The word from the folks at the emc….
In his useful PostClassic blog, Kyle Gann has taken up the question of whether today’s composers debate, or if they are too cool to do so. In the course of his blog entry, he talks about the fights of the 1980s between Uptown and Downtown, serial and minimal. It’s here:
http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2013/09/passionate-dinosaur-in-a-laid-back-new-world.html
Seeing that John White is getting his Prom this evening (see this link), it is rather wonderful that our friend, the New York artist John Emr has provided a link to Morgan Fisher’s blog page with a lovely account of John’s quiet revolution in music. Find it here.
It’s amazing what one comes across when idly surfing the web. For one thing, although we know Music from Other Minds Friday radio show on KALW and love what Richard Friedman and Charles Amirkhanian does with it, we have missed a lot of these programmes. Luckily, these days we can get to them any time, such as this show, 308: Mostly Rare, from 11 May 2012: http://rchrd.com/mfom/wp/2012/05/10/308/ , which features (along with a bit of Delius, Hauer and Stephen Montague), two excerpts from Marty Walker’s old Advance album. There’s Hal Budd’s In Delius’ Sleep (1974), played by Walker (Bb clarinet) and Barney Childs (piano and percussion) and Chris Hobbs’ Recitative (1979), played by Walker (bass clarinet), Childs (celesta), Virginia Anderson (percussion), and Hobbs (vibraphone). If you haven’t heard these two pieces from the 1970s, it’s worth a listen.
After more years than you can shake a stick at, the BBC Promenade Concerts at the Royal Albert Hall (the premiere British summer concert series), fondly called the ‘Proms’, will finally play music by John White. White’s Chord-Breaking Machine will open a concert of music by Frederic Rzewski, Morton Feldman, and, lest you think that they lost their heads and abandoned other music, the premiere of a piece by Gerald Barry.
This will be White’s first Prom. It’s a late one, of course, but it’s a Prom. And Cardew only got a Prom last year (the previous one in 1972 was the infamous Maoist Great Learning Prom, which seems to have scared the Beeb off any experimental music for a long time). Chord-Breaking Machine (1971) was commissioned by the Orchestra of King’s College School in Wimbledon. It is one of White’s Machine process minimalist pieces, related to White’s Gothic Chord Machine, a piece written for the Promenade Theatre Orchestra, a quartet (White, Christopher Hobbs, Alec Hill, and Hugh Shrapnel) who played virtuosic music on reed organs and toy pianos. Chord-Breaking Machine takes the ‘gothic chord’ idea to orchestral levels, consisting of a percussion pulse, successions of chords that ‘break’ from one to the other through diffusion, and brass ‘milestone’ chords. As far as we can tell, Chord-Breaking Machine has not been played since 1971. Should you have access to it, Brian Dennis’ review of the premiere (‘John White’, in ‘Music in London’, The Musical Times, 112/1541 (1971), p. 681) is a joy to read, not only for his account of Chord-Breaking Machine, but also for his assessment of White and Cardew playing White’s ‘Cello and Tuba Machine at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on May 17 of that year, where he refers to Stockhausen’s ‘mystical (and egocentric) ramblings’ elsewhere in the issue.
The Chord-Breaking Machine concert will be broadcast live on Monday, 19 August 2013 at 10.15, on the BBC (Radio 3). For information and tickets for the live event, see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/whats-on/2013/august-19/14646 .
Just after I uploaded the last entry, there was a flurry of Facebook posts, mostly from one person complaining about the price of The Great Learning, and suggesting a price point of £3-5, especially because it is now in PDF format. These have been removed and forwarded to the people in charge of pricing where they will be considered properly. But it does raise a question: what constitute the value of a musical work? We’ve just added a couple of Michael Parsons’ pieces and John White’s Drinking and Hooting Machine to our Freebies page with the composers’ permission. You can also get pretty much all of Chris Hobbs’ text pieces on that page. All for free. Other pieces cost money.
How does the EMC price music? It depends upon the situation: whether we have control over the item or not. It may reflect the work that went into the composition or the production of the item. It may reflect the composer’s idea of where value lies. Chris Hobbs, for example, lowers his prices dramatically if he can send the customer a PDF, because it means that he doesn’t have to wrap up the item, address it and schlep down to the post office. Other composers prefer to create their own material; if so, they price it, we take a bit off the top, which is ploughed back into the EMC. The money pays for our domain name and host — after using free internet sites from supermarkets and the like, we’ve got something more stable, and more pricy —and for the cost of printing real pieces and other projects.
