Author: Virginia

We continue the Video Watch comparison of performances of John White’s Drinking and Hooting Machine. Click Variation I, Variation II and Variation III 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!

Speaking of Facebook, a little while ago, the LA composer Sean McCann sent out a YouTube link for a performance of Drinking and Hooting Machine in the Powell Library Rotunda at UCLA. Marked ‘Hooting and Drinking Machine’  by the poster/filmmaker, it is a successful and rather beautiful performance. You can see it here:

There are several factors in this version that suggest that the performers may not stick strictly to the rules of the piece itself. First, the grouping is unclear: White specifically states that this piece is for four main groups of performers, with up to five sub-groups, making 4-20 distinct parts. White does not limit how many performers may play each part. Moreover, the actions requested in each part are different, but due to the instrumentation (bottles), the timbre is pretty close. And even if everyone played the same part, their choice of breath, ability to hold a note, and what constitutes a SIP, SWIG, or GULP differs. This is another reason that Drinking and Hooting Machine is so like Riley’s In C, which itself has only one part, and which performers move through the material at their own speed. But there’s another factor in this and other performances that is referred to by a person commenting on the YouTube upload. Bruno Ruviaro asks if they used the full score, as he had only been able to access the score excerpt in Nyman’s Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. (Well, Bruno, we have a fix for you there — stay tuned!).

So, can a performance using only half a score be a legitimate performance? This reminds us of Christopher Hobbs’s piece Pretty Tough Cookie, which is built up from one figure in an internal horn part in Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. That certainly is more Hobbs than Tchaikovsky in that one, and it’s designed that way. Half a Drinking and Hooting Machine actually destroys White’s random series and the system itself. But there is still an identity there that we can see as being Drinking and Hooting.

The UCLA performance is certainly White, and it’s a good one. Why? First, the acoustics in the Rotunda are gloriously resonant, sustaining the rather short breaths of the assembled masses (this is audience participation). And the simple fact that there are so many players solves the problem that appears early on in the Zeitkratzer video of silence appearing between hoots. The players in the UCLA video settle into longer hoots as the performance goes on, just like the Zeitkratzers do. But even though some performers hoot almost as fast as the Isle of Wight students in our first video (perhaps because of unfamiliarity with their instruments), the sound is always covered by other performers.

Was it universally liked? I think I heard the words, ‘Stop it, now!’ about 2 and a half minutes in. But what was absolutely lovely was the response at the end: joyous laughter, rather than the embarrassed laughter of the first video. They came, they drank, they hooted, and they enjoyed. What could be more fun? It’s almost like hanging out with White himself.

Right, that finishes this series on videos about John White’s Drinking and Hooting Machine, in its four variations. But next, we’re going to supply the theme itself. John White has agreed to allow the Experimental Music Catalogue to make Drinking and Hooting Machine — the official version published in the Scratch Anthology of Compositions — available on the web. This is coming soon, so keep watching, and of course, keep hooting!

We continue the Video Watch comparison of performances of John White’s Drinking and Hooting Machine. Click Variation I and Variation II for previous entries.

For its setting, this might be called the ‘university departmental meeting’ version of Drinking and Hooting. This version, by Zeitkratzer, as part of, or in preparation for the 2007 Donaufestival in Austria, shows a row of performers sitting as if they are in a seminar (or at high table). There are some unusual shots of one performer’s ear, but otherwise, this is a pretty focused and documentary style of Drinking and Hooting filming. At about 1’20” one sees a player taking two short sips, very fast. As to the quality of the performance, the players begin by allowing too many silences, as they do not hold their notes long enough. However, by a few minutes in, the players settle in very well and there are a number of rather pretty sonorities. The lesson here is that it is probably best to warm up on the long tones so that you can settle into the Drinking and Hooting world.

For those who are interested in Zeitkratzer, Julian Cowley’s Wire article from 2005, although pretty old, is a fascinating introduction. We wonder what happened to their proposed British experimental music concert mentioned in this article?

