of John Cage's contempt for Western harmony -- he deemed it "obnoxious" -- and his avioidance of its precepts in this light. New forms thus always propose new kinds of interactions. This is espcially true of music, which is innately abstract. With so many of these ONCE works, the audience may now, and, crucially, may now deliberately be included in whatever system of representation a given work elaborates. Laughter from the audience does not disrupt Mumma's Meanwhile, A Twopiece (1962); in a very real way, that laughter is inbuilt. That laughter, unscripted in the sense of not being predictable, was nonetheless probable, and a direct result of the score itself. Although the audience is not laughing at the music itself, they are laughing at the fact that the musicians behave more like contestants in some game than serious concert performers. Moving from instrument to instrument -- "station" to "station" -- as directed by mere slips of paper... it's all a bit absurd, isn't it? Perhaps not outrageous; I mean, any hep person knows that the musicians are always subject to... But certainly there's something comic is this particularly exaggerated helplessness before the anonymous stipulations of the performance itself.
"The audience may now, and, crucially, may now deliberately be included in whatever system of representation a given work elaborates." For once, the adverb is key. So much of what was staged at these ONCE Festivals -- and, involving dance, film, physical props, etc., cannot be presented with this box set release -- took as its setting that densely charged field that is the interface between performer and observer. Self-conscious gestures of inclusion, if only through overt confrontation, inaction or "surrender" of the artist being perhaps the most insidious and most effective means of assault (were Vito Acconci and Chris Burden in Ann Arbor with their notepads?); a refusal to settle for polite interactions; an emphasis on "connection" and "discovery" rather than the narrative unities supported by both programmatic and absolute music: these strategies helped the ONCE artists avoid the substitution of a new kind of escapism for the old. Think about it; with a few alterations, the Megaton for William Burroughs (1964) Miller describes on page 72 of the ONCE booklet could be a Universal Studios "ride." It is more than likely too much to claim that the ONCE composers and musicians were trying, with some collective push, to awaken their audiences (and themselves) to the paradox that is being attentive -- passively alert, actively acquiescent. Yet a work such as Scavarda's Sounds for Eleven (1962) compels me to think about this music in precisely these terms. Sounds for Eleven installs sonority as a metaphor for contemplation.
"By 1961 Scavarda had become interested in the expressive possibilities of sound itself, devoid of all extraneous associations such as melody, rhythm, and gestures. In Sounds for Eleven he expunged these elements in order to permit the discrete sonorities to be heard for their own intrinsic beauty. Unique timbres evolve from the interaction between instruments with natural decay properties and those capable of sustaining sounds such as the woodwinds. Scavarda sought a plastic form, freed from the chains of meter. Percussion sounds are simply permitted to decay to silence, while durations of woodwind sounds are determined by specified size of the breath intake." (130-1)
Scavarda (referring to himself in the third person for reasons I don't quite understand) may be boldly outlining one of the central concerns of the American musical avant-garde in the days prior to the ascendancy of minimalism, but he might as well be discussing yoga. Here we have another exaggerated and not deflated figure of the musical composition as will, as discipline, as injunction and prescription, as opposed to law -- the determinism that arches over so much early Reich and Riley. This intellectually nuanced but clearly audible difference is more conspicuous as soon as one notices the very careful mediations introduced by the conductor whose involvement is necessary if the music is to be played at all. In Sounds For Eleven, the exaggeration is accomplished via an insistence on the primacy of voluntary respiration in the creation of any musical "self". Vibrato, dynamics, pitch, and dissonance are all honored here -- and all are overturned. The piece begins with real immediacy: two jolts, the first from piano and guitar, the second from what sounds like the piano, the strings now strummed in the manner of a harp, and vibraphone. And Sounds For Eleven continues -- for about 11 minutes, as it turns out -- in this manner, until the silences that punctuate the individual "movements" themselves become the source of what is startling. A relationship binds contemplation and shock. The state of being absorbed is like a protracted shock. Or, alarming, painful events induce a variety of contemplation, an immobility, if not a composure, that is a necessary aftermath. A settling. One adopts an apprehensive attitude that serves as a prosthesis. Part of whatever one grasps is now that gap, insensate, that lies between oneself and the objects of one's fancy. Yet to be absorbed in something, to contemplate it, to project oneself into a time that would be, is also to leave one's perceptual defenses thinned by the effort and one's concentration more than a little susceptible to intrusion and disruption. "Shock" is an epithet, in such instances, for imposed discontinuity. Here's the rub: both shock and contemplation are operations by which we align and re-align our views of the world. And, contrary to the expectations we hold even after we have survived the stresses of either, shock dilates the passing of time where contemplation condenses it. Sounds For Eleven, candidly examining evanescent sounds as embodiments, must be occupied both points-of-view; Scavarda manages to get his composition to do just that, to inhale and to exhale, with stunning results that oblige the listener to give the piece multiple auditions.