As we can see, some of the EMC composers put their value into other areas than price, at least on some of their pieces. But composers actually produce a product, and they sell it at the price they set to reflect not only its intrinsic value, but also the hours spent in crafting it. Cardew spent over three years on The Great Learning. It’s an orchestra piece in all senses of the word, except for its instrumentation. It’s incredibly carefully crafted and artistically beautiful, both in the physical notation of the score itself and in the artistry of the music that results from its performance. The Great Learning is certainly comparable to orchestra pieces by Stockhausen, whose current pdf price list can be found here: http://www.stockhausen.org/pricelist_scores_books_2013.pdf . Here you can see that most of Stockhausen’s orchestral pdfs are priced in three figures.
So here’s the thing, as they used to say on Buffy. Here’s a point that should include all music of all kinds, but I’ll limit it to Cardew and Stockhausen for simplicity’s sake. Is it legitimate to protest the price of Cardew scores and Stockhausen scores? Of course it is: it’s an argument about price point and accessibility. However, protesting the price of Cardew scores and not protesting the price of Stockhausen scores (or vice versa) is an argument about value: you ask for Cardew to be cheaper, but not Stockhausen (or vice versa) only if you think Stockhausen is greater than Cardew (or vice versa).
If you’d like to comment on and debate this issue, please reply below.
A few of you may have noticed that our supply of what is arguably the greatest British experimental piece, Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning, has been a bit patchy: sometimes in stock, then out of stock, then in stock again. Well, this has been fixed, thanks to Walter and Horace Cardew at Danny Dark Records, who have decided to issue a high-resolution pdf version of the score. We have this pdf version, which you can order from the EMC by visiting our Classic EMC Catalogue page. When you order it, we will send you the pdf. Just print it out on A3 paper (or the US or other equivalent), and Bob’s your uncle (well, you might not actually have an Uncle Bob — it’s a metaphor!): The Great Learning without postage and packing and waiting in for the postie, who never arrives….
There are many of us who would rather have the real thing, and some of us who say that we can get it all on line for free. So why should you order this piece in pdf? Here are some reasons:
If you haven’t seen The Great Learning in a while, I’d suggest taking out the Dumb Show, the event that begins Paragraph 5. Turn to our newly uploaded video of Michael Parsons demonstrating the Dumb Show, and follow along with the score. If you’d like more on The Great Learning, you might try my article in Jems (Journal of Experimental Music Studies).
Whilst trawling through the EMC attic, admin found this very short guide and tribute, which was meant to last only for the occasion. It is now very much out of date; if you wish to know anything about Cornelius Cardew, you must start with John Tilbury, Cornelius Cardew: A Life Unfinished (Essex 2008). We have noticed, however, that this little note is listed in WorldCat as a library holding. It might have interested someone, so I put it up here, as a blast from the past.
Cornelius Cardew: A source guide and personal tribute on the anniversary of his death
As my major interest is British experimental music, today marks the anniversary of an important event. Some of you may be interested in this directly, or at least might need such information for undergraduate classes and library orders.
Twenty years ago this evening, the British composer Cornelius Cardew was killed by a hit-and-run driver while he was walking in deep snow to his home in East Leyton, London. Cardew could roughly (but with some justification) be called the “Cage” of Britain, in that he developed a particularly British philosophy of notation and indeterminacy which was wholly new. Morton Feldman said (in “Conversations Without Stravinsky,” Source 2 (July 1967), p. 43) that
[a]ny direction modern music will take in England will come about only through Cardew, because of him, by way of him. If the new ideas in music are felt today as a movement in England, it’s because he acts as a moral force, a moral center. Without him, the young ‘far-out’ composer would be lost. With him, he’s still young, but not really lost.
Cardew’s work divides very neatly into the tripartite format of Beethoven and others (which I was warned not to adopt automatically in undergraduate history classes). His early work was modernist and he was a briefly a student and then assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen, performing most of the realisation of Stockhausen’s notes to Carre’ (and then parting company with this work and with avant-garde modernism in “Report on Stockhausen’s Carre’,” The Musical Times, September, 1961, p. 619 (Part 2 in November 1961, p. 700)).
