A selection of Tom Johnson’s articles from on experimental music in The Village Voice, 1972–77, with links to pieces.

March 30, 1972

The Minimal Slow-Motion Approach: Alvin Lucier and Others

A pre-recorded voice is heard: “At the time of the next statement, this cassette will be closer to microphone one than Alvin’s cassette, and further from microphone two than Mary’s cassette.’ Then a different voice: “At the time of the next statement, this cassette will be further from microphone one than Stuart’s cassette, and further from microphone one than Mary’s cassette.’ There are four voices in all, and they continue to describe their positions in this manner, the recording quality varying accordingly with each statement. It is very difficult to visualize the movements of the voices, and I didn’t bother to try for the first five or 10 minutes.

But there was nothing else to do, and gradually I became involved and began trying to visualize the movement being described. It was a totally unemotional experience, and yet a fascinating one.

This is a description of Stuart Marshall’s “A Sagging and Reading Room," presented on the March 19 program, which opened the Spencer Concerts series. And judging from this concert, it will be an extremely adventurous and thought provoking series. Some of the seven programs will be presented at Village Presbyterian Church, and others will be at Spencer Memorial Church, near Boro Hall in Brooklyn.

The second piece on the program was Mary Lucier’s “Journal of Private Lives.’ It begins with a sort of prelude, consisting of black and white slides, depicting different forms of currency, along with newspaper clippings which are reversed and almost impossible to read. The body of the work consists of three simultaneous events. On a screen at the left, one sees a hand slowly writing a message: “In the dream I am writing you a letter. I don’t know what I am saying in the letter, but you must mail me a letter arranging to meet me on such and such a day... etc.’ On a screen at the right is a series of color slides showing slightly different views through a window. All are rather hazy, and a good deal of concentration is required in order to pick out the differences between them. The third event takes place on a central screen. For a while there are slides of solid colors, only slightly different in shade. Then there are two simultaneous projections on the screen, and a couple begins slow-motion ballroom dancing, casting mysterious double shadows on the screen. The whole piece is in dead silence.

The program ended with Alvin Lucier’s “The Queen of the South.’ Here, four singers sit around a square metal plate, about three feet across, with sand sprinkled on it. As they sing into their microphones, the metal plate vibrates, causing the sand to shift into many different patterns. It had a very religious feeling that night, with everyone staring at the sand as it moved into one intricate design after another. Most of the singing was not very pleasant to listen to, but it doesn’t matter, because the movements of the sand had some of the same magic for us that the Navajo sand paintings must have for the Navajos.

The most striking thing about the concert as a whole was its coolness. Very little actually happens in any of the pieces, and they all work on a static dynamic plane. And yet I was never bored. The minimal, slow-motion approach gives one time to become involved in images in a very personal way. And if you can flow with it, and stop wanting something dramatic to happen, it can be extremely rich. The slam-bang-fast-pace-keep-the-show-moving approach we have all grown up with is not the only way to put on a concert, by any means.

Note: This may be the first time that the new music was described critically as “minimal.’ In any case, the article clearly defines what the word means for me.

March 15, 1973

The Queen of the South Returns: Alvin Lucier

Last spring I reviewed Alvin Lucier’s “The Queen of the South,’ in which a metal plate about four feet by four feet was vibrated by amplified voices, gradually jiggling sand into beautiful designs. The piece has grown quite a bit since that time. The presentation at the Kitchen on March 5 lasted two hours instead of 30 minutes, and involved three vibrating plates instead of one. Sheets of wood, plastic, and metal were stimulated by purely electronic sounds, and several colors of sand, along with other ingredients such as coffee grounds, grain, and purple Tang, were used to create the visual patterns. Six television monitors projected the images, but most of the audience preferred to move around from one section of the room to another to view the patterns directly.

Two musicians operated sound equipment at each of the sheets. The sounds tended to be sustained, and the musicians adjusted them quite delicately as they searched for frequencies which would vibrate the sheets most effectively.

It may seem odd that a group of people would spend two hours watching minute particles vibrate and listening to the sounds that vibrate them, but there is an odd attraction to this symbolic activity, and most of the audience stayed until the very end. For me, the strongest association is with Navajo sand painting. But instead of a medicine man, the laws of physics are in charge of the mysterious rites. Lucier told me at the end of the evening that his own strongest association is with alchemy and that “The Queen of the South’ is an alchemical term.

He was attracted to the idea because of an appreciation for basic substances and for the mystery of how they interact with one another. Those with scientific backgrounds or with backgrounds in the visual arts would probably have made other associations.