Many of the works on this box set creep, or recoil half again as far after each advance. Bruce Wise's Music For Three [1964], for two pianos and taped accompaniment, is particularly glacial. This is not completely a criticism of Wise's dexterity, as the performers themselves choose whether the two halves of the work remain estranged or are united, that is, are played in sequence, or in simultaneity. Other works stagger or waver between lurching and leaning. More akin to Sounds For Eleven is Roger Reynolds' Wedge (1962), which offers even more broadly scattered tonal disparities and jarring, drawn-out collisions of timbres and dynamics. The form of the work is not that of a single tapered block, latently utilitarian, but of the action within a duality. Masses of wind and percussion instruments converge only in the process of passing by, and, ultimately, through each other. Wedge, then, not as a noun, but as a verb. An impression of objects functioning and perhaps malfunctioning, if not exactly of human characters climbing over each other up a treacherous slope of drama, is also key to the one utterly improvised piece to be heard on the ONCE box, Pauline Oliveros' and David Tudor's Applebox Double (1965). The title, presumably abstruse, is actually literal. According to Miller, this version of the piece "is an extension of a solo work in which [Oliveros] tapped, struck, scraped, rubbed, banged, and bowed various objects attached to an amplified wooden box. Typical items included springs, metal tongues, "Halloween crickets", and car curb scrapers. For the ONCE presentation, Tudor prepared his own box, hence the name..." (83-84). Although the instruments (which, like Paul Lytton's junkyard drum kits, must have been impressive assemblages) are already open in that they resonate, I would argue that Applebox Double is not about filling a discrete space, but rather, as much as the improvisation is about anything, is occupied with prying, breaching, venting, spilling out. But these boxes do not open easily. Wood jointed and pressed against wood, acoustically nailed and latched "shut", the boxes resist the performer's tools, and so the sounds that unleashed are mostly the sounds of pressure and strain, and of like substances vibrating against one another. Squeaking, creaking, screaming, whimpering, grunting, braying, howling... indeed, the prepared material -- the boxes themselves -- of Applebox Double almost cannot help but cajole Oliveros and Tudor into the production of noises that are suggestive of the human voice. The sounds of the performers' efforts at opening displace the sounds of what they hope to release. The homology that binds these containers to expandable / contractible "box" -- the accordion or squeezebox -- with which Oliveros customarily works becomes more and more apparent, as well as more complicated, as the performance proceeds. It is as if there is no escape from the formalism inherent in the mere act of breathing (into a reed, in vowels, across the waters). A kind of tautology is situated at the heart of Applebox Double, a tautology not just of physical realities -- lumber, metal, electronics -- but also of musical strategies, if you think in terms of what forces are being "unleashed" by these two Pandoras. So, despite the fact that it is very likely the one work here most relevant to a contemporary audience for improvised music, Applebox Double is only intermittently interesting.
