John White’s birthday event — preliminary pictures

Here are some pictures from John White’s birthday bash at Charlie Wright’s International Bar and Jazz Emporium. These are just tasters of some really cool happenings at the show:

1) John White introducing the events to come:

White compere

2) John Tilbury announcing his set of two sonatas by John White, whilst wearing the most amazing sequinned waistcoat:

Tilbury cocktail style

3) Michael Parsons playing a piece about what Erik Satie would sound like if he had taken lessons with Arnold Schoenberg instead of Vincent d’Indy.

Parsons playing

 

4) Chris Hobbs, introducing his two pieces:

hobbs intro

 

5) Gavin Bryars introducing his piece:

gavin intro

 

That’s just a taster. We shall come back with more on this event. It was a wonderful time. Good music, great fun.

The history of British experimental music in general history: Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music

Just the other day, there was a flurry of posts on the AMS-list email list regarding Richard Taruskin’s multi-volume Oxford History of Western Music (OUP). Most of the contributors were interested in subjects that Taruskin omitted, such as Latin American composers. I am, on the contrary, unhappy with what Taruskin has put in. There are several features that we should demand in any scholarly writing, whether they be music appreciation texts, student histories or professional monographs. I will test these features through what Taruskin writes about post-war music, especially Downtown experimentalism and British experimentalism, because I know that area better than any other.

The first feature of scholarly writing is that it should be factually accurate, at least as far as its central concepts. In the section called ‘Internalized Conflicts’, Taruskin begins with a factual sentence about Cardew’s education and his work with Stockhausen. He continues, ‘In 1967 he was appointed to the faculty of the Royal Academy, but by 1969, under the influence of the Cultural Revolution instigated in China by Mao Tse-tung and his Red Guards, Cardew renounced his advanced musical techniques as “bourgeois deviationism”.’ This sentence is absolutely false: Cardew only began study of Mao in the last part of 1971. The political aesthetic of Maoist arts demands that the artwork deliver a clear message to the working classes, using the music that they understand and like. The Scratch Orchestra, which Taruskin examines in this section, uses a philosophy that is an offshoot of Cagean indeterminacy. Their work included improvisation, alternative notations, and a kind of extreme egalitarianism allowing intelligent non-musicians (and non-reading musicians) parity with those musicians trained in Western classical music. The Scratch Orchestra affected a kind of hippie-ish communality and anarchy — something quite different from the regimentation of Maoism. Most of the important ‘experimental’ music of the Scratch Orchestra, and all of The Great Learning, appeared before the summer of 1971, when the Scratch, divided by schisms, held Discontent Meetings. From these meetings here emerged a strong Maoist contingent who became increasingly important to the musical content and performance activity of the Scratch Orchestra in its political phase.

The myth of a Maoist Scratch Orchestra has been perpetuated by several critics who were hostile to Cardew and Cagean indeterminacy. They dismissed Cardew and the Orchestra, essentially, with the thought that, ‘Oh, they played rubbish and they were political extremists’. This view played well in the conservative musical and political atmosphere of British newspapers and music magazines. The clearest expression of this myth appears in entries on Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra in Norman Lebrecht’s Companion to Twentieth-Century Music (1992), which are entirely false. Taruskin does not credit Lebrecht, but he follows Lebrecht in claiming that the Scratch Orchestra broke up in 1971, another error. Instead, they moved over the next year or so to a fully political organisation performing more tonal, accessible music and turning to agit-prop theatre, political education and other areas of focus. The Scratch Orchestra stopped being a full force by 1973; they disappeared in 1974. Taruskin is writing about a group at the wrong time using the wrong musical examples.

