“Trav­els In Nihilon“
Andy Par­tridge, XTC

“Zom­bie“
Fela Kuti

BCCO in Con­cert, Ply­mouth Church

I bought Icebreaker’s Ter­mi­nal Veloc­ity the day it was released in 1994 (orig­i­nally on Decca’s Argo imprint, it has now been reis­sued by Can­taloupe). I was get­ting my Mas­ters in the Com­po­si­tion Depart­ment at the San Fran­cisco Con­ser­va­tory of Music, and I was not the only one of my peers lis­ten­ing to the CD for the next few weeks. I didn’t like every­thing on it, but I didn’t just like the good stuff — it thrilled me! The good music wasn’t just good, it showed a whole new way of think­ing and being, of writ­ing and mak­ing music, that was com­plex and sat­is­fy­ing emo­tion­ally and intel­lec­tu­ally. It was both excit­ing and deep.

The works that shook me up are the book­ends on the disc, Michael Gordon’s Yo Shake­speare and Slow Move­ment from David Lang. In these two pieces were ways to advance beyond the two kinds of min­i­mal­ism, the pulse-pattern music of Steve Reich and the truly min­i­mal mate­ri­als of Mor­ton Feld­man; Gordon’s piece took both rep­e­ti­tion and pulse and con­stantly thwarted their smooth, sequen­tial pro­gres­sion, break­ing up the flow of the music and turn­ing it in on itself, while Lang pro­duced a mas­sive, drone-like slab of sound, both con­tin­u­ous and con­tin­u­ously shift­ing over 20 min­utes or so, full of allur­ing details. Each piece pro­duces a sound that the com­posers wanted, and that sound went beyond the con­ven­tions of con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal cham­ber music to encom­pass the sonic power and appeal of rock music — they are not rock songs, but longer form pieces of abstract music that owe a super­fi­cial resem­blance to the work of Glenn Branca, although made with much deeper skill and ambi­tion. I would write that the rest was his­tory, except that the his­tory was already being made.

They were doing what good artists do, which is kill their fathers, fig­u­ra­tively. A com­poser has to dis­cern the music that appeals to him and con­ceive of the music that he wants to pro­duce in reac­tion and con­cor­dance to that, then look to past work as mod­els. That step involves under­stand­ing the tech­niques of pre­vi­ous com­posers by mak­ing them your own, by pro­duc­ing your own fugue or sonata-allegro form move­ment. The goal is not to imi­tate, but to incor­po­rate, then to kill your fathers, to say that was good for them, but this is what I want to do. It means under­stand­ing styles, pro­duc­ing them, and then shed­ding the styles of oth­ers and cre­at­ing your own. It’s a con­stant back and forth between accept­ing influ­ence and rebelling against it that is an inher­ent qual­ity of the soul of the best artists. Steve Reich was a rev­o­lu­tion­ary in his own day, find­ing his way to a new style that came out of the music he him­self enjoyed and played while not itself being that music, and the Bang On A Can com­posers became the same within the con­text which Reich cre­ated. Ter­mi­nal Veloc­ity was the announce­ment of a newer style, which came out of love for Reich and Louis Andriessen, and had bits of those fla­vors while being new.

Style is the essen­tial, fun­da­men­tal qual­ity in the con­sid­er­a­tion of music, and a mad­den­ing one as well. Unlike the writ­ten or plas­tic arts, music has no inher­ent con­tent and is made up of ges­tures and tech­niques, the com­bi­na­tion of which cre­ates style; the style of an epoch, a gen­er­a­tion, a nation. The his­tory of West­ern Clas­si­cal music is also the his­tory of the accre­tion of styles (pop music his­tory is about the cycling of a lim­ited num­ber of styles, and cre­ates a non-Western sense of time), and built into that his­tory is the value that this accre­tion must be advanced, whether by cre­at­ing some­thing brand new or, like Stravin­sky exem­pli­fied, tak­ing some­thing old and mak­ing it brand new. Gen­er­ally, when new styles are accepted, incor­po­rated and repro­duced past a cer­tain point, deca­dence sets in — the Baroque become Rococo — and some­thing new comes along to open up a path out of a seem­ing dead-end. It’s a Hegelian dialec­tic of music, and when a style becomes per­va­sive, deca­dence is the inevitable end-point.