The works documented here that do plunge and swerve, such as Philip Krumm's proto-minimalist Music For Clocks (1963) or Ashley's The Fourth Of July (1961) are more rare, and tend, at least on first hearing, to be more "experimental", more memorable. This is due, in part, to the fortunes of cultural chronology. The late 1950's and early 1960's, as Miller's notes indeed point out, were also a great era for experimental cinema in America. Film-makers Milton Cohen and George Manupelli were important members of the ONCE circle, and, as has already been mentioned, composers such as Donald Scavarda and performance artists such as Mary Ashley inserted film into their own work, which was otherwise relatively traditional in terms of it adherence to the properties of their chosen media. The Fourth Of July is certainly more analogous to a short film such as Stan Brakhage's Desistfilm (1954) than it is to other pioneering works in electronic music like, say, Varese's and Xenakis' Poème Electronique (1958) or Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (1956). (There are matters of scale to consider here as well; The Fourth Of July is almost 19 minutes in length.) Both Brakhage and Ashley take a party as their subject, and proceed to alter and edit their record of the proceedings until the quotidian is completely obscured by the overt artistic gesture. Both Brakhage and Ashley eventually leave the party, Ashley for the stratosphere of pure electronic tones, Brakhage departing into archetypes of union achieved through sex and violence. And like Brakhage's frame-defying Mothlight (1963), Ashley's The Fourth Of July very much faces forward. Had Ashley, as in his more "mature" music, introduced narrative, with its logical sequence and grounding in some past, would only produce a feeling of reaching, however tenuously, backwards and not the sensation of steadily accelerating away from an (arbitrary) starting position that is so integral to The Fourth Of July. Consciousnesses, intimated by the initial presence of human voices in conversation (a piano is also playing in the background), is only transitory here, perceived only as long as it is deformed within reasonable -- i.e., not utterly random -- parameters. At some point, The Fourth of July somehow overloads and manages to exceed consciousness: that of the artist, and of the audience.
"The plan of the piece was to make a large number of tape loops mixing five sine-waves at different proportional frequencies (mathematically determined, but not in any of the conventional tuning systems). Then there was a grand plan to layer these loops in a hierarchy of different speeds, durations, repetitions, and sectional groupings. The plan was much too ambitious for the technology. The tape noise buildup and the sheer audacity of the number of stops and starts, fades, and other ingredients in the plan made it clear to me -- after I had built the tape loops -- that I couldn't do the piece. But I had the loops. So I just started playing around with them on the three machines [tape recorders] -- a few weeks of 'free improvisation' -- until I had something that I almost liked... Meanwhile, I was experimenting with a parabolic microphone (which trades the distance the microphone can 'hear' against the microphone's frequency response). On the afternoon of the national holiday I heard a party starting in our neighbors' backyard (which was about 50 feet away). So I pointed the microphone toward the party to hear it on my own system. I recorded about an hour (so that I could listen again later)... Listening to the party tape later (many times) I realized that the frequencies of the microphone were amazingly like the sounds I had on my 'free improvisation' tape, so I simply mixed the two together..." (109-110)
Contemporary, and nearly exclusively digital, electronic works usually feel much, much different than The Fourth Of July, which nevertheless lies within a scope we can call "antecedent". An album such as Oval's Ovalprocess (2000) or Matmos' A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure (2001) are much more about alienating entire "known" genres (pop music, dance music) by making the source of the samples utilized in a given piece a commentary or even a critique. The term "absolute music" has no application and very probably no significance here. (I never thought Eddie Condon would be germane to this discussion, but, "we called it music", indeed…) Yet this critique is not quite re-contextualization, or even transformation. It is, rather, very much in the spirit of Dada: the outrageousness of the "real" cannot be held at bay indefinitely, representation itself bursts, and neither nostalgic nor futurist sentiments can survive for very long in the music. If musique concrète is, in a virtually heretical paraphrase, part of a never-ending search for new musical resources, about the depletion of old resources and the restoration of the musical enterprise itself via an infusion of previously unheard sounds, "glitch" and "micro-sound" are more concerned with how the musical enterprise itself is exhausted, that the last hope is that, with more sophisticated tools and a healthier attitude towards oneself and one's fellow "subjects", those sonic resources can be made to disclose new truths about themselves and the process of creation itself. The universe of personal, interpersonal, and social relationships suggested by the best of contemporary electronic music, specifically, improvised electronic music, is, in the final analysis, probably as vast as some of the music's amanuenses have argued. But that universe is also still, in large measure, tilted on an axis of the personal. I'm reminded suddenly of Sachiko M.'s 1:2 (2003) on the A Bruit Secret label: 20 minutes’ worth of a single “test” tone, deviations from which are irregular, perhaps due to some defect in the musician’s “empty sampler”, in nature and can only be measured by an oscilloscope, in fractions (.5 hertz). The actual perception of the diversity within this same, however euphonious that same may be, it is equivalent to a "Eureka!" moment, isn't it? Some musical formalists, the kind who equate music appreciation with pattern recognition, would hold that the musical experience can nearly always be reduced to just this type of enthusiasm or, to make it sound slightly more poetic and, heaven forbid, noble, "discovery". But aren't we just delineating a form of self-congratulation? The listener may feel as if he or she has wrested himself or herself free of some obsession, has pulled through to insight and even true resolution. But the more prosaic truth, I maintain, is that one's attention has not been instrumental in making some "external" sublimate, but that the object of attention has merely shifted, away from the "external" and onto the listener's own attentiveness. Narrative does not require only collision and "change", whose life anyway depends on interpretation. Narrative is conflict, and, for my purposes anyway, what I have just described does not qualify as such. It is a simulation of narrative, just as Markus Popp's digital clicks and skips, though actually painted on or inscribed into the myriad of compact discs that have been incorporated into a single Oval (or Microstoria, or So) compact disc, emulate House and Industrial beats.