The sounds were quite interesting in their own right, and it seemed like a rare opportunity to be able to watch these sounds as the many beautiful designs took form on the sheets. I felt I was getting a clue to the mysteries of the laws of the cosmos. What more can one ask of a work of art?

June 7, 1973

The Sonic Arts Union: Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma

The Sonic Arts Union performed more or less continuously in WBAI’s Studio C for three days, May 25 through 27. I have attended Free Music Store concerts there many times, but have seldom heard one on the radio, so I decided to listen to some of their performances on my FM tuner. This turned out to be a very poor vantage point. David Behrman’s “Home Made Synthesizer Music with Sliding Pitches’ and Gordon Mumma’s “Cybersonic Cantilevers" sounded all right, but I was never able to really involve myself the way I do when I am on the scene, watching them manipulate their equipment. And Alvin Lucier’s “Vifarb Hyperb,’ which apparently has something to do with moving loudspeakers around the room, did not make any sense at all on radio. This was frustrating, of course, but at the same time it was deeply encouraging, because it demonstrated that the concert hall is still alive and well and necessary. Even in purely electronic pieces, radios and phonographs are hopelessly inadequate as substitutes for a well-organized concert presentation.

However, a wonderful crazy tape piece called “In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women’ came across fairly well on the Saturday night broadcast. This is Robert Ashley’s setting of a poem written in 1944 by John Barton Wolgamot, and it is quite unlike anything else, chiefly because of its unique text.

Wolgamot is a minor poet, if there ever was one, though he seems to be famous among many artists who were around the University of Michigan in the early “60s. The 128 verses of this poem are largely a long list of “really grand men and women,’ including all the names eulogized in our history books and a number of unfamiliar ones. Throughout the reading, a great variety of electronic sounds go on busily in the background.

Apparently Ashley spliced out all the breathing points, because the reader’s voice goes on and on without ever coming up for air. The text is delivered in a rhythmic monotone, and I became restless after 20 or 30 minutes, but I also became more and more fascinated with the absurdity of listing all those names, just for the sake of listing them. Perhaps I would not have been so restless if I had just turned my attention to the consistently interesting electronic sounds accompanying the reader, but for some reason I seldom did. It is a hard piece to come to grips with, even on a basic perceptual level. But that’s partly what makes it so wonderfully crazy.

Early the following afternoon I visited the studio to see how the Sonic Arts Union would be set up during normal visiting hours. I found a casual gallery atmosphere, with people dribbling in for varying lengths of time. Some 16-mm films were running, but I was more interested in the ““Cybersonic Cantilevers" which Gordon Mumma was pumping into the room. This is not really a piece, but rather a process, involving a special set of equipment which will run on any sort of sound you want to feed it. No matter what sort of input you use, the sounds go through the same circuitry, where they become distorted in particular ways, and come out as ““Cybersonic Cantilevers."" While I was there, Mumma was working mostly with a large pile of cassette tapes. Every once in a while he would grab randomly at the pile and find something fresh to plug into the system. He explained that some of the time he had been making ““Cybersonic Cantilevers" out of WBAI’s broadcast signal, and that he sometimes set up microphones, so that interested passers-by could feed their own voices into the system.

Mumma also had a couple of little do-it-yourself units. An individual visitor could put on a pair of headphones and manipulate a few simple controls, directing several varieties of distortion into either ear. It is a neat gadget, guaranteed to keep you interested for quite a while.

It is difficult to say what these “Cybersonic Cantilevers’ sound like, since much depends on the nature of the input, but they are usually raucous and tend to flit nervously from one kind of squawky sound to another. It is fairly easy to tell if the machine is feeding on verbal, musical or electronic material, but the specific identity of the input is never very clear. One of the fascinations is trying to puzzle this out.

Mumma’s goal is not to create lovely effects, or to convey human emotions, or to create good music in any traditional sense. It has to do with machines: communicating with them, playing games with them, trying to accept them, and simply letting them do their thing. His machines are telling us something. And when we tune in on their level, the music seems fascinating and important - even to people like me, who never soldered a single wire and have trouble remembering the difference between a watt and an amp.

April 11, 1974

Robert Ashley: A Radical Statement

Bob Ashley’s “Your Move I Think’ on March 30 was the most radical statement I have encountered for some time. Even the normally liberal audience at the Kitchen began to dwindle in the first half hour, and I suspect that if the event had taken place anywhere else in New York it would have provoked mass protest. I don’t think anything in the performance was completely unprecedented. Nor was the material overtly offensive. There were no tortured animals, no political diatribes, no vulgarity, no painfully bright lights, no loud volumes - not even any nudity or repetition. Yet, in his own indirect way, Ashley was presenting something that people did not like at all. They did not look bored as they walked out, as people do when something is inept or just bad. They seemed really irritated, and even angry. I doubt that most of them could have explained exactly why they felt the way they did, but I suspect that Ashley understood it all very well. Such controversy can only be generated by an artist who understands what we want and expect, understands why he wants to give us something completely different, and has mastered the art of involving people who don’t want to be involved.