I’ve been per­son­ally won­der­ing when this might set in for the cur­rent post-minimalist gen­er­a­tion. Fol­low­ing Ter­mi­nal Veloc­ity, record­ings from the Bang On A Can All-Stars bal­anced explo­ration and con­sol­i­da­tion, test­ing the lim­its of the style and defin­ing it simul­ta­ne­ously. Gor­don and Lang pro­duced some more stun­ning, excit­ing music, notably with Indus­try, Deca­sia and Cheat­ing, Lying, Steal­ing…

But time passes, gasses coa­lesce, explo­sive debris falls to the earth. The exper­i­ments have become a style, and the pro­duc­tion of some com­posers has become famil­iar. In the past two sea­son, I have caught the pre­mieres of Lang’s The Lit­tle Match­stick Girl and Singing In The Dead Of Night by the col­lec­tive com­posers, and was left sad­dened that these works were entirely famil­iar, entirely pre­dictable, sound­ing like imi­ta­tions of the com­posers’ pre­vi­ous works. Bang On A Can has become an insti­tu­tion and seems to be implic­itly seek­ing both self-preservation and self-replification.

A related insti­tu­tion is MATA, and last Fri­day I caught the third night (out of four) of their 2009 fes­ti­val. Like the pre­vi­ous two events, this one fea­tured enjoy­able, capa­ble music from the young and emerg­ing com­posers MATA is ded­i­cated to pre­sent­ing, as well as some unsuc­cess­ful work. Taken in the larger con­text, this third night showed a sim­i­lar insti­tu­tional prob­lem, the prob­lem of same­ness and pre­dictabil­ity. As a col­lec­tive choice, the pro­gram­ming, despite sub­tle vari­a­tions between pieces and the worth­while qual­i­ties of the indi­vid­ual works, sought and reflected a desire for some kind of safety.

I’m sep­a­rat­ing two things here, the choices indi­vid­ual com­posers make and how well they suc­ceed, and the exis­tence of the MATA Fes­ti­val as a whole. The first half of Friday’s pro­gram was solid, mainly in the style of Bang On A Can aes­thet­ics; punchy, pulse-based, clear scor­ing, bright col­ors, sim­ple dia­tonic har­monies, long lines above faster repet­i­tive struc­tures and sequen­tial struc­tures that gen­er­ally end in a dif­fer­ent place than they start, with­out much look­ing back to their begin­nings. The style eschews most melodic and har­monic devel­op­ment in favor of con­struct­ing polyrhythms and mov­ing a pulse around and for­ward. It’s con­tem­po­rary cham­ber music with a rock sen­si­bil­ity, but not only with less fire than rock but also less fire than Yo Shake­speare. It’s acces­si­ble to the ear and appeal­ing to an audi­ence that prob­a­bly doesn’t hear much clas­si­cal music and con­sid­er­ing the back­grounds and youth of the com­posers, the style seems to be in the process of lit­eral insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion. The pieces; Jascha Narveson’s Nice Boots, Patrick Burke’s Hypno-Germ, Greg Spears’ Quiet Songs, David Crowell’s sCrAm­BLe SuIt and Magic With Every­day Objects from fes­ti­val Exec­u­tive Direc­tory Missy Maz­zoli, were all well crafted and com­mand­ingly per­formed by the NOW Ensem­ble. They all suc­ceeded on their own terms, although some of those terms were more com­pelling than oth­ers. Quiet Songs was one of the stand­outs, a two part work that explores some rel­a­tively ambi­tious emo­tional ter­ri­tory amidst an aes­thetic that is both eager to please and affect­less in equal parts. The use of pre­re­corded sound of quiet trum­pet calls and ring­ing bells gives the work a sonic space and har­monic rich­ness that sup­ports the ele­giac goal; the instru­ments play their lines at inde­pen­dent speeds and the slow, heavy under­ly­ing pulse grounds the expe­ri­ence in a place of inte­rior con­ver­sa­tions. Spears men­tions the “entropic sonic land­scapes of late-Mahler and Mor­ton Feld­man” in his notes, but the piece doesn’t really dis­in­te­grate nor lose energy, it instead devel­ops a sense of repose and dig­nity that is lovely. That’s har­mony for you.