Another feature of scholarly writing is that the writer should have explored extant research in the subject area and at least be aware of its central writings. Taruskin elsewhere cites Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, but here he does not use it.  Taruskin instead focuses on Scratch Music, claiming erroneously, ‘For outsiders, further definition had to await the publication of Scratch Music (1972), an anthology edited by Cardew, containing examples by himself and fifteen other members of the Orchestra’. There are many other sources for information on Cardew’s work and that of the Scratch Orchestra that are available in sources such as The Musical Times. Scratch Music is a delightful collection of notes, compositions, found and newly-created art, and various other submissions by Scratch Orchestra members, arranged on the pages according to random means. It ends with ‘1001 Activities’, a list of short directions and statements that are reminiscent of Fluxus Action Scores. Scratch Music presents a rationale for the contents and a brief explanation of the Scratch Orchestra; it also contains a short article by member Michael Chant questioning whether ‘Scratch Music’ was ever a coherent Scratch Orchestra genre, and a (rather wistful) statement by Cardew that because of the move to a more politically aware aesthetic, there never be any more Scratch Music.

Taruskin nearly ignores the most useful section of Scratch Music, a reproduction of the Draft Constitution, a document which appeared in the announcement for the inaugural meeting in The Musical Times in 1969. The Draft Constitution lays out the ‘genres’ of Scratch Orchestra musical activity, including compositions, Improvisation Rites, Research Projects, Popular Classics, and a category called Scratch Music. Taruskin only looks at the category ‘Scratch Music’, treating it as if it were the entire stylistic output of the Scratch Orchestra. Along the same lines, one might describe Beethoven’s style using a collection of his piano miniatures. But there are many other elements to the output by members of the Orchestra. Scratch Orchestra compositions could be complex and multi-layered, using common-practice notation as well as text (‘verbal’)  and graphic notation. Improvisation Rites and Scratch Music, on the other hand, could be short compositions, but they also could be incomplete in some way, representing notes for accompaniments (Scratch Music) or situations for improvisation (the Rites). Popular Classics were just that — any piece known well to part of the membership — and Research Projects were longer, sometimes collaborative, projects in which the research into phenomena (including illogical conclusions) fed into some kind of performance. Finally, given that Taruskin appears to believe that Cardew is the founder, leader, and main figure of the Scratch Orchestra, it is astounding that he does not deal with Cardew’s own work, particularly Treatise (his graphic score, written before the founding of the Orchestra) and The Great Learning (1968–71), largely written for and dedicated to the Scratch Orchestra.

This leads us to two more features of scholarly writing: the writer should be proficient in the theory of (or at least reading of) the music in question and she/he should be aware of how the music appears in historical context. Taruskin describes some of the pieces in Scratch Music and the 1001 Activities without knowing how they were used, not how they could be performed today. Of the former, he can only write, ‘Very few Scratch pieces employed musical notation as normally defined. Many consisted of drawings that, without oral explanation, could not readily be translated into the sort of continuous action the constitution specified. Some, however, consisted of verbal prescriptions that occasionally suggested vivid musical (or at least sonic) results’. He lists some of these without any attempt to talk about the outcome in performance, the use of materials, or anything else that would explain the events in some artistically meaningful way. The only explanation he gives is a translation for his American readers, that a ‘Gramophone’, an instrument that appears in one event, is ‘a phonograph or record-player’. As to the 1001 Activities, Taruskin writes, ‘Some, perhaps most, are entirely “conceptual” in the sense that they can be more or less vaguely imagined but not literally realized’. He does not know that the Activities were a kind of intellectual game, a collection of events that were first mentioned on the Scratch Orchestra’s tour of Cornwall and Anglesey. They appeared in the Scratch Orchestra concert in 1970, based on another genre, the Research Project, called ‘Pilgrimage from Scattered Points on the Surface of the Body to the Heart, the Brain, the Stomach and the Inner Ear’, albeit as a protest by an anarchistic sub-group of the Orchestra called the Slippery Merchants. This group timed what was then the ‘101 Activities’ throughout the main performance, playing all Activities, whether musical, physical, or conceptual.

Taruskin could have understood these activities as artistic event had he researched Fluxus Action Scores, which are quite similar, for his section on Fluxus. Instead, Taruskin quotes George Brecht’s ‘Three Telephone Events’ from Water Yam without an indication of how they are performed. He also describes an event that he attended, but he didn’t like. The image of Fluxus that Taruskin portrays is curiously absent of women, except for Charlotte Moorman (because she played topless), despite the fact that Alison Knowles, a Fluxus member, co-edited the book Notations with John Cage. Taruskin uses this book for a number of examples, but he leaves her name off the credit.