When I entered the Kitchen, a few minutes before the program was to begin, Ashley was already seated at a dining-room table with Kathey Beeler and Anne Wehrer. Four floor lamps surrounded the group, shedding a pleasant light and marking off the playing area. Prerecorded tapes played softly in the background, but the focus was on the three performers, who rambled on as if the audience wasn’t even there, all the time sipping on mixed drinks.

Their conversation was intelligent, and much of it was quite interesting, though it sometimes bogged down, the way dining-room conversations generally do. They talked about art vs. entertainment, about California vs. New York, about Nick and George and other friends, about the art establishment, about grant distribution, about how dull they felt most performances were, and about the difficulty of gaining recognition for new approaches.

Aside from short snatches of diverse music and some dreamlike monologue on the tape, nothing really happened. The performers just kept talking and getting drunker, and the audience kept leaving, and the general irritation kept increasing. The irritation must have had something to do with the sharp realism of the performance, which reflected many conversations we have all participated in, and was not always a flattering mirror. And it probably had something to do with the way the performers insisted on being themselves rather than playing roles, which must have given people the feeling that they were not seeing a show, and not getting their money’s worth. We like to talk about spontaneity and slices of life, but we seem to have trouble dealing with them in a raw form, which has so little artifice or formal structure. And of course we were left out, unable to express our own opinions, and unable to share in the alcohol. The performers didn’t even bother to tell us who Nick and George were.

But perhaps the essential irritation had to do with power. At one point in the discussion the performers observed how artists tend to put themselves in positions of power, particularly when they perform, forcing people to listen, manipulating their perceptions, and titillating their emotions. Ashley’s attitude toward the artist’s power trip was strong. “You don’t have to do that anymore,’ he stated several times.

One could argue that “Your Move I Think’ also represents a kind of power trip. Ashley was giving us a calculated experience, after all, and one that most people did not want. Still he wasn’t trying to sell us a bill of goods, and he certainly wasn’t trying to prove he was clever or profound. Basically he was just offering a provocative real-life situation and allowing us to make of it what we would. I guess most people still prefer pieces that let them know how they are supposed to respond.

This is not the first time Ashley has offended audiences. Born in 1930, he was one of the founders of the Once Festival at Ann Arbor Michigan in the “60s. People who were there still talk about Ashley’s “Wolfman Motorcity Revue,’ which must have been one of the really major statements from the days of multi-media. He was one of the first to discover new forms of music in speech sounds, as he did in “She was a Visitor.’ He has evolved a number of unique theatre pieces, such as “Four Ways,’ in which four performers carry microphones and loudspeakers in attache cases. His String Quartet Describing the Motions of Large Real Bodies utilizes one of the more ingenious systems for hooking up live performers with electronic equipment, and also produces some of the most attractive sounds in the whole string quartet literature.

Ashley is currently based at Mills College in California, so his work is seldom heard in New York, except in connection with the Sonic Arts Union, a cooperative group which he formed with David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, and Gordon Mumma. So it is still fairly easy for New Yorkers to avoid Ashley’s iconoclastic work. But that may not always be the case. I have the feeling that sooner or later the music world is going to have to come to terms with Ashley. And the dust may not settle for quite a while.

January 26, 1976

What Is Improvising? Annea Lockwood and Many Others

I’m not sure what “improvising’ really means anymore. Traditionally it applied to forms of music which weren’t very free at all. Jazz improvisers had a good deal of melodic freedom, but had to keep right with the chord changes of whatever tune was being played. Harpsichordists were said to be improvising figured bass accompaniments in baroque music, but they too were obliged to follow strict, predetermined harmonies. Raga improvisers didn’t have to worry about harmony, but they had to keep strictly to the prescribed scale, and work with specific melodic formulas.

But then both free jazz players and avant-garde instrumentalists loosened the reins a whole lot, and their improvising sessions became almost totally unpredictable. They wanted to be free of all restrictions, and they set no conscious limitations on what could happen. Of course, if players had approaches that offended or interfered with the other musicians, they wouldn’t be invited back to the next session, but that was about the only kind of restriction or censorship that existed. In this atmosphere, a good many types of music, which in another age would probably have been considered improvisatory, were presented as actual compositions. Stockhausen, for example, wrote a set of piano fragments which could be played in any order, and which took radically different forms from one reading to another. But he didn’t call it an improvisation at all. He called it Klavierstueck XI. And Cage, many of whose works were equally unpredictable, began referring to “music indeterminate of its performance,’ because to have called his work “improvisations’ would have implied that the players were not guided by goals and rules.