Having experienced the efforts of the Isle of Wight students, we might compare it with the recording of Drinking and Hooting Machine on Machine Music (Obscure 8, 1978), performed by Brian Eno, Christopher Hobbs, Gavin Bryars, John White, and Susan Dorey. Those familiar with Terry Riley’s piece In C (1964) will see how similar its structure and ending is to Drinking and Hooting Machine. D & H uses bottles rather than ‘real’ instruments. It’s also slower than In C, but it has the same, easily-followed process, albeit through changes in pitch, rather than In C‘s motives. White wrote, ‘The effect of this piece has been compared to that of a large aviary of owls all practising very slow descending scales’ (liner notes to Drinking and Hooting Machine, Obscure 8). You can hear a bit of the Obscure version here:

Although we can’t see the performers on the Obscure recording, we can hear several distinct differences. The primary difference is how slowly the Obscure recording progresses. White asked performers to blow their bottles for a ‘whole breath’. What does this mean? One must empty one’s lungs, of course. The IoW students huff and puff like a jug band, but their short breaths are, in some way, ‘whole’. If their breaths were not at least mostly whole, the students would become hyperventilated as their lungs filled with unused air. But on the Obscure recording we can hear the players leisurely breathing in, then equally leisurely blowing long tones over their bottles. This brings us from score-reading to performance practice. Here the ‘whole breath’ means an intake of breath that results in a long (or longish) note that uses up the air with the end of the note.

Another feature of the Obscure recording we can hear is the professional approach to the piece. The players have practiced their ‘instruments’ enough to hold a clear and steady tone. They have worked out what constitutes the varying intensities of drinking that White has written (these include ‘SIP’, ‘SWIG’, ‘GULP’, and to leave the level ‘AS IS’), which lowers the pitch on each successive groups of hoots. There is no giggling. Whatever is funny about the piece — for instance, seeing competent performers playing on old bottles — is is interpreted as funny by the audience members themselves. There is a concern with the pace and placement of the notes to balance the texture of the music throughout (White writes that notes should be played without significant gaps, other than the intake of breath and the required drinking to change the pitch of the bottle). Of course, the students are students, and the Obscure players are professional. But all performers should approach their performance in a professional manner, no matter whether they play an old wine bottle or a Stradivarius violin.

The Obscure performers therefore avoid the coordinated pulse that the students achieve in their ‘rhythmic’ version (the instructions clearly state the ‘There is no rhythmical pulse other than that produced by the individual length of breath of each performer’). Lastly, although we cannot see the Obscure performers, we are confident that they did not put bottles on their heads when they finished their drink — at least not until after the piece had ended.* Why? The instructions clearly state that once each player finishes the required number of hoots, he or she enters the coda. Here the performers hoot on their empty bottle until all have finished their bottles and, at a signal, they end together.

One only wonders how the Isle of Wight students found this piece, whether they decided it to be ‘infamous’, and whether they decided on their performance strategy alone. They certainly couldn’t have been taught this by their teacher. Could they? I’m not trying to be a killjoy. Rather the reverse: all the fun in this piece comes from playing it as a piece; arse around with it, and it’s just arsing around.

*What the players do with the bottles after the performance is up to them, of course.

Since people like the link to the disastrous performance of Christopher Hobbs’ Voicepiece a while ago, we thought we might begin our current investigation of performances of John White’s great minimalist masterwork, Drinking and Hooting Machine, with a performance by GCSE and A-Level students at Sandown High School on the Isle of Wight. Now, we don’t want to do down any real efforts on the part of the students, but for some reason, we suspect that this performance was not thought quite through. Like the Voicepiece performance, there is no sign that the students have actually read the instructions. If they had done, they wouldn’t have been able to describe Drinking and Hooting as ‘infamous’. So, lesson 1, folks: RTFI [the last letter is ‘instructions’, equivalent to ‘manual’ in computer terminology].More versions to come, but in the meantime, enjoy, and let us know your thoughts!

We’ve been spoiling you with good video. How about something quite different? Here’s how not to perform an indeterminate verbal piece, supposedly Chris Hobbs’s 1967 classic Voicepiece, but coming out as something much noisier. We bring this to you as a cautionary tale: Kids! Don’t drink and perform experimental music! Stay away from YouTube if you do!