Another feature that I would ask of scholarship at all levels is that musical examples should be explained adequately in the text. They should not be only presented and named. Any pieces that are not illustrated should be described as they appear in the score. Taruskin does not explain how the Scratch Music pieces work, nor does he really describe other examples in this volume. In the Cardew section, a page from 1001 Activites is displayed, but here, too, is another error in scholarly work. This example is credited solely to Cardew, as if he wrote all 1001 events. The error could be Taruskin’s; it could be a careless sub-editor. It is, however, an error that is glaring enough that it should have been corrected. He mentions that Cage’s ‘Lecture on Nothing’ is meant for performance as well as a lecture, but he does not go further. Lacking a score example, Taruskin makes the same error in describing 4’33” as Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Nicholas Cook, and Lydia Goehr. These writers do not refer to any of the three versions of the score, nor their variants, so what they describe is not Cage’s piece, but rather David Tudor’s performance. I have written elsewhere on the other writers’ errors (‘The Beginning of Happiness: Approaching Scores in Text and Graphic Notation’, in Sound and Score (2013)). Taruskin points out that he is describing a performance, but he does not explain how, or whether, the score would offer anything more.

Taruskin concludes by pointing out that Cardew moved to ‘writing mass songs to incite popular activism’, illustrating this with some extracts from Cardew’s political book Stockhausen Serves Imperialism in which he criticizes Cage and Stockhausen. He assesses the Scratch Orchestra in this way: ‘The Scratch Orchestra came up against the perennial dilemma of maximalism: they reached the limit. As one antagonist scoffed, “How can you make a revolution when the revolution before last has already said that anything goes?”’ Putting aside for a minute Taruskin’s rather inappropriate and vague use of the term ‘maximalism’, we find that this quotation is from an interview by Barney Childs with Charles Wuorinen in 1962, in answer to Childs’ question, ‘Is there, then, really an “avant-garde”?’. Wuorinen’s objection is something that Taruskin has used elsewhere in his criticism: a kind of all-purpose dismissal of modern music. Taruskin is thus part of a trend in criticism that I would call ‘grumpy’ history, in which an individual, movement or era is revealed to be not as good as everyone might think. For Taruskin, Cage was provoking the bourgeoisie with his pieces, so he may have liked or at least expected the sabotage of Atlas Eclipticalis in New York. Taruskin then attempts to offer a sympathetic rationale for these actions. One leaves the section on Fluxus thinking that it was run by art-house bores and later that Cardew was a swivel-eyed Maoist agitator writing anarchistic pieces with his cadre. He need go no further because the material does not deserve it. Because he writes this grumpy, incomplete history, Taruskin considers himself to be an expert on Cage. And perhaps some people actually believe him to be one.

Since this is a blog entry and not a formal review I will not go further. To go further would tire me out; it’s too much like marking a student essay, and not a very good one.  But it makes me wonder, if the sections I know well cannot satisfy basic criteria for useful scholarship, what happens in the sections on music I don’t know well? Suffice it to say, I find no use for the Oxford History of Western Music.

Pictures of the Scratch Orchestra

Being the Experimental Music Catalogue, one of our favourite topics is that of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental ensemble founded by Cornelius Cardew, Michael Parsons, and Howard Skempton. After all, the founder of the EMC, Chris Hobbs, was the designer of their first concert, at Hampstead Town Hall, in November 1969. Over recent years, more pictures of the Scratch Orchestra have emerged, showing them realising Improvisation Rites, Scratch Compositions, and Scratch Music of all sorts. But Frank Abbott, a member of the SO in 1972, has just uploaded a set of pictures of the Scratch Orchestra at play.

