Sunday night there will be a rather wonderful event at Cafe Oto. Various people — original Scratch Orchestra members, new folk, younger folk — have been working on that most fascinating genre of Scratch Orchestra music-making, the Improvisation Rite, using the early Scratch Orchestra document, Nature Study Notes. Nature Study Notes is a collection of Improvisation Rites, edited by Cornelius Cardew, that existed right at the start of the Scratch Orchestra. Improvisation Rites are not compositions, at least not according to the Draft Composition of the Scratch Orchestra. Instead, they are meant to supply conditions for improvisation: a setting, idea, installation, and so on. In fact, many of the 152 Nature Study Notes Rites are actually compositions (they tell you what to play), but the Scratch Orchestra genres have always been somewhat fluid. For more on Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra, there’s a rather good article on Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra in the unlikely setting of the Red Bull Music Academy website: http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/magazine/cornelius-cardew-feature.
Stefan Szczelkun launched this concert of Scratch Orchestra improvisation along with a host of others, and from the early notes on rehearsals, it looks amazing. The information on the concert at Cafe Oto exists on their site: https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/nature-study-notes/ . It’s going to be a lovely programme, and the EMC (Chris Hobbs, Virginia Anderson) are going to be in the audience, cheering them on. For those on Facebook, the event notification is here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1409389246024588/?ref_dashboard_filter=upcoming . And Carole Fyner will be interviewing performers on her Resonance Radio (London and the Internet) show, Sound Out, on Friday, 20 February, at 2 pm.
And should you want to follow along, the EMC has put up a download of the original EMC edition of Nature Study Notes on our Freebies page: http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk/emc/Freebies.html . Your school field trip notebook was never this much fun!
Today, some of us at the EMC feel a bit Partched, given that Harry Partch has won a Grammy. So many people have been talking about Partch that we followed one of the YouTube links (thanks to our friend, the John Cage expert, David Patterson) to a 1958 film about Partch in which he shows off his instruments. This film can be found on a DVD from Innova Recordings, which includes four rare films and performances (see here: http://www.innova.mu/albums/harry-partch/enclosure-viii ). The DVD also includes a 1968 film about Partch that was broadcast on KPBS San Diego (a film that appeared briefly on YouTube but was removed), and a 1981 performance of Barstow at San Diego State University by Danlee Mitchell and the SDSU Partch Ensemble.* But for the moment, luxuriate in the demonstrations of Partch’s instrumentation. Microtonal sounds so juicy you could swim in them….
*I was a graduate teaching assistant at SDSU in 1980–81 and got a glimpse of early rehearsals for that performance. As a TA, it was my responsibility to keep undergrads off the cloud chamber bowls, which were stored at the back of the recital hall.
The whole Southern Californian ‘pretty music’, minimalism and postminimal scene that came up from the late 1960s and after is very complementary to the British experimental scene. Some of the connections are there (Harold Budd’s work with Brian Eno on Obscure Recordings, for instance); some are just really happy parallels. This week, two items about Daniel Lentz came into my personal Facebook account. Lentz is one of the twin pillars of the Los Angeles ‘pretty music’ scene (along with Harold Budd). His music is sometimes almost liturgically ritual, often lush and sensual, intimate, occasionally funny, and, yes, often very, very pretty. Daniel Lentz’s music is always well worth checking out (as is his artwork). (For those who don’t know his work, here’s his website: ).
But back to last week’s Lentz. The first is a link to YouTube. It’s a mid-1980s American children’s TV show called Reading Rainbow, hosted by LeVar Burton, in which ‘Is It Love’, a piece from Lentz’s album The Leopard Altar is set to an animation. It’s a delight of bright digital sound. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzQrYTWdNCA&feature=youtu.be . It’s worth chasing up the whole track, which lasts about nine gorgeous minutes.