The early, maybe even primitive, tape pieces on the ONCE box do possess a unique mobility, internal as well as ideological, regardless of whether they feel awkward, herky-jerky and / or quaint to us. The Fourth Of July is a piece I feel I should, on the one hand, take to task for the banality and ugliness of its inconsistencies, and, on the other, that I must praise for the manic, esoteric vitality of its incongruities. There's an over-abundance of conflict here. As there is in George Cacioppo's surprisingly nocturnal -- dark but not heavy, counter-intuitively transparent -- Advance Of The Fungii (1964), for male chorus, French horns, trombones, clarinets and percussion. Actually, there is no advance, and no text; these are sonic events in which momentum and resolution are stunted. Glissandi, convex and concave sounds intersect, but the lines do stop. Here. Here. And here. Advance Of The Fungii is a collection of non-sequiturs. It is brilliantly pointless, or, better, brilliant and pointless. Or, better still, its brilliance is assured by its pointlessness. No reconciliatory action in the piece can conjure up redemption. If this is true, does that mean that damnation does not exist? It is a terribly leading question. A tendentious one at that. Aesthetically, centers and peripheries have been declared obsolete. We have been informed that the moral fact of a work of art is no longer to be found in the work's inner character but in the miracle that, in our broken world, the work exists at all. This is what the void looks like from an optimist's perch, which is never as high as the optimist thinks it is.
In the end, and in spite of the fact that contemplation and "readings" can, all on their own, be constitutive of civil disobedience, listeners are always listeners. Freedom in art for the appreciator is invariably "shown", encased in the possible ("fictional"), thus vicarious, and most vicarious when the experience feels most powerful. Real freedom as it is situated in any work of art is only activated once one leaves the work and returns to other conceivings, which, I suppose, is another way of saying that one never really departs from the work at all. The artist, on the other had, can take full pleasure in freedom. But pleasure, as Keirkegaard wrote in his Journal, is its own adulteration. Could it be that, after all, listeners -- those "observers" I mentioned earlier -- are privileged, in that they are, -- we are -- freed somewhat from the torment that is change? Artists, no matter how ingeniously they apply themselves, can never outwit change. So the "performer", stepping sideways, becomes the "agent provocateur", then, making one leap, assumes the responsibilities of the "demonstrator" or, making one further leap, those of the "activist". The question in 2004, now that we can say we are at a kind of terminus of, at least a relative hiatus in, the revolution carried forward by these artists, is: "how bad were things, really?" How hazardous; what was being leaped over? What prompted these musical reactions? Were they seen, if only in hindsight, as necessary? What perniciousness were they hunting down? The resolution that the ONCE works serve as metaphors for changing personal and social realities... better, interpersonal realities at small and large magnitudes... of the 1960's is a very seductive one. ONCE was explicitly anti-academic and yet implicitly anti-fragmentation and anti-cultural segregation; pro-peaceful cultural coexistence, polymorphously perverse detente. ONCE prefigures our own contemporary shift away from categoricalness, generality, and glue. After ONCE, what has "improved", what has not? Is quantifiable aesthetic "change" a real measure of aesthetic success? Or is the extent to which a work is self-contained enough to weather the eroding forces of time and taste a better testament to its value? Could the ONCE recordings have been seen as an extraordinary "treasure trove" until now, 40 years later? If so, what excuse for our extraordinary oversight could we give? Who is to blame? That is we, as listeners who are aware and, to an extent, proud of our awareness of the political (corporate, state) thread wound within every sound, have some duty, if only a minor one, to ask ourselves why this box set has appeared now. To inquire as much is not necessarily to impute nefarious motives to New World Records -- or anyone else, for that matter. Certainly, a revival of both critical and popular interest in the music itself, neither wholly composed nor entirely improvised, accounts for the set's arrival in 2003. As the "one big" digital medium continues to fuse the differences between media, too, I am sure there are those artists -- Kaffe Matthews, perhaps -- who have happily anticipated being able to look back at the ONCE activities in order to appraise the pluses and minuses of that fusion. The higher profile of some of the ONCE participants, Ashley and Roger Reynolds (an excellent compilation of his post-ONCE works is now available on the Pogus label), also has something to do with this music's grand presentation. Overall, then, there is a need, an old one, to understand how and why we got where we are. ONCE has re-appeared in answer to this need. But my suspicion is that the answers ONCE gives might be disappointing, infuriating, irrelevant, and, I hate to resort to this diction, "hokey" from this point-of-view. I fear that the ONCE will be consigned to the same historical ghetto as those challenges it sought to overcome. I can envision the rejection, without compunction or any tempering admission that we did, after all, ask, of ONCE's answers. A corrective -- that is one of the things I hear when I play these compact discs.