Gradually “improvisation’ has lost most of its original respectability and come to imply a completely uncontrolled sort of messing around, and no one wants to admit that he is improvising, except in jazz quarters where, due to such long traditions, the word has never become a pejorative. But in the meantime, if we could return to the original sense of the word, and realize that most forms of improvisation have actually been forms of highly restricted improvisation, we could say that there is an awful lot of improvising going on these days, and that a number of composers have devised ingenious new ways of doing it.

Like Charlemagne Palestine, who often sits down at the piano, without knowing how long he is going to play or how often the music will change, but with a very clear idea of the overtone effects he is going after and the basic harmonies he will be playing as he tries to get them.

Or Philip Corner, who sometimes restricts his activity for an hour or so to the simple task of blowing into a curious ceramic pot, but within that severe limitation, will allow reverberant low tones and whooshes of air to come about however they will.

Or Jim Fulkerson, whom I recently heard perform on unaccompanied trombone, focusing his efforts on three or four specific and rather unusual techniques, but without much plan for details within these sections.

Or La Monte Young, or Joan La Barbara, or Garett List, or Jim Burton, to mention only a few New York composers, all of whom set highly defined performance tasks, but end up with a variety of specific results from performance to performance.

Annea Lockwood’s January 10 concert at a very new but very active loft space on 17th Street, known as the Brook, was another case in point. Lockwood is particularly concerned with sounds she finds in nature, and over the years has evolved a rather amazing collection of tapes. The recordings she has acquired of the erratic astral sputtering of pulsars, and of rumbling volcanic and earthquake activity are especially impressive. Human musicians will probably never produce sounds quite as awesome as these. She also has a number of fine recordings she has made herself of geysers, mud pools, rivers, rippling lakes, tree frogs and other wild life, storms, and fires.

For this presentation, she assembled representative tapes from all these categories, added some human breathing sounds, and set up a 10-track playback system, each track having its own carefully placed loudspeaker. For about an hour a rapt audience of a hundred or so listened to these sounds as they faded in and out, and interacted with one another. In the case of the earthquake, the speed has been jacked up to bring it into the range of human hearing, but otherwise the sounds had not been tampered with, so it was easy to identify the elements, appreciate what they represented, and understand why the event had been called “World Rhythms.’ The mix which the audience heard was concocted on the spot, which is where the improvisation came in. By mixing the ten tracks spontaneously, Lockwood was able to respond to the acoustical realities of the moment, and pace things according to the mood of the evening. But there was an additional element in the concert.

While the recorded sounds were being played, Carole Weber sat next to a large gong, hitting it rather gently at unpredictable times, adding manmade vibrations to the mixture of recorded sounds. These infrequent gong tones seemed to have a different feeling every time, and later Lockwood explained what had been going on. A physical movement, such as hitting a gong, energizes the system somewhat, and Weber’s assignment had been to sense this slight increase in her energy every time she hit the gong, wait until she had almost returned to a state of complete calm, and then hit it again, all without paying conscious attention to how she was playing the gong, or what prerecorded sounds she was hearing.

Was Weber improvising? Well, she certainly wasn’t just messing around. In fact, assuming that she has the power of concentration to strictly adhere to such a difficult assignment, and being fairly sure that she does, then her actual individual will power was never engaged even for a moment. That is certainly a long ways away from the type of freedom which is often implied by the term “improvisation.’ It would be better if we could get back to that original definition. We should remind those who have been avoiding the word that, with the exception of a few very loose styles, improvisation has always involved specific intentions and tight restrictions, and does not necessarily encourage performers to express spontaneous emotions. Then we could say that all these composers are working with improvisation, simply because the exact outcome is not predictable. All of this is only semantics, of course, but this particular problem is one which seems to be causing a lot of unnecessary confusion, at least in classical and avantgarde circles. If improvisation could become a respectable term in all quarters again, with the understanding that it covers a lot of different ways of making unpredictable music, then I suspect that many people who think they did disagree would discover they don’t.

May 24, 1976

Pauline Oliveros and Philip Corner: Meditation Music

One important genre of new music is consistently overlooked because it never takes place in widely advertised public events, but rather in workshops and relatively intimate gatherings, where everyone can feel free to take part. It involves meditation, and thus overlaps somewhat with the activities of meditation groups and sensory awareness groups, but it has been developed by composers and must be considered primarily a from of music.