The second Lentz item is a piece from 1977, and was sent to us by Janyce Collins, performer, teacher, and pilot. This piece is called Flying Alleluia for 29 Hang Gliders, a piece in which each hang-glider pilot either sings a note, or installs a wind-operated Aeolian reed on their machine. The 29 pitches are played as each pilot launches in score order, so that ‘massed listeners’ below the flight path will hear the Alleluia plainsong. We do hope that someone performs this again, and that it will be a good day when we’re there to hear it.
One of our favourite British experimental groups was the Portsmouth Sinfonia, aka ‘the world’s worst orchestra’. This is a short documentary about their performance at the Royal Albert Hall on 28 May 1974, with Sally Binding, pianist on Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, and the Portsmouth Sinfonia Choir, singing The ‘Hallelujah’ Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. It’s in three parts on YouTube, to be found by clicking the links below. Thanks to the musicologist and theorist Kevin Holm-Hudson for making us aware of this historic film.
For those of you who follow Kyle Gann’s PostClassic blog, you will have found a real treat today in his entry, ‘Justifying the Strange Artist’, in which Gann looks at the work of Henry Cecil Sturt’s ‘Art and Personality’ essay. Charles Ives wrote his famous Essays before a Sonata, partly in response to Sturt’s essay. Here Gann reproduces a long passage from his upcoming book, giving us a good idea of what Sturt thought and why Ives wrote his response. Gann begins by stating how much the Essays influenced him as a teen, and how the reception of Ives’ writings have been increasingly seen as confused: ‘a jumble of pseudo-intellectual blovations’. There seems to be a trend toward a revision of Ives reception in recent years, with writers seeing him as homophobic and sexist, and returning to the early view of Ives as a kind of ‘outsider’ amateur, whose innovations come mainly from his inability to write music competently. Having spent a lot of time reading Ives (and Cage) from the age of thirteen and having my mind well and truly ‘blown’ by the ideas of these composers, I find the modern response to be curious. I can only imagine that the lack of understanding of the Essays and the condemnation of his ideas by modern writers to be a problem with their understanding of music and of history. Gann’s blog post is here: http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2015/01/justifying-the-strange-artist.html . It’s well worth close reading.
One of our regular go-to composers is the founder of Irritable Hedgehog Recordings, David D. McIntire. McIntire works on worldwide minimalism and postminimalism, totalism, and all the postmodern ‘isms’ anyone could want, from his base in Missouri. The official site of Irritable Hedgehog has music by a number of composers (pianism by R. Andrew Lee, design by Scott Unrein) is worth visiting: http://irritablehedgehog.com/Recordings.html . However, today we were perusing McIntire’s Soundcloud page, which includes a bunch of his Hedgehog tracks, plus E.I.O, a free improvisation group which McIntire co-founded. Well worth a little listen: https://soundcloud.com/irritable-hedgehog-music .
The Tortoise and His Raincoat: Music for a Very Long Walk is an event created by Nat Evans, who is hiking the 2600 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, creating environmental recordings and collaborating with composers along the way. Scott Unrein, a Portland-based composer who is associated with the Missouri-based minimalist recording company Irritable Hedgehog, has written episode 6: Nacre. You can hear it (if you listen carefully — it starts very softly!) here: https://soundcloud.com/natevans-1/the-tortoise-6-scott-unrein-oregon-nacre
Edited for errors. Really, we shouldn’t let admin try to write copy! (Virginia)
Those fans of minimalism and ambient music might like this rare visit by Jon Hassell and his trio to Los Angeles’ KCRW programme, Morning Becomes Eclectic. The trio includes movie music guy John Von Seggern on bass and electronics and Cold Blue artist Rick Cox, whose guitar, electronics and sax work has been delighting postminimalist friends for decades. Interesting, jazzy stuff. We’re listening to it now….