François Le Lionnais, "Lipo: First Manifesto" (1960): "Should humanity lie back and be satisfied to watch new thoughts make ancient verses?"
I am not listening to the ONCE box set as I write this. I have stopped it's spinning. Right now, now's the time... I am listening to Pavement's Slanted And Enchanted (1992), My Bloody Valentine's Loveless (1991), and Slint's Spiderland (1990; my freshman year at college). By such accidents are the muses summoned, and I am no longer injured by the possibility that I will repeat myself.
I am no longer initiated to the post that I must repent myself. No more inhibited by the postmortem that details how I shall repine myself.
A pang; invariably similarity attacks my articulation.
Yet I resolved no longer to worry on the bone of echoing one's own words.
[HOME] | [DISC 1] | [DISC 2] | [DISC 3] | [DISC 4] | [DISC 5] | [5 DISCS] | [WORKS CITED] | [COMMENTS]
Louis I. Kahn, the great American architect who, with an irony that is fitting in its absence of leniency, was prevented from carrying out his plans for his home city of Philadelphia, is quoted in the recent film My Architect to, roughly, the following effect: art is proof that man can make what nature cannot. At Yale University in 1963 Kahn closed a lecture whose humbler beginnings are to be found in a discussion of the dual problem of the client and the budget in architectural design with customarily lofty insight:
"Architecture is what nature cannot make. Nature cannot make anything man makes. Man takes nature -- the means of making a thing -- and isolates its laws. Nature does not do this because nature works in harmony with laws, which we call order. It never works in isolation. But man works with this isolation..." (Essential Texts; 167)
Kahn could have just as easily said "within" as with. Nothing truly creative thrives, much less exists in isolation. Kahn understood this too; he understood the work as a something small, a motion waiting to be received (that is my belief, anyway). Yet, when it comes to music, we often listen alone for concentration's sake -- and for concentration's satisfaction. And yet (doubling-back, almost) it is the work that lasts, not our solitude.