In a way this is a new form of religious music. Of course, it has nothing to do with organized religion, but it does owe much to Eastern religious teaching, and it is oriented toward spiritual values. It is not a popular activity, and never will be, any more than Zen meditation or philosophical debate ever will. Yet it is an important development - particularly since it has independently attracted two of the most stimulating musical minds I have ever come in contact with - Pauline Oliveros and Philip Corner.

Oliveros is a California composer who has been working in this direction for some time. Several years ago I attended a session she led at the Cunningham Studio. Much of the evening was devoted to “TeachYourself to Fly,’ an absorbing situation in which one is asked to breathe normally, very very gradually allowing one’s breath to become vocal sound. I gained some useful nonverbal insights that night, but one shouldn’t expect much to happen without an appropriate atmosphere and an experienced leader. I don’t think you can really “teach yourself,’ despite the title.

Recently I have been studying Oliveros’s “Sonic Meditations’ XII-XXV, published in the winter issue of the Painted Bride Quarterly. They are clearly expressed, and rich in implications. One meditation involves saying a single word very very slowly, others involve group chanting, some deal with imaginary sounds, and any of them could probably keep serious meditators busy for several sessions. One can be quoted in toto, since it is defined so briefly. But don’t confuse brevity with simplicity:

Re Cognition

Listen to a sound until you no longer recognize it.

Other recent Oliveros works are intended for formal presentation to an audience, but these, too, sometimes involve elements of meditation. In a large theatrical work called “Crow II,’ for example, part of the music is for four flute players, who are asked to determine which pitche to sustain by attempting to send and receive telepathic messages. The audience is also invited to try to tune in on any psychic messages and anticipate what pitch the flutist will play next. Regardless of whether any psychic communication actually takes place, the problem becomes an absorbing meditation, especially for the flute players, and brings an air of intense concentration into the performance situation.

Corner’s work with meditation music has gone on mostly in the context of “Sounds out of Silent Spaces,’ a group which he formed several years ago, and which I have been participating in this year. The format varies. Sometimes quite a few guests attend and participate, and sometimes only the regulars are there. Sometimes Corner’s ideas dominate, but a good many of the group’s activities originate with other individuals. The mood and profundity of the sessions can vary greatly, but my personal experiences with two of Corner’s meditations demonstrate what the high points can be like.

One afternoon about eight of us set about the task of simply sustaining a unison “oo’ for a long time. With the men singing in their upper range, the women in their lower range, and everyone remaining very soft, the blend was so remarkable that after a while it became difficult to distinguish one voice from another. On a material level, I became conscious of the way the tone moved around slightly in space, depending on who was taking a breath at the moment, and of the tiny fluctuations that occurred when someone would drift slightly out of tune. On a more spiritual level, the tone became something like a mandala, and after focusing my attention on it for some time, my whole self, as well as merely my voice, seemed to become part of that tone.

Another meditation sometimes done in “Sounds out of Silent Spaces’ has to do with trying to sing extremely low tones. Like most meditation problems, this is not easy, and one can’t expect results every time. But once, when my concentration was particularly keen, and the atmosphere particularly tranquil, I found a deep resonance somewhere in my chest that I had never found before and may never find again. Some would no doubt consider this a mystical experience, but being basically a skeptic, I simply considered it a minor triumph in a general quest for greater self-awareness.

April 25, 1977

Robert Ashley Documents the Aether

Judging from the image on the color-tv monitor, we are on a boat gradually approaching the Golden Gate. The soundtrack consists of Robert Ashley talking to David Behrman about his music. I figure that the two men are also on the boat with the camera, and I expect to have a view momentarily. The camera doesn’t cooperate with my desires, however, and continues to focus straight ahead. Then, after maybe 10 minutes, it rises and begins to circle overhead, looking down on the buildings of San Francisco. A tricky cut? A flying boat? I eventually realize that I must be seeing all this from a helicopter. Ashley and Behrman continue to talk on the soundtrack. Their conversation is quite informal, with many incomplete sentences and some very long pauses. Breezes blow in the background. About 15 or 20 minutes into this videotape, the camera comes back to ground level. There has still not been a single cut. Off in the distance we vaguely make out two men sitting at a picnic table. Gradually we get a closer view and discover Ashley and Behrman, in perfect lip sync.