Here they are on a trip to the Munich Olympics, having fun in and around a swimming pool. http://www.flickr.com/photos/91353040@N02/sets/72157637042974695/

Frank Abbott was asking for confirmation of names and the exact trip. These are the names, as best we can find out (thanks to Dave Smith for identification. There are tales to tell about this trip and the people in it, but first we’d like to pin down these people, so if you know them, do let us, or Frank, know.

UPDATE: Bryn Harris has kindly added to our knowledge on these pictures: ‘Just to advise that the location was the swimming pool adjacent to our camp site at Solbad Hall, Tirol, to which we moved straight after Munich in summer 1972’. It certainly looks like you all were having fun, Bryn!

Picture 1: + Walter Cardew?

Picture 2: +Horace Cardew?

Picture 3: Tim Mitchell’s child?

Picture 4: same?

Picture 5: Tim Mitchell’s wife or a friend of John Tilbury

Picture 6: John Tilbury

Picture 7: Barbara Pearce

Picture 8: Chris May

Picture 9: John Bangs

Picture 10: Kevin Richards

Picture 11: Stella Cardew

Picture 12: Pete O’Sullivan

Picture 13: Catherine Williams

Picture 14: Cornelius Cardew

Picture 15: John Bangs

Picture 16: Unknown

Picture 17: Bryn Harris

Picture 18: Carole Finer

Picture 19: Dave Smith

Picture 20: Jenny Robbins

Picture 21: Dave Russell

Picture 22: Ian Ward

Picture 23: Wahid?

Picture 24: Hugh Shrapnel

Picture 25: Lisa Major

Picture 26: Penny Jordan

Picture 29: Alec Hill

Alec Hill (13 May 1941–October 2013)

Just last night those of us at the Experimental Music Catalogue heard some bad news. Alec Hill, a member of both the Scratch Orchestra and the Promenade Theatre Orchestra, has died. Hill attended John White’s weekly Sunday meetings at the Arts Lab, London, from 1969. These meetings resulted in the formation of the Promenade Theatre Orchestra. The PTO, a quartet including White, Hill, Christopher Hobbs and Hugh Shrapnel, created and performed some of the earliest British minimalism on toy pianos, reed organs, and their own secondary instruments: White on trombone and tuba, Hobbs, on bassoon, Shrapnel on oboe, and Hill on clarinet. The group reflected White’s interest in musical systems; it also reflected his wit and humour. The name, ‘Promenade Theatre Orchestra’, has a kind of Edwardian end-of-pier aura; its acronym, PTO, also stands for ‘please turn over’, a kind of schoolroom shorthand.

This was a time when most ‘great’ modern music aspired to serious consideration of great ideas, large displays of virtuosity, and a scientific rigour, and most composers wrote for large groups of professional ensembles in great halls, with the benefit of arts funding. On the other hand, the PTO wrote music in the early systems process style called Machines, but they played it as a part of their life, in weekly meetings before pub sessions. They performed on toy instruments with a patent air of good cheer and serene grace rather than in studied contemplation of serious matters. Hill, Hobbs, White, and Shrapnel were also members of the Scratch Orchestra, an ensemble, co-founded by Cornelius Cardew, which had a similar taste for anti-highbrow instruments, musical content, and performance style. However, the Scratch Orchestra was mainly a non-reading, improvisatory experimental anarchic collective; the PTO was a minimalist supergroup who played their toy pianos and reed organs literally to destruction. You can find out more about the PTO on the Experimental Music Catalogue website, which discusses their landmark concert at the Orangery, Holland Park, London in 1972: http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk/emc/About_the_PTO.html .

If someone had marketed the PTO as a boy band, Alec Hill would have been ‘the smart one’.* He had a PhD in nuclear physics and worked as a scientist. The PTO was a composer-performer ensemble; Hill contributed to the PTO repertoire less frequently than Hobbs and White, but those few pieces are central to an understanding of PTO music. Hill employed his interest in campanology to create compositions with rigorous permutational systems, especially in two pieces for toy pianos, Small Change Machine and Large Change Machine (the ‘change’ in the titles is a pun on English ‘change’ ringing).