Humans actively make lives as much as they "passively" live them. The ostensible subject of My Architect -- a documentary directed by Kahn's estranged son, Nathaniel -- is one man's, Louis Kahn's, rather awful prolificacy with the "means" (his words) of life. The film is a psychological kaleidoscope of Kahn's interpersonal relationships: a wife, two mistresses, two "illegitimate" children, various other family members and associates who did and did not know of Kahn's several "lives". Yet the minute one of Kahn's uncannily intimate monuments appeared in the film, I felt fully cognizant that, against my wishes, the life of one these structures is more precious, more potentially tragic as well as triumphant, than any one person, no matter how brilliant or misshapen (Kahn was both). The buildings as such impressed me like facts, captured on film regardless of the director's / son's intent. For me, the most striking of Kahn's projects is Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, a frankly amazing complex situated on the shores of a lake in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. This city within the city was "hand-built" -- i.e., erected without the benefit of much modern industrial equipment -- over the course of 23 years, while the country itself was engaged in a battle for its own independence from Pakistan. The very fact that the building continued through war and famine and Kahn's own death in 1974 and God knows what else is alone expressive of a desperate hope. And, although Kahn never saw his work completed, the people of Bangladesh did attain their future. For those Westerners among us seeing it today -- this huge, somehow Kubrikian, still very Eastern honeycomb of fenestrated concrete interiors and exteriors -- Dhaka cannot help but evoke wistfulness for the passing of the visionary from our own culture. Contemporary architects in America, their buildings often slapped together like so much post-modern gingerbread, would never dare to sully their hands with aims of uplift. Here at Dhaka, looming gray and majestic, is our discarded future. Without a doubt, this is a mysterious kind of future shock. As one of Nathaniel Kahn's "subjects" tells him near the conclusion of My Architect, indeed, Louis Kahn may have been a weak man and a poor father, and he may not have given young Nathaniel the filial love that the boy longed for, but Kahn loved in other ways. Tears welling in his eyes (literally), this man tells Kahn that his father is primarily responsible for making possible his entire country's future: a functioning democracy whose citizens have at least a measurable standard of living must pivot around some axis, and Kahn gave the Bangladeshis that center, those radii, those diameters. You have to understand; I'm not endorsing the ideology of the individual genius. True, we cannot separate "ideas" from "men", but I look upon Sher-e-Bangla Nagar and see an idea that was so generous it very nearly built itself. The idea needed Kahn, perhaps, only for coherence and transmission. And as soon as the Bangladeshis understood what this American -- an immigrant, a Jew, an adulterer, a scientist, an artist -- had communicated to them and committed to its realization, all I can say to you is that the idea really did enter the realm of the inexplicable. "Genius" as the character or spirit of a place... a nation... you see, there are, occasionally, these real-world examples that stop one's skepticism cold.
For added contrast, there is future we have obtained in the United States. Precisely what have we forged, what have we earned, especially here in Middle America? Plushophiles and "smushies". Survivor and Average Joe. Tom DeLay and Michael Moore. Mannatech. Microsoft. Welbutrin and Paxil. Strip malls. Britney Spears and the ICP. Call centers. The savage American energy that gave us figures like Ives and Whitman has, in large measure, been turned away from art. The incredible wherewithal we Americans have at our command to better ourselves and out fellow human beings has been depleted in the fashioning of shinier, more hulking, instantly obsolescent tools of self-destruction. I don't intend this to be a cri de coeur for modern America, or yet another pastoral lament for the good old days. But I do have to wonder why the future has, in this country, become such a fearful shadow. Perhaps because loneliness stalks the land in a new guise, enraged, vindictive, bloody-handed.
Meanwhile, Sher-e-Bangla Nagar embraces and nurtures many lives. Devotional lives, commercial lives, artistic lives, lives of service to national, and, more to the point, socially responsible goals. Is the city also home to pollution, murder, poverty, disease, corruption? Absolutely. There is no utopia to be portrayed here. Perfection is not my claim. Is the city also an expression of a higher ideal? Absolutely. Does that ideal belong to one man? Absolutely not. It is not simply that the people of Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, individuals all and not mere incarnations, like Animatronic mannequins, of "culture", are free to pursue their happiness in some arena, an empty elliptical expanse, but that, as huge as the capital is, each person still have to shrink themselves and allow their will to wither just enough for their to be room for all to live there in harmony. The residents of Sher-e-Bangla Nagar do transform their personal spaces, without question, but, in doing so, they agree to the initial composition of those spaces -- not Louis Kahn himself, who, after all, is a neighbor first, a builder second.
"I was given a program of about twenty-five pages, and that wasn't even a full program since the program was speaking about the assembly building. It said the requirements of the assembly building were something like this: THE ASSEMBLY BUILDING: TEN ACRES. That was the program! And a few other things which were really funny like, 'hostels should have closets.' Anyway, this is twenty-five pages of very meaty and serious requirements. The third day I was there [Bangladesh] a fellow with a good idea said why didn't you bring it all together into one unit. And the idea stemmed from this thought. That after all, an assembly building is a transcendent place. A place, no matter what kind of rogue you are, when you go into an assembly somehow you may vote for the right thing. Now I thought that it had transcendent qualities, and so I observed that the [Bangladeshis] pray five times each day and very earnestly. So I thought of this preposterous idea of having a mosque attached to the assembly. I thought the mosque should be answerable to the assembly, and the assembly answerable to the mosque... I think that if you were to judge the city as if it were an institution of man, and that the nature of connection is very vital in architecture. [emphasis mine] The sensitivity of the emergence of new institutions, even out of the old, seem to want to branch from it. The sensitivity to what may be willing to be an institution of man, and the spaces around it which it could express itself are almost a first requirement." (203-204)
I have faith in the idea that a work of art can accomplish much the same thing. I recall a couple of beautifully complementary descriptions Joseph McElroy has graciously given me of his towering, mostly unread "novel" Women And Men: as a fictional world, it is "a multiple dwelling set in motion"; as an experience for readers, "a book to dwell in." And, just think, music, by virtue of its mathematics, is much closer to architecture than literature is...