Har­mony is also the key to the mem­o­rable suc­cess of sCrAm­BLe SuIt and Mazzoli’s piece. In the first piece, har­mony is a metaphor for cham­ber music. All the live music in the fes­ti­val was cham­ber sized music, but this was one of the few pieces of actual cham­ber music, of actual dynamic inter­play rather than purely mech­a­nized idea of fit­ting instru­ments together to pro­duce an over­all pulse-pattern. In Crowell’s work the instru­ments speak with and to each other, which, along with a key change, made all the dif­fer­ence. The piece has direc­tion, a point, a pur­pose beyond just the idea of musi­cians play­ing slightly syn­co­pated eighth notes in lay­ered pat­terns. Leave that to King Crim­son, give me cham­ber music. Magic With Every­day Objects was a break with the over­all pro­gram­ming, a slow piece about har­monic con­so­nance, dis­so­nance and dis­in­te­gra­tion, where chords are built up, pressed against each other, get knocked away, come back in new har­monies. This was not harsh dis­so­nance, but an unset­tling kind that begins in a set­tled place but can’t main­tain itself there. This is truly music about entropy, about things falling apart, and is strongly affecting.

This night’s sec­ond half was the only fail­ure of the fes­ti­val, but it was a real fail­ure. David Moore led his band Bing & Ruth in a per­for­mance accom­pa­nied by two short, silent films made by Sedastien Cros (who men­tioned in the pro­gram he’s look­ing for an Amer­i­can wife to solve a visa prob­lem … ). Bing & Ruth are a clas­si­cal drone band. They are pre­sented under the guise of con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal music and per­form long, sonorous and vaguely impro­vised drones, with the occa­sional open fifth and cctave thrown in. I say vaguely impro­vised because the music the play is easy to assem­ble by ear, in rehearsals, and there is a cer­tain free­dom within the over­all con­fines of each drone, but there is very lit­tle musi­cal activ­ity other than some per­cus­sion pat­terns and the instru­men­tal­ists repeat­ing notes. In an aes­thetic that val­ues the sonic expe­ri­ence of lis­ten­ing to rock music, they are the clas­si­cal ver­sion of Sigur Ros. It was unam­bi­tious musi­cally and bor­ing, and there is an unde­ni­ably com­fort in this kind of sonic bore­dom, it makes no demands and only asks you to sit while it reaches out to you with plan­gent vibrations.

And here is the aspect that trou­bles me — why seek such com­fort, such famil­iar­ity? Here I am con­vey­ing a per­sonal prej­u­dice, a dis­trust of the group, the herd instinct. I think for artists that’s gen­er­ally a good out­look, for com­fort in one’s own style and be deadly. Seek­ing to con­vey com­fort in music is a wor­thy goal, and Mom­pou, for exam­ple, wrote a lot of good music, but an arts insti­tu­tion pro­mot­ing com­fort is a prob­lem. I don’t know how inten­tional this was, but it was there; a patron at inter­mis­sion com­plained to me of “pablum.” The admirable excep­tion was the open­ing sound and film col­lab­o­ra­tion between Mike Ver­nusky and Daniel Moldon­ado which was a strange, com­pelling slab of crackly elec­tronic noise and someone’s over­seen night­mare. Is this truly rep­re­sen­ta­tional of the music being made by the gen­er­a­tion of com­posers MATA is sup­port­ing and pro­mot­ing? If so, then it’s time for some artis­tic frat­ri­cide — once an aes­thetic is pol­ished to per­fec­tion and show­ing no fur­ther devel­op­ment, that’s over­due. How­ever, the alter­na­tive, that MATA con­sciously choose to present only this aes­thetic, is still prob­lem­atic. They are a cul­tural insti­tu­tion, and exist to present and pro­mote ideas. If their goal is safety, then they should con­sider how see­ing safety can make an insti­tu­tion cul­tur­ally irrel­e­vant — just con­sider the New York Philharmonic.

Cul­tur­ally, is this gen­er­a­tion seek­ing safety? Per­haps this is so — the reac­tion to Ruth & Bing was thun­der­ous. I’m not sure what this is about. There are frag­ments that seem to make up parts of a whole that is as yet unclear. I was sur­prised recently to see a sep­a­rate dis­play of zom­bie books at Barnes & Noble. I’m fas­ci­nated with the zom­bie genre but am puz­zled by this pro­lif­er­a­tion. “I Walked With A Zom­bie” con­tin­ues to be affect­ing to me, just as the orig­i­nal “Night Of The Liv­ing Dead” and “Dawn Of The Dead” keep scar­ing the hell out of me. Leaf­ing through some zom­bie graphic nov­els unset­tled me — the hor­ror of the crowd, the mass chas­ing after the indi­vid­ual is deeply fright­en­ing to me, and not in the deli­cious, plea­sur­able chill that usu­ally draws peo­ple to hor­ror. I think the pop­u­lar­ity reflects an iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the zom­bie, the desire to be one, to be part of the mass, com­forted in num­bers and relin­quish­ment of respon­si­bil­ity. This is the gen­er­a­tional change from Romero’s work­ing class mon­ster of 40 years ago to the mass, undif­fer­en­ti­ated swarm peo­ple seek to lose them­selves in. It’s almost a kind of religion.