At the same time Cardew met Christian Wolff and John Cage, and soon he found that music notations which spurred the performer to action, leaving other elements indeterminate, was more attractive. Cardew wrote, during this second period in his working life, two landmark pieces of writing on notation, its psychology and aesthetics: “Notation, Interpretation, etc.,” Tempo 58:21 (1961), pp. 21-33, and the often overlooked Treatise Handbook. Both pieces concentrate on Cardew’s ideas which led up to Treatise (New York: Gallery Upstairs Press, 1967; now sold through Peters), his 193-page graphic score.
Cardew also worked with the improvisatory group AMM and became interest in a kind of notation which would not need literacy in music (by means of common-practice notations) nor in the visual arts (by means of graphic notations), but rather in written English (or by translation, any spoken tongue). His concern with a music which anyone might, with practice and thought, play at a high artistic level, led to the founding of the Scratch Orchestra (particularly in Scratch Music (London: Latimer Press, 1971) and to his largest-scale work, The Great Learning (London: Experimental Music Catalogue, 1971; available through http://www.matchlessrecordings.com). This work might arguably be the largest, most complex work of experimental music, having seven sections and taking about seven hours to complete, and forms a compendium of experimental techniques and styles.
During this period Cardew showed his gifts as leader and teacher, inspiring a whole movement of British experimental performers and composers: John Tilbury, Cardew’s equivalent to Cage’s David Tudor, an accomplished pianist who allied himself to the movement; Gavin Bryars, John White, Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons, contemporary composers who joined him; Christopher Hobbs, Hugh Shrapnel and other students in his Royal Academy of Music classes; critics like Michael Nyman; improvisatory musicians like Keith Rowe and Eddie Prevost; visual artists like Tom Phillips. The classic work which dealt contemporaneously with both American and British experimental music is Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (London: Studio Vista, 1974; reprinted Cambridge: CUP, 1999).
After Cardew completed The Great Learning he entered a new phase in which he (at least at first) repudiated his previous avant-garde and experimental works as part of a concern with Marxist-Leninist philosophy and Maoist aesthetics. For most people this break with modernism came in his book Stockhausen Serves Imperialism (London: Latimer Press, 1974); musically it can be heard in the re-release of his album Four Principles on Ireland and Other Pieces (Ampersand ampere7, 2001 (for which I wrote the update’s liner notes)); scores of the music (the Piano Albums from 1973 and 1974) can be found on the Experimental Music Catalogue http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk. Another personal view of graphic works from a late-Maoist angle is Cardew’s “Wiggly Lines and Wobbly Music,” Studio International, November/December 1976, pp. 247-55 (part of their Art and Experimental Music issue).
From here many uninformed commentators have merely dismissed Cardew as a political agitator (for he was a leading figure in his political sphere) and writer of protest songs for workers (one writer whose name I have, perhaps thankfully, forgotten seemed to think that the entire British experimental scene had disappeared from music into politics), but there remain works of note, particularly Mountains (1976) for bass clarinet, which Cardew wrote for Harry Spaarnay, and Boolavogue (1981) for two pianos. After Mao’s death Marxist-Leninist aesthetics seemed to allow more use of art-music techniques while retaining political content: Mountains is a Bach-like fantasia which, at one point, moves into a section of graphic notation, and Boolavogue allows limited performer choice at one point. This late work is harder to find: one may try Forward Music (2013: now out of business) and http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk for scores published by the Cornelius Cardew Foundation. The Scratch Orchestra and Composers’ Project site, Musicnow http://www.musicnow.co.uk is also useful as a source of recordings and information.
Cardew’s long-time friend and performer John Tilbury has been, for years, working on his monumental biography of Cardew; from the taste he gave in “Cornelius Cardew,” in Contact, Spring 1983, pp. 4-12, and from discussions of his work and its scope, this should be the major Cardew source when it appears. For a larger overview of Cardew and the scene in general, I have to set aside humility and suggest my MA thesis: “British Experimental Music: Cornelius Cardew and His Contemporaries,” (Unpublished thesis: University of Redlands, 1983, 278 pp.; reprinted by the Experimental Music Catalogue http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk, 2000 2013: now out of print), which goes into the subject in a little more depth than Nyman’s and is a good companion to that book.