The ONCE Festival... this abandoned but intact city; because people had fled it, time ignored it. Its unforeseen solidity, the utility of its inner workings, the delights of its plazas and gardens and streets and markets, they all posit some forgotten future. It is a future that, because it has always existed in an always-later age of wisdom and dotage, belongs even more to the past than those remembrances with which we are all swaddled.
"In the process from conception to application, however, simplicity [of constraint] engenders complexity." (Motte; 12)
Banish Michigan from your mind. Raze the homes, plow the university under, swing the the ball into the facades of the shops and diners. Slash and burn the last stands of forest. Wall it in with white, wall it off in black. There is no surprise latent in location. Timing is just coincidence seen from more than one point of view. And we're trying to escape point of view. Forget the connections that thrum in gray sinewy Möbius strips between Ashley's The Wolfman (1964) and The Stooges' Funhouse (1970), reverberations of which can be felt in the noise generated by other Michigan-based experimenters Destroy All Monsters, Griot Galaxy, Carl Craig, and the extended Universal Indians / Wolf Eyes family. Get it all out of your head, these details like a swarm of ants over a dollop of honey. Break the wheel of comparing.TM
"The goal of potential literature is to furnish future writers with new techniques which can dismiss inspiration from their affectivity." (François Le Lionnais, 1961)
ONCE upon a time in America. Another morning, another spring, another cup of coffee and jog around the track. Days duplicated one after the other. Days churned out down through the generations until all that is left are tattered blurs that have no innate movement, no direction, only a corona of gloom that symbolizes what used to be present. Once upon a time in America, when I was young, I had friends like you would not believe. They things we used to say to one another. The amusements we used to force upon one another. The troubles we courted. You see this scar? Ah, but you have noticed my trophy, you're curious about it, aren't you? The times we won, the times we tasted dirt. The brothers and sisters we made. The places we boasted about soaring off to. They are not laid flat on any map, nor roll-called in any directory. Lost in the dreadful mists are the heights from which we jumped... and from which we fell.
By all means, have a seat. I can take your shoes, your coat; there's blankets in that cupboard just over there if... I know there's a draft, and the light in here is pretty feeble, but try to make yourself as comfortable as these modest accommodations permit. And let me tell you about it.
~ Joe Milazzo (January - April, 2004).
[HOME] | [DISC 1] | [DISC 2] | [DISC 3] | [DISC 4] | [DISC 5] | [5 DISCS] | [WORKS CITED] | [COMMENTS]
Kahn, Louis. Essential Texts. Edited by Robert Twombly. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. 2003.
Steefel, Lawrence D., Jr. "Marcel Duchamp and the Machine." In: Marcel Duchamp. Edited by Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine. New York and Philadelphia, PA: The Museum of Modern Art; The Philadelphia Museum of Art. 1973.
All quotes relating to the ONCE Festivals and the music presented at said festivals are drawn from the accompanying booklet to the 5-disc boxed set, Music from the ONCE Festival, 1961 - 1966. New York: New World Records. 2003.
All quotes relating to the Oulipo have been drawn from: Motte, Warren F., Jr. OULIPO: A Primer of Potential Literature. Lincoln, NE: The University of Nebraska Press. 1986.
[HOME] | [DISC 1] | [DISC 2] | [DISC 3] | [DISC 4] | [DISC 5] | [5 DISCS] | [WORKS CITED] | [COMMENTS]
Bravo, Joe. Bravissimo.
Posted by: walto at April 12, 2004 9:49 AMAnd I thought my review of the box was lengthy! A splendid piece of writing about one of the major documents of recorded music of recent times. I will make it my business to direct as many people as I can to it - the box and your feature.