The PTO broke up on the Scratch Orchestra/PTO tour of Norway in 1973, as Hill and Hugh Shrapnel became interested in music with a greater political content. Although Hill did not work with the People’s Liberation Music and Progressive Cultural Association projects and protests for as long as Shrapnel, he can be heard playing bass clarinet on two tracks of Consciously, a compilation album of PLM and other groups associated with Cornelius Cardew’s late political concerns. You can find this album on the Musicnow website, here: http://www.musicnow.co.uk/plm/. Hill’s interest in grassroots musical activity, which had begun with his work in the Scratch Orchestra and his compositional interest in change ringing, continued. He founded the Cotswold Clarinet Choir in 1996, which has met weekly since then in Gloucester (http://cotswoldclarinetchoir.webs.com/ and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CotswoldClarinetChoir). He was also involved in Chinese traditional music and Chinese culture in his retirement. He married in 2009 and is survived by his wife and children.

The last appearance by all four members of the PTO occurred at the Conway Hall in 2001 on the twentieth anniversary of Cardew’s death. They played Cardew’s Octet ’61 for Jasper Johns, an indeterminate piece best known for having an event marked ‘out, away; something different’. The members of the PTO interpreted this event by standing, raising glasses of red wine, and declaiming, ‘To Cornelius!’ There had always been a slight hope that we’d see all members of the PTO together, this time playing the music they had created in the short, heady years from 1969–1973, but sadly, Hill’s death means that we’ll never see this line-up again.

I’m hoping that this blog post will begin a conversation. I probably chatted with Alec more about bass clarinets than the PTO, as he seemed to be much more involved in this kind of amateur music than any of the more ‘modern’ music that he did so well in his youth. Thus it would be useful to hear from others about Alec, the PTO and Scratch and any other memories that you may have. Just respond on this blog with comments, or on the Experimental Music Catalogue Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/emcsystems). I thought you might like listening to this short clip of the PTO playing Hill’s Large Change Machine at the Orangery in 1972, perhaps with that glass of red wine in hand.

Virginia Anderson

*White would have been ‘the funny, creative one’, Hobbs ‘the cute one’, and Shrapnel ‘the nice, sweet one’. That said, boy-band marketing is too limited as a characterisation of the group. All members of the PTO were smart, funny, creative, cute, nice, and sweet.

TARDIS Time

As the 4th International Conference of the Society for Musical Minimalism begins in Long Beach, those of us who can’t attend should have something to keep us entertained as well. Here’s a programme that the minimalist/systems composer Paul Epstein sent us a while back of a concert he played at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959. The pieces are landmark ones, the players include some of the ‘megastars’ of early minimalism (click on the picture to see a bigger version). Thanks, Paul, for this, as always. This concert now appears among the EMC’s list of historical events we’re going to visit once time travel is worked out properly. We’re assuming the role of AN Other on Imaginary Landscapes No. 4 will be ours when it does. Do you have any time travel favourites? Let us know!

Noon Concert-Cage

Pictures from 1967

Here are some more items from the EMC archives. The two pictures are from a meeting of the Northwood New Music Society in 1967. The first picture shows Alan Cutts, viola, and Christopher Hobbs, piano. The second shows Hobbs (then 16) working on preparations inside the piano. What were Hobbs and Cutts playing? Was the duo picture of a different piece than the preparations picture? We’re not sure.

northwood new music507 hobbs preparations 1967508

From the past: a flyer from 1976

Here is a (rather battered) flyer advertising a series from 1976 sponsored by Music Now (an organisation created by Victor Shonfield to promote experimental music and jazz in Britain). The first two concerts advertised here present six British systems composers in the duo line-ups they had at the time. Christopher Hobbs and John White were more commonly known at this time as the Hobbs-White Duo. Arguably, John White was the originator of British systems techniques; at this point Hobbs and White had abandoned ‘strict’ systems for percussion (as the material says here — click to see it better), and were playing wind instruments and piano pieces of an increasingly through-composed, referential style. Hobbs and White have played together since, but this was one of the last concerts in an unbroken partnership that had been going since the late 1960s with the Promenade Theatre Orchestra. Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton have played together and toured as a duo since this concert. Parsons was, like Hobbs, White, and Gavin Bryars, closely associated with the Systems group of British artists. John Lewis and Dave Smith played American minimalism as well as their own work. Parsons wrote about these composers and this concert series in his article, ‘Systems in Art and Music’, The Musical Times, 117/1604 (1976), 815–818.