Those who live in Britain will find Julian Cowley’s “Revolutions from Scratch,” The Wire December 2001, pp. 26-31 to provide a good overview of Cardew’s life and memorial of the 20th anniversary of his death, as it includes interviews with many of the people who worked with him. Those who can tear themselves away from the queue for the Harrods’ sale in London (do people still do this?) can come to the Conway Hall in London on 29 December for a day (2pm-6.30pm) devoted to Cardew’s works performed by those who knew him.
A personal note: I had completed my second semester of my MA and my first trip to Britain was the usual cheap haul nightmare on December 18, 1981. We had to disembark from the plane far out on the tarmac and be bused to customs because of heavy snow. I waited for almost an hour for my host, Christopher Hobbs, to appear: he had had to run two miles to his nearest tube station because the buses could not make it up the hill to his part of town because of heavy snows. As we made our way from Heathrow to his house, Chris told me that he would have to leave me the next day because he had to go to his Cardew’s funeral, and explained what he knew of the circumstances, the most serious outcome of that season’s rotten weather.
Chris went. He told me that it was a moving service: Bach was played and the Internationale sung. I felt that I couldn’t go. I hadn’t met him, although I knew him — his works — well. I had first come across his views of notational aesthetics and psychology in “Notation, Interpretation, etc.,” while doing a paper on notational aesthetics as an undergraduate and had played Octet ’61, Autumn ’60, and Paragraph 6 of The Great Learning. I owned Scratch Music— as did most of the people I knew, as its 99¢ cover price made it about the cheapest book in any music book store, even in the 1970s. I was a fan, but a fan who would have called him “Mr. Cardew” (or would have avoided any address until I had felt comfortable enough for a first name). I still refer to “Cardew”, as I will never have a chance to meet him; “Cornelius” – still more, “Cor” – is for his friends.
Cardew’s death had hit everyone in British experimental music and to some extent brought them back together for the first time since the Scratch Orchestra. Spats between Marxists and non-Marxists of professional and non-professional musicians were put aside. Cardew’s young age — he was only 45 at the time — made the sense of urgency to keep ties and to take note of important events and works more keen. I was caught up in this: the people I talked to on that vacation all had Cardew’s life and works at the forefront of their discussions and this led to my choosing Cardew and other British experimentalists for my MA thesis and pretty much everything I written about since.
At the time of his death there were signs that Cardew was going to enter more fully back into experimental and new music: he had agreed to take part in a concert with AMM, for instance. It’s too bad that we couldn’t see how that artistic life may have continued. I really wish that I had met Cardew. I’m only one among many who learned from him and who were affected deeply by his ideas.
Virginia Anderson, 13 December 2001
There are two main sections on the EMC site that may be of interest.
1. The first is a new version of our famous Freebies page, which has offered little tit-bits from time to time. Now our Freebies are downloadable, including John White’s Drinking and Hooting Machine, Michael Parsons’ Pentachordal Melody and Rhythmic Canons, Chris Hobbs’ Word Pieces and his clarinet piece Why Not? Plus the famous Aran ringtone.
2. The second consists of the first two entries in what we hope to be a series of historic recordings. The first is itself not that historic — Christopher Hobbs and Dave Smith playing British minimalist and post-minimalist music for two pianos in June 2013 — but the concert itself contains a load of pieces by Parsons, Howard Skempton, John White, Smith and Hobbs that have not been heard in thirty years or more (and in the case of Howard Skempton’s piece, No Great Shakes, may not have been heard before at all! We’re checking this…). The other entry is a performance of Chris Hobbs’ piece Second Doomsday Machine in 1997 in its ‘official’ four piano version.
Check them out, and if you like what you hear or download, let us know. We’ve been passing on your thoughts to the composers and performers.
We continue the Video Watch comparison of performances of John White’s Drinking and Hooting Machine. Click Variation I, Variation II, Variation III, and Variation IV for previous entries. You may also like to check out the EMC Facebook page for June 6 and June 8 for comments on this series from the composer Paul Epstein. Another composer friend of the EMC, Oded Assaf, has commented on a previous entry in this blog, as well. Please feel free to get in touch!
