The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music

James Saunders, James Saunders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351697576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The recent resurgence of experimental music has given rise to a more divergent range of practices than has previously been the case. The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music reflects these recent developments by providing examples of current thinking and presenting detailed case studies that document the work of contemporary figures. The book examines fourteen current practitioners by interrogating their artistic practices through annotated interviews, contextualized by nine authored chapters which explore central issues that emerge from and inform these discussions. Whilst focusing on composition, the book also encompasses related aspects of performance, improvisation and sonic art. The interviews all explore how the selected artists work, focusing on the processes involved in developing their recent projects, set against more general aesthetic concerns. They aim to shed light on the disparate nature of current work whilst seeking to find possible points of contact. Many of the practitioners are active in areas that span disciplines, such as composition and improvisation, and the book explores the interaction of these activities in the context of their work. The other chapters consider a range of issues pertinent to recent developments in the genre, including: definitions of experimentalism and its relationship with a broader avant garde; experimentalism and cultural change; notation and its effect on composition; realising open scores; issues of notation and interpretation in live electronic music; performing experimental music; improvisation and technology; improvisation and social meaning; instrumentalizing objects; visual artists' relationships to experimental music; working across interdisciplinary boundaries; listening and the soundscape; working methods, techniques and aesthetics of recent experimental music.

PART I

1

Why Experimental? Why me?

Christopher Fox

In 1990 I was asked to contribute an article to a forthcoming issue of Contemporary Music Review about English experimental music. They wanted something written from the perspective of a composer who was too young to have been in the Scratch Orchestra but for whom the work of composers like Cornelius Cardew, Gavin Bryars and Howard Skempton was an important influence. I wrote a few thousand words under the provisional title, ‘Here Comes Everybody: beyond Cage and beyond’, but then the issue was shelved and I gave up midway through the article, at the point where I was about to start discussing aspects of my own music. At the start of 2000 I was asked for something similar and wrote more of what appears here, only for that project also to founder. Returning to these words for a third time I have made minor revisions to what I already had and brought matters more or less up to date, but I have resisted the temptation to disguise the long evolution of my ideas. Indeed, as I will suggest later, the shifts in emphasis between the three generations of this text tell their own story.

In 1974 Michael Nyman published his book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. At the time I was an undergraduate in the music department at Liverpool University and as soon as I got hold of the book I became fascinated by its construction of an alternative to the established new music canon within which I was trying to locate my own compositional activities. Nyman described music which, unlike that of Birtwistle or Stockhausen, was not on the library shelves, not in the record shops, not on Radio 3; exactly the sort of music, in other words, to appeal to a 19 year old keen to get ahead of the game. The book also confirmed my suspicions that there might be ways of writing music that could be based on processes without being serialist, that could involve repetition without being rock, that could embrace tonal materials without being backward.

Over the following months and years there were memorable opportunities to add an acquaintance with the music itself to that first encounter with it through Nyman’s prose. The boxed set of Drumming, Six Pianos and Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ came out in 1974; in 1975 the Philip Glass Ensemble came to Liverpool and made my ears ring with some of Music in Twelve Parts; somewhat later I was one of the minority to be delighted rather than dismayed by a concert that Gavin Bryars, Dave Smith and John White gave at the 1979 Composers’ Weekend organized by the society for the Promotion of new Music at York University. Later still I began to add words of my own to the growing critical literature around this music, with articles on Morton Feldman, Erhard Grosskopf, Christian Wolff and Walter Zimmermann for Contact, on John Cage, Steve Reich and Zimmermann for Tempo, and a portmanteau survey (‘Après Einstein: la succession minimaliste’) for Contrechamps.

At first I devoted a great deal of energy to trying to establish the defining features of ‘experimental’ music. In ‘Walter Zimmermann’s Local Experiments’, for example, I suggested that a ‘characteristically experimental’ compositional approach was the ‘distancing of creative will from created sound’ and the rejection of the ‘possibility of music as a direct and immediate outpouring of the creative will’.¹ This was both an echo of Gavin Bryars’s definition of his aesthetic position as:

stand[ing] apart from one’s own creation. Distancing yourself from what you are doing … I’m more interested in conception than reality.²

and an attempt to maintain Nyman’s distinction between experimental music and other ‘avant-garde’ composers.

As I suggested earlier, one of the most appealing features of Experimental Music was that Nyman argued that it was possible to ‘isolate’ the music under discussion in his book: in the introductory paragraph he claims that he will

attempt to … identify what experimental music is … what distinguishes it from the music of such avant-garde composers as Boulez, Kagel, Xenakis, Birtwistle, Berio, Stockhausen, Bussotti, which is conceived and executed along the well-trodden but sanctified path of the post-Renaissance tradition.³

What followed was a panoramic study, ranging from experimental forebears (Ives, Russolo), through the ‘permission giving’⁴ work of Cage and, subsequently, Brown, Feldman and Wolff, to the various dissolutions of musical convention in the 1960s and the new focus on minimalism and tonal materials that succeeded them. As Keith Potter said at the time, ‘At each stage Nyman picks out the essential points, asks and answers a lot of the right questions and gives liberal examples of pieces.’⁵ For me and many other young composers the book was akin to a generously illustrated holiday brochure, full of exotic possibilities, even if many of them seemed too remote to visit.