I lived in Fort Greene dur­ing the time Nel­son George writes about in this arti­cle, and have been back again now that I’ve returned to New York. It cer­tainly has changed demo­graph­i­cally. I remem­ber when the first semi-fancy restau­rant opened, it seemed rev­o­lu­tion­ary. Now com­posers live there, and hip­sters and white fam­i­lies. I used to hear auto­matic weapons fire at night along the edge of Bed-Stuy. I’m not roman­ti­ciz­ing any of that, because it’s good that New York City is so much safer now that 20 years ago. Strangely, the music of the gen­er­a­tion expe­ri­enc­ing this safety may not be con­sid­er­ing the value of an aes­thetic alter­na­tive. I over­head a bit of con­ver­sa­tion at the bar among some rec­og­niz­able new music musi­cians. There were dis­cussing music to be played at Tan­gle­wood this sum­mer, and one men­tioned George Rochberg, to which another replied that Rochberg is “cheezy.” Cheezy? Not hardly. The word is not apt, but if any­thing is cheezy it is a solid line of major tri­ads, straight eighth notes and pre­dictable pop song type struc­tures. Rochberg him­self embraced aes­thetic dan­ger, he aban­doned the ser­ial school of com­pos­ing, lit­er­ally loos­ing friends and col­leagues, out of deep per­sonal need and ended up writ­ing music that is aggres­sive, dark, lyri­cal, exco­ri­at­ing, pow­er­ful and mov­ing. He did not seek safety, and did not make cheese.

Tech­nol­ogy may have some­thing to do with this as well. This is the gen­er­a­tion that has come of age with Finale and Pro Tools. Mak­ing music on a com­puter is in many ways quite easy, and cer­tainly pro­duc­ing engraved-quality parts on a laser­jet printer is a huge advan­tage. But the com­puter also makes it too easy to loop and copy and paste, rep­e­ti­tion is built into the means of pro­duc­tion. Mak­ing pulse-pattern music is as easy as work­ing out a few lines in a sequencer, loop­ing, copy­ing, than trans­fer­ring from MIDI to score. There is a dan­ger in the seduc­tive ease of pro­duc­ing these sequen­tial struc­tures, and a huge advan­tage of pen­cil and blank score paper. The music of Gus­tav Mahler took an extreme leap in expres­sion, imag­i­na­tion, spon­tane­ity and fecun­dity when he stopped writ­ing a piano score first and began writ­ing the orches­tral score directly; the ver­ti­cal sweep began to match and exceed the hor­i­zon­tal development.

I must again repeat so this is clear; the results are often well-made, solid, enjoy­able pieces of music. That is the indi­vid­ual choice. But why should any insti­tu­tion be pro­mot­ing safety in music as ‘emerg­ing,’ or pre­sent­ing it as any­thing other than anthro­po­log­i­cal? And what­ever hap­pened to epa­ter les bour­go­isie? Again, safety for the indi­vid­ual is one thing, it’s valu­able and desir­able. Safety in the arts is a very dif­fer­ent thing, limn­ing deca­dence. This is not a time to be play­ing it safe. After eight years of fear, seek­ing pro­tec­tion from false father-figures and the dam­age that has done to our cul­ture and coun­try, with a com­pletely unsteady future on the hori­zon, it’s time remem­ber the good old bad days, and con­sider that the Sex Pis­tols may have made ter­ri­ble music, but they were, and still are, absolutely nec­es­sary. We can­not ensconce our­selves in refuges and ignore the world out­side our doors, it’s nei­ther eth­i­cal nor moral. And at least some of our music should be reflect­ing that.