Cage fanciers will be thrilled with this new series on James Pritchett’s blog. Pritchett is one of the great writers on Cage: author of The Music of John Cage, and of the Grove Dictionary entry on him. Pritchett has written a lot on Feldman and others on this blog. Well worth checking out. See http://rosewhitemusic.com/piano/2014/05/31/cage-spirituality-still-point/
On Friday, as part of the Frontiers Festival of New Music, Simon Peacock, his Surge Orchestra, plus students of Birmingham Conservatoire (as the Thallein Ensemble) played Terry Riley’s In C (1964). This performance was held in the absolutely gorgeous setting of the rotunda of the new Library of Birmingham. The place is worth visiting just for the view: blue-lit escalators and a high-level people mover, black metal framework. Add to that a whole lot of books and exhibits and a pretty good cappuccino at the in-house café, and it’s a lovely place to visit. But we were here for Terry Riley.
Chris Hobbs, who had directed the first British performance of In C in London in 1970, introduced this performance. His introduction (the first part of which was cut off) appears here:
Hobbs had been advertised as performing with the group and had rehearsed with them once rather late in the schedule. But he decided that they had already fixed their performance and that it would be better for him to let them perform it themselves. The ensemble of students was especially excellent and enthusiastic. They would have played a classic version of In C very well indeed. Such a version would have consisted of the score: 53 little motives that are repeated ad libitum by each player, who moves through the material at her/his own pace. The resulting counterpoint of voices has made In C stand out as the first ever piece using repetitive process minimalism. Almost all performances are kept together by a pulse of repeated high Cs in octaves throughout the piece (usually on piano or mallet instrument). Once all performers reach the final repeated motive, they can end on a signal by the conductor.
I had come expecting the classic version, given that it was an anniversary event. At the very most, I had expected the group to follow the main structure and motif to motif procedure, adding occasional improvised melodic ornaments. Riley himself has added such material. However, the improvisation — or what might have been directed or newly composed material — was far more extreme than I had heard before. The group, rather bravely, rejected the C pulse, choosing to keep time themselves. Here they are, after an opening improvisatory passage, including a spoken monologue by Peacock, beginning the first real Riley portion of the performance:
The lack of a pulse made the tempo in the Riley music slow down somewhat, but not as much as some previous performances. But what was unusual was the decision by the director, Peacock, to intersperse sections of the Riley with other passages, most of which did not have the driving pulse of In C. These were described as improvisation. Peacock chose to speak some text through a microphone, both at the beginning, before Riley’s first notes, and in an improvised passage just before the final chunk of Riley’s music. This text, which was blurred and unintelligible, could have been Riley’s own prose, but I suspect was Peacock’s own. This clip has the last of Peacock’s narration (which seems to have had some sea imagery, though I am not sure) and the improvised music:
Now, this is a report of what happened, not a review, so I’ll only share a bit more of what I observed. I was not at the rehearsals, so the following is just an educated guess. I don’t think what they played was free improvisation and extemporisation of the original piece. Usually in free improvisation, there are ‘fuzzy edges’ in which a performer initiates a new texture, melody, or character to be taken up by the rest. But for me, this was too directly sectional: of Peacock, Riley, Peacock, Riley, etc. Some of the Peacock band sections had a little Riley in it. Most, like the excerpt above, had little of the incessant pulse of the original piece. The audience, some of whom had come specifically to hear In C, some of whom were library visitors who happened across it, seemed to have a different physical reaction to the Riley sections than the Peacock ones. Of course, this was due to the rock-like propulsion of Riley, compared to the more amorphous Peacock sections.
Chris Hobbs has said nothing more about this performance than I’ve indicated above, so I have only my experience as a listener to go on. And that leads me to a question. Of course, there’s nothing wrong in revising or paraphrasing a piece, but when a composer does so, he or she usually calls it ‘Paraphrase on’ or ‘Meditation on’ the original composer’s piece by the paraphrasing composer. This concert was advertised as Terry Riley’s In C and was mounted as a fiftieth anniversary of Riley’s creation. If this piece is so important as to be memorialised with a performance at a large festival of American and British music, then why change it?