Compare this with the score (click thumbnail to read):

What is very odd indeed is the use of the conducted beat. But we like the hats and the Hirst-dotty shower curtain.

Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise (1963-67), is quite probably the biggest and most beautiful piece using graphic notation ever written. And because Cardew left Treatise to be interpreted freely —there are no instructions — performances range from the strictly dutiful (reading left to right, up for high, down for low, agreed responses to certain symbols such as numbers or circles) to the eccentric.

Over the years students in various experimental and notation classes I have taught have come up with some really fine Treatise interpretations. One version for which I hold fondness and which exists on the web is by a former notation student, Ben Kennedy, who realised page 92 of Treatise as an assignment. Now I can’t remember the exact criteria he used (if you read this, Ben, do tell us!), but his realisation has the practicality and the ingenious social approach to indeterminacy that occurred in the best work of the Scratch Orchestra. As I remember it, Ben used friends and flatmates who were not music students, but were enthusiastic electric guitar players. He explained the piece briefly, but (I think) gave no strict instructions for the interpretation of the page (other than to give them a time frame to do it). And here’s the kicker: he contacted and recorded each of the four guitarists separately, then combined them for the ‘performance’ (actually, more like record production or minimalist mixing), so that what comes out in total could not have been predicted by each player. It’s a kind of obscure heterophony, I suppose, given their responses to the same stimulus. But since the guitarists use a soundworld typical of their kind, whilst avoiding cliché, it’s just a happy version of Treatise.

Here it is (there are a couple of electronic noises at the opening, and then it starts):

Here are some more videos that might tickle your fancy, from the energetic folks at FZML Leipzig. Over the last several days, Leipzig has been celebrating Cage’s 100th birthday (http://www.cage100.com/english/cage100/information/) with their Water Music Project (http://www.cage100.com/english/projects/water-music-project/), in which loads of pianists in a whole load of cities (Addis Ababa, Kiev, Brno, Birmingham (England,not Alabama), Thessaloniki, Bologna, and other places) perform Cage’s Water Music (1952), his first really theatrical piece, which are then streamed to their site and held there and on their YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/FZMLLeipzig?feature=watch).

The performers have taken various approaches to the strictures of the piece, but there are points of interest in all of them. Of special interest to friends of the EMC is EMC’s founder, Chris Hobbs, performing Water Music with his normal, clinical accuracy as to the instructions in the score. Chris first played this piece in the mid-1960s, so he knows it pretty well by now. The Birmingham performance was held at the Ikon Gallery (http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/), a wonderful space with vaulted ceilings in the centre of Birmingham, in association with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (http://bcmg.org.uk/). So this was really neat to see in person, but it has now been recorded to go into the Leipzig mix. Here it is:

Water Music is not all serious. The range of radio sounds used in response to Cage’s specified frequencies, for instance, is fascinating. We got everything from the evening’s news to the A Team theme in the various versions. The range of toy instruments were cool: the toy trumpet at the end of the Ethiopian performance, by the legendary Girma Yifrashewa was not traditional, but deeply cool:

and Hobbs’ submersion of his duck call in water came out exactly the way we’d expect it to sound had someone drowned Donald Duck. The Lyon performance is best viewed without introduction:

The Leipzig performance, at the Book Fair, literally sets out its stall:

In Kiev, the set-up looks like a conference presentation, but it has snazzy music:

In Bosnia-Herzogovina, the performance is still and serious, with AOR rock:

Finally, both Brno and Thessaloniki prefaced their submissions with travelogue advertorials for their cities, like one gets before contestants perform on the Eurovision Song Contest. Perhaps you could have a home Water Music party, in which you judge your favourite entry, just like Eurovision.* If so, do let us know about it!

At the moment, the Birmingham performance is almost inaudible on YouTube and is not playable on the Leipzig site, but this should be fixed soon. We’re looking forward to collecting the whole set!

*For our non-European friends, that’s the meaning of this post’s title. The judging for this contest always was broadcast through calls to the host city from the participating countries — ‘Hello, London, here are the results of the Belgian jury…’.