The other concert on this flyer advertises a concert promoted by the Progressive Cultural Association, featuring the Peoples’ Liberation Music group. Founded by John Tilbury, Laurie Baker and John Marciano, this folk-rock group is best known for the participation of Cornelius Cardew.

musicnow promolittle

Happy 101st birthday, John Cage!

Here’s a delightful video for the event, if you haven’t seen it. It’s from Mondays with Merce, part of the materials produced for the centenary. This (Episode 15) is a cracker, with contributions from Christian Wolff and Gordon Mumma, Cage performing 4’33”, and some amazing insights into dancing to electronic music from Merce Cunningham (it’s in the nerve, not the muscle, apparently). Beautiful and fun.

The Prepared Mind, with John Cage and David Tudor: http://www.mercecunningham.org/film-media/mondays-with-merce/episode-15-the-prepared-mind-john-cage-and-david-tudor/

On debate

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

 

Radio 3 BBC Prom 50

For those of you who can get it, there are five more days of Prom 50: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b038l7nr

The Radio 3 information is here:

Duration:

1 hour, 30 minutes

First broadcast:
Monday 19 August 2013

BBC SSO and Ilan Volkov live at the BBC Proms with Gerald Barry, Feldman’s Coptic Light and the World Premiere of Frederic Rzewski’s Piano Concerto with the composer as soloist.

Live from the Royal Albert Hall, London

Presented by Andrew McGregor

John White: Chord-Breaking Machine
Gerald Barry: No other people. (UK premiere)
Frederic Rzewski: Piano Concerto (BBC commission: world premiere)
Feldman: Coptic Light

Frederic Rzewski (piano)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Ilan Volkov (conductor)

Ilan Volkov brings his spirit of adventure to this late night Prom, featuring music as beautiful as it is ground breaking.

The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra performs music by a quartet of visionary and idiosyncratic composers, including two premieres. John White’s Chord-breaking Machine could be seen as belonging to a tradition of experimental English minimalists, deconstructing musical material into its constituent parts and reforming as repetitive machine structures; Irish maverick Gerald Barry’s No Other People, tonight receiving its first UK performance, also draws on repetition and seemingly simple musical figures, but here to create strongly contrasting canvases of bold, wild and stark music.

Frederic Rzewski’s BBC Radio 3-commissioned Piano Concerto, tonally kaleidoscopic and stylistically far reaching, receives its world premiere, with the composer as soloist. And the concert concludes with Morton Feldman’s late masterpiece, Coptic Light, a meditation for orchestra: a beatific and spiritual end to this late-night Prom.

See what you think and let us know. We liked the White of course, and the Feldman — always good. Nice of Ilan Volkov to programme this. He’s been an enthusiastic proponent of this music for some time. And he got the Beeb to programme John White. Cool.

Okay, one gripe. We’re hoping that someday the BBC will not only programme the music, but also someday actually learn something about it; for instance, the description, ‘John White’s Chord-breaking Machine could be seen as belonging to a tradition of experimental English minimalists’. Well, duh. John White is the main man, the big daddy, the big Kahuna, the founder and leading exponent of English minimalism. He invented Machine processes and if we’re talking about any minimalism in Britain before 1980, that minimalism has White to thank in some small part or other — for Machines and other systems processes. If you don’t know John White’s minimalism, try his Promenade Theatre Orchestra music. Or his electric music. Then try some Parsons, or Skempton, or Bryars, or Nyman, or Hobbs, or Dennis, or Shrapnel, or Smith, or Lewis, or Hill, or….