Well, this small series of Video Watch on Drinking and Hooting Machine has brought up a number of issues about performing indeterminate music. One of the most interesting points made about the UCLA performance was Paul Epstein’s comment on our Facebook page: ‘Frankly, I don’t regard the piece as all that experimental; the instructions seem fairly precise and the concept elegant’. I agree that the piece is precise and elegant. The piece is experimental/systemic, or experimental/minimal, though. It comes from a time when minimalism was a type of experimental music (think In C, Pendulum Music, and so forth). Drinking and Hooting uses compositional indeterminacy or chance, like Cage’s Music of Changes. Unlike Music of Changes, however, Drinking and Hooting also employs performance indeterminacy. We can compare this to Cornelius Cardew’s graphic piece, Treatise, which was very carefully structured and organised syntactically, but played freely. The ‘good’ performances — the ones that I return to and think about — are the ones in which the performers exercise thought and care as to what to do with it. Whether they interpret it syntactically or not is not the issue — Cardew didn’t provide instructions — what matters is that the performers treat it sensitively and creatively.
Paul Epstein obviously takes care about what kinds of bottles he can use in an observant performance of Drinking and Hooting. And given his care and attention, I would like to step back (but not completely back) from my tentative approval —actually an understanding — of any performance using only the two sections of the piece that exist in Nyman’s Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. Certainly we can say that such a performance is an arrangement of Drinking and Hooting, or a paraphrase or exercise on it. A partial performance is less artistic, though, and probably more educative, analytical, and pedagogical. One of the first mature performances of a graphic piece in which I took part was also an ‘arrangement’: an ensemble reading of Earle Brown’s Four Systems (1954). Four Systems does not specify its instrumentation, but Brown limits it implicitly, first, by dedicating it to David Tudor on his birthday (which begs the question of whether a ‘good’ version could only be played by Tudor, perhaps only on his birthday); second, by explaining that the boundaries of the graphics indicate the limits of the keyboard. But our group at Barney Childs’ New Music Ensemble at the University of Redlands in 1974 — consisting of first-time members — learned so much about playing suggestive indeterminacy (which has limits of pitch and time) that I have used this piece as an introduction to the interpretation of indeterminate music ever since.
And since the last variation, I received an email from the director of the UCLA Contempo Flux group, the pianist Gloria Cheng, informing me about their performance. First, she took care to find the official version of Drinking and Hooting Machine, which meant getting the Scratch Anthology of Compositions through interlibrary loan from Australia. She knew of the student version in Brian Dennis’s Projects in Sound, which would have been shorter, but is also a viable version, but she took that extra step to ensure a good performance. Water bottles were supplied by the concert committee. The Contempo Flux performers rehearsed, then were placed throughout the hall to provide examples for the rest of the audience. One of the students explained the method to the audience, and the piece provided the end to the concert — a happy one, from the video evidence. Now, you can’t fault that preparation, which resulted in our favourite online version of Drinking and Hooting thus far.
But this is the final entry for this Video Watch piece at present. After looking at the variations in performances, we now reveal the theme: the score itself. John White has graciously allowed the EMC to make Drinking and Hooting, in a facsimile of the official Scratch Anthology version, available for download. You can access this piece on the EMC Freebies page. On this page you will also find pieces that Michael Parsons and Chris Hobbs have equally generously allowed us to offer. Just click here: http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk/emc/Freebies.html . We’d like to pass on the information and any good words you might have for these composers if you do download any pieces, so please get in touch. And whatever you do, keep drinking and hooting!
There’s a lot to tell about the With Four Hands conference, but for now, the best. Christopher Hobbs and Dave Smith played pieces by Michael Parsons, Howard Skempton, John White, Dave Smith and Hobbs. With help from the session chair, we were able to put our portable recording device in a good place (rather than bootlegging it as we had planned). The raw recording sounds good. Many historic moments made in this concert: some pieces not played for 30 years or more, the first public duo performance by Hobbs (of Hobbs-White) and Smith (of Smith-Lewis) for over 15 years. Chris is going to do some edits (mostly sounds of moving piano benches around, rather inaudible spoken programme notes, the bleeding-chunk excerpt of Remorseless Lamb, cut because of time, which Chris announced as ‘scrag end of Lamb’), and then we’ll see what we can do to make it available. Short teasers: John White’s pieces, from 1966 and 1974, prove that this music didn’t evolve from experimental/minimal to postminimal in the clear evolutionary way that the Americans’ music did. And Dave Smith’s systems piece, Swings, sounds much like it would sound if Bernard Hermann had gradually taken up gamelan with Meredith Monk. One wants to dance….