The tape runs on for another 40 minutes. Sometimes the camera flies away, returns, and finds the speakers standing on a hill or walking somewhere. Most of the time we must be content to watch them from a distance, or not see them at all. The soundtrack continues to be informal but insightful. There are no cuts. By the time the hour is over, I realize that I have experienced not only some remarkable camerawork by Philip Makanna but also a perceptive portrait of Behrman. The tape reveals him as a quiet, modest man who doesn’t like looking at the camera any more than this camera likes looking at him. His short answers often leave the interviewer at a loss for words. He frequently deflects the conversation away from himself and onto other topics. Ashley points out during the interview that his music has an intimate quality and is intended for small audiences. Everything fits together.

On a more subtle level, the tape also made me understand a little more about Ashley, who is the producer and director as well as the interviewer. I remembered that for some years he has been doing performance pieces that involve spontaneous conversation, and I begin to appreciate the amount of study that has gone into making his talking performances seem so casual and unstudied. This is only one of the 14-hour-long tapes that make up Ashley’s “Music with Roots in the Aether,’ on view at the Whitney Museum through April 20. There is an hour-long interview and an hour’s worth of musical performances devoted to each of the seven composers included in the series. Some of the settings and camera angles used in the performances are as unlikely as those used in the interviews. During the performance of Behrman’s “Music with Melody-Driven Electronics,’ the camera frequently looks on via mirrors so that one loses a sense of direction. Gordon Mumma is interviewed while oiling his bicycle, and is shown playing his musical saw in an unpopulated amusement park. Philip Glass talks mostly about money and practical matters and becomes distracted by children playing in the background, while the camera occasionally picks out twitches in his fingers. Terry Riley gives his interview while milking his goat in rural California, and then goes into a sort of rustic-modern house to play some of his solo organ music. Alvin Lucier is represented by three works, one of which takes place during the interview. Pauline Oliveros does one of her often discussed but seldom heard accordion-and-voice performances. Ashley himself is interviewed by an assistant, and presents a theatrical work called “What She Thinks.’ The series reveals a good deal about the artists, and presents their works with care and understanding.

I think the main reason Ashley feels this music has “roots in the aether’ is simply that it is not completely notated. Of course, it is not exactly improvised either. In most cases the performers may make only extremely limited choices. In Glass’s music they must even stick to prescribed melodic fragments. In all cases, however, the sense of timing and pacing is rather free. Neither the composer nor the performers can predict how the music will take shape in a particular performance, or how long the performance will last. Some of this is determined by, well, the aether.

For Ashley, I think his title also implies a lack of historical roots, but I’m not sure about that. Certainly all of these composers owe debts to John Cage and other composers who launched a general approach to indeterminate music in the “50s. All of them have been influenced to one degree or another by Eastern ideas, and I sense a spirit of jazz here and there. Certainly they all have been influenced by developments in electronics. On the other hand, none of their works sound much like anything that came before. But whether their music has specific historical origins, or whether it did to some extent spring out of the aether, it must all come from about the same place. All seven composers are around 40 to 50 years old, all are Americans, all are probably as well known in Europe as they are here, and all create relatively static pieces that generally take a long time. They do comprise a sort of category, however nebulous, and perhaps the most valuable thing about Ashley’s videotapes is that they help define this category. Furthermore, by putting everything together, they make it clear that something significant has been going on within this category. Of course, Ashley does not claim that these seven names should be regarded as any sort of definitive list or school. In fact, he had originally planned to include one or two others in the series, and it would not be difficult to see a number of other American composers, and perhaps even a couple of British ones, as part of the same basic phenomenon.

I have been emphasizing the subject matter of “Music with Roots in the Aether.’ But documentaries are also works of art in their own right, and it seems to me that this one is particularly successful, even though it’s as long as about eight or 10 typical feature films. Ashley’s settings sometimes verge on the bizarre, but they always end up seeming appropriate in one way or another, both in the interviews and in the performances, and as I mentioned, his own extremely casual talking and interviewing method is an art in itself. Not only does the no-cuts technique present a unique challenge that Makanna’s camera meets ingeniously time after time, but it is also appropriate to the long, unbroken continuities of the music. That lone camera moves slowly and somewhat predictably, a bit like the music itself, but neither is ever boring. There is no editing on the soundtrack either. The tapes come spectacularly close to actually capturing a live-performance quality. At one point, after having seen quite a few of the tapes, I suggested to Ashley that “Music with Roots in the Aether’ might well be his own finest creative work, but he only shrugged. Perhaps he thinks of it mostly as a documentary of other works rather than as a work of his own, perhaps he was just being modest, or perhaps after almost 20 productive years as a creative artist he just finds it too difficult to make such comparisons.