But, compelling as Experimental Music then appeared, the book’s central thesis, that a music called ‘experimental’ existed in a directly oppositional relationship to another music called ‘avant-garde’, now seems simplistic. Clearly Stockhausen epitomized an approach to the work of composition radically different from that of, say, Cage or La Monte Young, a difference he made clear each time he appropriated elements of their work in his own music. But Nyman’s categorization of Kagel as avant-garde rather than experimental is hard to sustain, for example, if one considers the works that Kagel was creating at the end of the 1960s. Were Kagel’s Staatstheater (1967–70) and Ludwig van (1970) so distinct from Cardew’s The Great Learning (1966–71) or a ‘Popular Classic’ as defined in the Scratch Orchestra’s draft Constitution (1969)? Indeed was not the large-scale organization of continuity in The Great Learning actually less ‘experimental’ than that in Staatstheater?

Gradually my struggle to establish a theoretically satisfactory line with which to divide the avant-garde from the experimental led me to the conclusion that things were rather more complicated than Nyman had suggested, a conclusion that I realized I had acknowledged in the music I was writing some time before I finally abandoned my attempts to maintain the division in words. Unlike Nyman in 1974, I also had the great advantage of knowing that the experimental rigour of Reich’s Pendulum Music (1968), with its indeterminate process and its minimalist concentration on a single sound-generating phenomenon, would eventually lead to The Desert Music (1982–84), music closer to Copland than Cage. I should add in Nyman’s defence that he had already hinted at such complications, quoting Feldman’s judgement on Boulez and Cage – ‘what is interesting is their similarity’ – and pointing out that the then freshly politicized Cardew saw both camps as sharing ‘overriding similarities’ rooted in the ‘elitist, individualistic culture which has spawned both’.⁶

But if Nyman’s attempt to establish experimental music as aesthetically discrete was flawed, his tracing of a musical history other than that of modernist orthodoxy was nonetheless an important early manifestation of the post-modernization of new music. Although Experimental Music was itself a typically modernist project in its insistence on a dialectical opposition between the experimental and the avant-garde, it nonetheless challenged a central tenet of modernism, that the remorseless progress of history could lead to only one future and that that future was made concrete in the work of the avant-garde. What Nyman made clear was that a work like The Great Learning had its own history, different from but no less valid than that of Stockhausen’s Momente (1961–72), for example. What has become clear in the years since 1974 is that there is not just one true history, that of the post-1945 modernist avant-garde with, possibly, and in contra-distinction, a shadowy alternative history, that of experimental music: instead there is an abundance of histories. Furthermore these histories are themselves contingent on the perspectives adopted by the writers who fashion them and on the contexts in which the histories are recounted.

One of the most startling examples of this was Cardew’s revision of the history of his own work in his book Stockhausen Serves Imperialism (1974), where what had once been claimed as musically progressive was instead attacked as socially regressive. Similarly the classic account of 1950s Darmstädter Ferienkurse as a crucible in which the associative impurities of music were burnt off to produce a new, pure, international soundworld could be retold by Hans Werner Henze as ‘the ruling class’s attempt to make music non-communicative … a thing apart from life … without any social dimension … to prevent people from seeing music as simple, concrete and comprehensible communication between human beings’.⁷ Less radically, the period since the publication of Experimental Music has seen a broadening of the history of modernism itself to allow the re-adoption of figures such as Scelsi and Nancarrow, whose music had been marginalized by the avant-garde in the 1950s and 1960s.

The development of this plurality of musical histories has not been entirely straightforward. An attitude at the heart of modernism, that at each point along the vector of history one particular set of compositional approaches will be more important than any other, was still much in evidence in the 1980s and is retained by some commentators to this day. Richard Toop, for example, justified an article on four representatives of the so-called ‘New Complexity’ with the assertion that ‘alongside Birtwistle and Ferneyhough they represent the few possible sources of light within a scene otherwise dominated by (to coin another catch-phrase) “The New Capitulationism”’.⁸ Elsewhere, historical precedent was invoked as a means of excluding from discussion those musics which were not congruent with the modernist tradition. Thus Harry Halbreich remodelled the early 1980s in the mould of the 1920s, casting Brian Ferneyhough as ‘unser Schoenberg’ and Horatiu Radulescu as ‘der Varèse unserer Zeit’.⁹ Having assigned these roles, both central to the ancestry of the post-1945 avant-garde, Halbreich could safely dismiss as unimportant any other composer whose work was not related directly to Ferneyhough’s post-serial ‘complexity’ or Radulescu’s ‘spectral’ music.

Nevertheless there has been no shortage of composers prepared to embrace the creative possibilities implicit in the dissolution of the monolithic modernism of the post-1945 era. At various points in the last 30 years, composers as different as Clarence Barlow, Kevin Volans and Michael Finnissy could all be said to have been writing music which is essentially inclusive rather than exclusive, evolving musical languages for each new work that drew on a wide range of sources and doing so in such a way that the identity of both the composers’ intentions and their various sources can co-exist. Volans’s White Man Sleeps is a case in point, taking elements of the indigenous musics of southern Africa and articulating them through instrumental ensembles intimately associated with West European art music. In the first version (1982) ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Musical Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Bibliography
• Index