Other con­tem­po­rary artists are not play­ing it so safe — the music I’ve seen at Roulette recently is full of dar­ing and doesn’t always suc­ceed, but it fails at try­ing some­thing that gets beyond the rou­tine and the accepted, which is a valu­able kind of fail­ure, while suc­ceed­ing at exceed­ingly mod­est goals can­not sus­tain thriv­ing art. My week ended with a con­cert that was entirely dif­fer­ent than MATA, that sur­pris­ingly took far more chances, that failed in many ways and yet was com­pletely won­der­ful. That was the Brook­lyn Con­ser­va­tory Com­mu­nity Orches­tra’s per­for­mance of Brit­ten, Mahler and Cop­land at the pro­saically sump­tu­ous Ply­mouth Church of the Pil­grims in Brook­lyn Heights. The pro­gram was the Sim­ple Sym­phony, Lei­der eines fahren­den Gesellen, and Appalachian Spring — imag­i­na­tive and solid but not dar­ing. Unless you con­sider that this is a com­mu­nity orches­tra, with a few capa­ble play­ers and most strug­gling through their parts, but all ages and races play­ing nonethe­less. So the strings were unco­or­di­nated, the brass rough, the wood­winds out of tune. But Music Direc­tor Dorothy Sav­itch led them along through the scores with­out con­ced­ing any­thing to the qual­ity of the ensem­ble, and in the Mahler soloist Daniella Car­valho was indeed solid, with a lovely, rich voice. In absolute terms, the musi­cians failed to play the parts, but they were will­ing to get up in front of a robust crowd and make music. Safety was no issue, music-making was, and they made won­der­ful music.

Appalachian Spring was a bril­liant choice — the music is well known and, although it’s not easy to play, seems apt for a com­mu­nity orches­tra. I’ve heard a lot of com­plaints about Cop­land being a faux-populist, even from John Adams, but on that I call bull­shit. Cop­land was a good com­poser who decided he wanted to make music that was meant for a national audi­ence, and wrote good music which sat­is­fied that goal. That is not so dif­fer­ent than the idea of mak­ing con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal cham­ber music that appeals to a rock aes­thetic, and cer­tainly noth­ing like the con­de­scend­ing, smug igno­rance of Ayn Rand, who sought out des­per­ate rubes to sell her snake oil to. Hear­ing this ensem­ble calmly strug­gle through the lyri­cal bright­ness of Cop­land, the con­vivial energy of the Brit­ten, the regret­ful long­ing of the Mahler was truly mov­ing, the idea of mak­ing com­mu­nity music in this spe­cial­ized age is so valu­able. It’s also dar­ing, because the added inti­macy of play­ing for our friends and neigh­bors means they are emo­tion­ally com­mit­ted to your suc­cess and fail­ure. Emo­tion­ally, this pro­gram cov­ered a far greater range of human expe­ri­ence, ecsta­tic and tragic, than did the MATA Fes­ti­val. The nice, full sound of the orches­tra as they reached the Shaker tune “Sim­ple Gifts” was a com­plex and un-ironic expres­sion of the accep­tance of human expe­ri­ence. The encore, the “Hoe-Down” from Rodeo, was eas­ily the most dif­fi­cult thing they assayed. Stum­bling but always end­ing up on their feet, they closed the bar door to tremen­dously excited applause.

This marked the BCCO as a cul­tur­ally rel­e­vant insti­tu­tion. They are mak­ing music for their com­mu­nity. This is uniquely impor­tant, because music is the glue of civ­i­liza­tion. It is lan­guage that makes us human and brings us together in groups, and musi­cal lan­guage I believe came before any other kind, it was self-consciousness at mak­ing musi­cal sound that made us con­scious. And after one makes music, one makes music with another, and so civ­i­liza­tion is born. And it comes with a lot of hor­ri­ble prob­lems, but it’s the best we’ve got, and the strug­gle to keep it together is con­stant and nec­es­sary. Mak­ing music for and with each other is essen­tial. Con­sis­tently show­ing what is pos­si­ble in music-making is essen­tial, and hat involves sur­prise, con­found­ing expec­ta­tions and pro­vok­ing unan­tic­i­pated responses. Com­fort is cer­tainly an impor­tant part of our lives, and safety that of our well-being, and those will pre­serve civ­i­liza­tion as long as we’re sat­is­fied with where it is. In terms of val­ues, we can­not be sat­is­fied with where it is. So we need music to be a lit­tle dan­ger­ous now and again.