May 23, 1977

Gordon Mumma and Alvin Lucier Make New Connections

In rare cases, technological skill and artistic ability occur in equally impressive amounts in single individuals. In this respect, I particularly admire David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, and Gordon Mumma, all three of whom presented their work at the Diplomat Hotel ballroom in the recent series sponsored by Artservices. Behrman is still working with homemade circuitry that emits plaintive automatic harmonies in response to particular pitches played by live instruments, as in concerts I have reviewed in the past. But both Mumma and Lucier presented material that was new to me, and so rich that in one column I can do little more than describe what happened.

Mumma calls his latest work “Some Voltage Drop.’ Like most of his music, this is not a set composition so much as a set of materials. Everything changes and develops from performance to performance. On May 9 he began with a tape of a Central Asian folk singer and then overlapped into a complex and raucous improvisation on a specially designed synthesizer. The next section became theatrical as Mumma lit carbide lamps and put a teakettle on to boil. Behrman joined him, wearing a miner’s hat and occasionally blowing on a harmonica. Mumma began playing his musical saw, as he often does, and eventually the wailing of the saw began to blend with the whistling of the teakettle. As the overhead lights faded, the glow of the carbide lamps began to suggest a camping scene. In the next section Mumma played a remarkable electronic instrument, built by Paul DeMarinis, which emits curious rhythmic bleeps when a hand is placed over its vital parts. The performance ended with a brief tape of loud vigorous drumming dedicated to Salvador Allende.

The symbolism of this performance was far richer than in any Mumma work I have heard before, and I am not sure I understand it thoroughly, but a few things seem clear. In his interview with Robert Ashley in the “Music with Roots in the Aether’ series, Mumma talks a great deal about folk instruments. I think he feels that the DeMarinis instrument, the Central Asian singer, the musical saw, the specially designed synthesizer, and the harmonica are all contemporary folk mediums, because they resist notation and thus defy the central dominating culture. One could see the campfire scene as a reference to guerilla warfare, which would tie in with Mumma’s concept of anti-establishment folk culture, as well as with his pro-Allende sentiments. The synthesizer music provides an additional symbol, since the particular circuitry is called “Passenger Pigeon.’ Passenger pigeons became extinct in 1914, according to the program notes, and Mumma’s synthesizer will also become extinct someday, since he removes one component every time he plays it. But I have still only scratched the surface of this complex work as a whole, and the complex emotions it aroused in me. I would have to be able to answer many questions about Mumma’s casual performance style, his preference for raucous sounds, and his remarkable technical skills before I could be satisfied that I understand his art thoroughly.

On May 2 Alvin Lucier presented four works, each of which went on for 20 to 30 minutes. All conveyed quiet ritualistic moods, and all had strong visual elements. The means of producing sounds were rather elaborate in each case, but these techniques were always justified, because the result was always music that could not be produced in any other way.

For “Tyndall Orchestrations’ Lucier sat at the center of the space with a Bunsen burner. Joan La Barbara was at one side producing soft screechy vocal sounds. Birds sang in a similar manner via a tape recorder. The flame on the Bunsen burner flickered in response to the sound, and sometimes went out. At the four corners of the space, four additional performers lit additional Bunsen burners and placed glass tubes over the flames. The flames flickered and produced soft sounds within their resonating glass tubes. The lighting added additional atmosphere, as it did throughout the evening. This piece, incidentally, is based on the work of the 19th-century acoustician John Tyndall, whose book The Science of Sound ought to be required reading for all musicians and composers, and for everyone who tends to think that electronics has made acoustics obsolete. Tyndall experimented with foghorns, sound lenses, the effects of weather on sound, and on other acoustical phenomena, as well as with these “singing flames.’ In “Music on a Long Thin Wire,’ a wire some 50 feet long was stretched across the performing space. Lucier sat at one side controlling electronic equipment. I didn’t quite understand how the vibrations of the wire affected the sound, but the music came out as curious electronic phrases that wailed slowly up and down, sometimes became guttural, and often took unexpected turns.

In “Outlines’ one assistant moved a microphone around the contour of a full-size canoe, another assistant walked slowly away from a large loudspeaker, and Lucier did a little imaginary trout fishing, casting his fly line back and forth through the air. The resulting music was soft, high-pitched buzzing. I found it difficult to pay attention at first, because the sound didn’t change much and was a bit reminiscent of fluorescent lights and other environmental sounds that I am accustomed to blocking out. Later, however, I began to notice that whenever I turned my head the sound changed drastically. There were really a whole lot of little buzzes hovering around my head. I became fascinated with trying to figure out which one was loudest, trying to pick out my favorite, and generally enjoying this completely new sound experience.