Posted by: dan warburton at April 12, 2004 9:58 PMPaul at New World forwarded me Robert Ashley's own recollections on the origin of the name ONCE, in case you're interested (I quote from an email of his):
"The name ONCE is buried in memory lost, but I think this is the way it happened. We were on a drastic deadline for a name, because of the first printed material that had to be mailed and nobody had come up with a name that anybody liked. Finally, in desperation, Mary Ashley (my wife at the time) said to me, "Why don't we just call it ONCE?" She designed all of the publicity and she was good with names and I think, for her, ONCE looked good and could be used in many ways visually. I called up a few people and they agreed and the design went to the printer that afternoon. It was definitely not a corporate decision. It turned out that she was right. It was certainly a magical name. We did a lot of things with it like "ONCE a month", "ONCE again", etc. and it gave the negative reviewers everything they needed, like "ONCE is enough" --- to get us a lot of attention. Personally, I think she got it from a great Count Basie record of the time where the arrangement of "April in Paris" ends in a screaming high trumpet chord --- there is a short pause and then Basie says, "Just one more time" and the end tag comes back with the trumpets even higher; then Basie says "Once more"
and the tag comes back with the trumpets even higher; then Basie says "Just one more Once" and the tag comes back with the trumpets higher than
believable. Great record. You should get it. The record also includes "L'le Darlin", one
of the greatest swing band tunes ever made."
Any Basiephiles out there care to point me in the direction of this album? It's not in my collection - yet
Posted by: dan warburton at April 13, 2004 9:55 PMDan, I am not a Basiephile but I remember I have this record (vinyl only). It's "E=MC2" with an atomic bomb explosion on the cover. So, if you need it, we can make something, next time we meet...
Yes, The Atomic Basie, aka E=MC2 (sorry for the lack of superscript). But that's an album of Neal Hefti originals--no "April in Paris"! It's usually considered the best of Basie's postwar albums.
Posted by: nate dorward at April 14, 2004 8:41 AMWell kids, it seems I should go either for the album or for the piece Bob Ashley mentions! Happy to know that your Basie collection is as impressive as your Evan Parker & Steve Lacy, Jacques :)) and thanks Nate for the info too! But if that particular version of "April in Paris" isn't on E=MC², where is it?
The saga continues..
I remember "April in Paris" is an album on Verve, Count Basie wears a beret, seems to be great...
Sorry, Dan, I don't have it
Dan, it is indeed the album "April In Paris" you want, on Verve. Easily obtainable. If you want to go whole hog, Mosaic's just released "The Complete (what else???) Verve Studio Recordings by Count Basie," but there's a certain measure of perfunctory stuff there, all impeccably swung of course.
As for chapeaus de style, perhaps following the fashion set by his stepchile The. Monk, Basie appeared in public topped off by an everpresent hat of varying style, perhaps most famously the yachting cap (Vegas Basie) but in earlier years, a fedora (KC/NYC).
Posted by: tom Djll at April 23, 2005 5:25 AMThe yachting cap is my favorite form of Basie millinery, perusable on so many Pablos.
Posted by: derek at April 23, 2005 5:53 AM(from 'Disc Four')
"New forms thus always propose new kinds of interactions."
Thus if the form is itself "revolution" (as distinct from "revolutionary") -- the fervent preoccupation of so much of this music -- we now are left in the relativistic position of having no 'normative' state against which to pitch our own revolutions, except the "basest" mammalian concerns. Does that make us lucky? (i.e., special? 'May you live in post-normative times.')
Wow. Joe, what an inspiring piece of work! This should be in print, and not just 'cause it's so damn hard to scroll thru on a laptop screen... There is so much here, so much to praise, enjoy, argue with, sneer at -- it deserves a ONCE Festival of its own at the very least (you might think I'm damning with faint praise there, but, no, not at all).
(footnote to previous too-hasty Basie paste: "Li'l Darlin" may be found on The Atomic Basie, from his Roulette years.)
Posted by: tom Djll at April 23, 2005 6:29 AMDon't worry Tom, Joe will be coming to a webzine near you any day now!
Posted by: nd at April 23, 2005 9:59 AMPS cool piece in STN itemizing the pitfalls of improvisation.
Hey, compliments to the Bags staff for the ever-cooler imaginary expletives! Not only do they keep the spam away, they offer some tasty syllables to crunch on!
Posted by: nd at April 23, 2005 10:05 AM.................................................. © 2003 - 2006 bagatellen ..................................................