In “Bird and Person Dyning’ Lucier very gradually approached the center with little microphones mounted in his ears. His eyes were closed most of the time. He listened intently as he moved. At the center of the space was one of those electronic birds that you have probably seen in variety stores, where they are sold as tree ornaments. From the loudspeakers around the space a variety of electronic tones faded in and out, accompanying the repetitious little tree ornament. But there were other tones that slid up and down faintly inside my ears. As in most of Lucier’s work, some of the acoustical and electronic techniques behind the music were a mystery to me. If I had asked around, I could probably have found someone who could explain how everything worked, and often such pieces arouse my intellectual curiosity enough that I do that. But with this piece, and the others on this program, I found I was quite content to let the music retain its mystery.

October 10, 1977

Pauline Oliveros Meditates

As I enter a dimly loft space on Warren Street, Pauline Oliveros is sitting crosslegged on a little platform. She raises her hand in a ceremonial greeting whenever someone comes in the door. It is the first concert of a new series sponsored by the Samaya Foundation. After a while Oliveros takes up her accordion and begins playing a drone. This is the “Rose Mountain’ series, which she’s been doing for four years, but which I have never heard except in a short recorded segment. She controls the bellows well and pulls the tone out quite steadily for perhaps 15 or 20 seconds, and then pushes it in equally steadily for a similar span of time. Pull again. Push again. After a while she adds another note, and another, and eventually she begins singing sustained tones along with the accordion. But the basic mood remains tranquil. Pull again. Push again. The sonorities drone on without ever changing very much or very often.

She appears unusually calm and centered as she plays. Now in her mid-forties, she is in her prime as an innovative musician. There isn’t even a hint of self-conscious rebellion, nor do I sense that she is just testing out new ways of making music. Most of that is in the past for her, and now the music comes from some specific personal place, which she seems to understand thoroughly. She has a good reason to appear calm and centered.

Soon I realize that the vowel sound is changing. Sometimes it is closed, as in “hay,’ and her voice takes on a reedy quality that almost disappears into the sound of the accordion. Sometimes it is more open or more rounded, and the voice stands slightly apart from the instrument. I begin to wonder how she decides what vowel to use next. There seems to be a logic there somewhere. Pull again. Push again. The changes are subtle and not very frequent, but something is happening.

Later I begin to hear something that has been going completely over my head. Because the reeds on an accordion are never absolutely in tune, if one listens closely one can hear little pulses or beats as the reeds vibrate against one another. But the curious thing is that these beats are a little different when the bellows move out than when they move in, since different reeds are involved. For a while I fix my attention on specific pitches and listen to the tempo of the beats. There seems to be a logic there somewhere, and for a while I begin to wonder if Oliveros is even controlling this subtle aspect of her music. Pull again. Push again. The instrument breathes slowly and steadily, but there are subtle differences between its inhaling and exhaling.

Eventually I begin to realize that something is also going on in the harmony. I haven’t been concentrating as well as I sometimes can and I haven’t been paying much attention to what notes have been dropped and added, but somehow the music seems to be creeping into new keys. I am a little surprised by this. Most of Oliveros’s work is involved with meditative states and spiritual values, and doesn’t usually have much to do with harmonic progressions and rhythmic patterns and other more down-to-earth musical techniques. But this piece seems to move around quite knowingly, and I begin to suspect that there is some intricate tonal system at work. That seems almost necessary, because pieces of music don’t move through intricate modulations as smoothly as this unless someone sits down and figures it all out. Pull again. Push again. The sonority is so simple and steady, and there never seem to be more than two or three pitches at once, but somehow it is drifting somewhere.

I listen specifically to the harmony for a while, but little changes take me by surprise, and I get confused and eventually give up. There seems to be a logic to these gentle modulations, but I can’t figure it out. Pull again. Push again. Any particular moment sounds very much like any other particular moment, but something is happening.

After the concert, which lasts about an hour, everybody is zonked out by the hypnotic tranquillity of the whole thing, and it is another five or 10 minutes before people begin to stir from their seats. I decide to hang around for a while until I have a chance to ask Oliveros how all of those neat key changes work, and her answer astounds me. It seems that she doesn’t quite know either, because this music is also a meditation, and all of the music theory stuff is largely a side effect. As I understand it, the general idea is that when she feels the sonority should change she purposely leaves it where it is, and when she finds that she is content to listen to it just the way it is, she allows it to change. So there are you. In an oversimplified sort of way, you know the complete score, and you could even try singing it or playing it on some instrument yourself. All you have to do is think about whether you want the sound to change or not, and then do the opposite. And you’ll get wonderful beating rhythms, and a unique, intricate tonal system, and some of the most sophisticated minimal music around. Simple, huh? Well, maybe. After you’ve worked at it for as long as Oliveros has.