Music: Healing the Rift
Ivan Hewett Continuum Books, 272 pp.

Most musically sophisticated readers will violently disagree with this tome, the latest in a long line of books, manifestoes, and rants railing against the ostensible dissolution and self-destruction of classical music - you know, the three B's: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and their latter-day (and sometimes naughtily non-tonal) descendants. Most of these cranks try to prove the universal and incontestable physiological basis of tonality - a hoary idea, which, when taken as a whole, the multifarious musics of the world soundly refute with myriad tuning systems and pan-tonal practices. Others seek to rescue tonality by associating sound with color, or more amusingly, attempt to initiate regressive movements by coining or poaching still-obscure terms such as Neo-Melodism, the Derriere Guard, and the New Formalism.

Not the cavils of a crank but a thoughtful, penetrating, yet ultimately misguided reading of music that ranks with Henry Pleasants' must-read 1955 screed The Agony of Modern Music, Ivan Hewett's Music: Healing the Rift outlines and bemoans the main musical rifts of the last century: between audiences and composers; composers and tradition; classical music and society at large; and the multiple 'rifts' created by our era's efflorescence of styles and compositional strategies.

On the current state of concert hall music, Hewett gets many things right, but his misunderstanding of free improvisation - "The whole effort of the players in these groups goes towards eliminating any trace of memory or habit from the sounds they make." (p. 145) - and capricious dismissal of electro-acoustic music blinds him to the most exciting developments in art music of the last 30 years.

I did enjoy Hewett's outline of the six salient sonic features of modernist classical music, his sly satire of programme notes, and a pointed deflation of numbers in music that begins "But numbers can be manipulated in all kinds of ways which owe nothing to musical craft or tradition." (p. 111) His short, sharp discussions of composers Helmut Lachenmann, Salvatore Sciarrino, John Adams, and others bristle with acute observations, though I cannot countenance the coronation of Pierre Boulez as "...the conscience, as well as the mind, of contemporary music." (p. 109) Read Rocco Di Pietro's Dialogues with Boulez to find out how Boulez fundamentally misunderstands the music of Feldman, Scelsi, and other 20th century masters.

Music: Healing the Rift is well-written and eminently readable; to rebut every wrongheaded point in the book could consume dozens of pages. Does anyone really believe that "...classical music stands on three legs - rationality, democracy, tradition..."? (p. 258) I suspect most composers and orchestra musicians would giggle and/or sob at such a suggestion. The real rift - between audiences and adventurous music - may be mended simply by education and exposure. In high school English class, my classmates and I spent hundreds of hours reading novels and short stories either silently or aloud. Guess how much class time we spent intently listening to lengthy, complete, complex pieces of music (or music at all)? Zero. And I sang in the choir and hoofed my way through two musicals! Today, focused listening remains a self-taught art - no wonder the audience for adventurous music is so small.

Ultimately, Hewett and I (and I bet you do too) hear contemporary classical, out-jazz, noise, free improvisation, lowercase sound, and other new, adventurous musics with radically differing ears. Citing Minimalist pieces like Steve Reich's 1967 Piano Phase he declares "It's pleasant to be given a holiday from oneself, to feel the normal darting activity of one's mental and emotional life soothed by the minimalist tick and euphonious chords." (p. 188) In Piano Phase I hear beauty and have sometimes been moved to tears; this suggests to me that Hewett missed the biggest rift of all: that subsequent generations listen differently, new works grow old, and a few old works become classics.

Published in Signal to Noise Fall 2004, no. 35, p. 55

Rhythm Science
Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid The MIT Press, 131 pp + CD

Wide-ranging books on music tend to traverse one of two paths. The traditional route demands sifting through an array of artists, cataloguing multitudes of musical macro- and micro-movements, and arranging the information into an ordered, coherent, insightful narrative. The other option is to "rhapsodize and ramble" by amassing an improbable roster of seminal figures, obscure historical tidbits, general trends, and personal anecdotes only to synthesize it all into an eminently readable, nourishing, and at times bracingly poetic, narrative. Rhapsodizing and rambling is risky, but pays off in books such as David Toop's Ocean of Sound and Douglas Kahn's Noise Water Meat, which reward the reader with insights into even the smallest crevices of music history.

In the essays that comprise Rhythm Science, Paul D. Miller, better known as illbient pioneer DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, rhapsodizes and rambles while exploring his concept of "rhythm science" or how artists create and cope with the continual flow of patterns and sound in culture. Early in the book, Miller declares "This book is a theater of networks, of correspondences that turn in on themselves and drift into the ether like smoke-rings blown in an airless nightclub." He's right. Regrettably, much of this slender tome reads like an unedited interview from Wired magazine circa 1998 when words such as "digitality" and "dataspace" were emblems of an immanent hyperlinked future where everyone prospered at a dot.com, wore narrow-framed chic-geek glasses, and expected holographic heads-up displays to hit the market by 2001.

Throughout the book, Miller asserts several definitions of rhythm science: "Rhythm science is a forensic investigation of sound as a vector of a coded language that goes from the physical to the informational and back again." Another definition rolls the good and bad elements of the book into a single paragraph: "With rhythm science, what the Surrealists called 'automatic writing' - transforming subconscious thoughts into formalized artistic acts - gets flipped, becomes a gangsta dreamtime remix. Rhythm science models itself on open-source Linux-coded [sic: Linux is an OS, not a programming language] operating systems, becomes a mode of psychogeographic shareware for the open market in a world where identity is for sale to the highest bidder. Screen time. Prime time: Life as a boundless level video game with an infinite array of characters to pick from." A superb comment on automatic writing mingles with fleeting assertions, provocative yet unexplained analogies, poetic eruptions, and vapid academic cant that says nothing: an editor should have intervened.

Rhythm Science is an uneven book, though good tidbits abound. Miller is at his best recounting his past and describing his work as DJ Spooky. In the essay "Districts" he explains Dub by drawing an analogy to Robert Rauschenberg buying a drawing in 1953 from Willem de Kooning only to erase it into a new work of art. And here's a starting point for anyone who wants to pioneer the field of sonic ethnography: "It's amazing, to this day, if somebody gets into a beat, there's a whole structure that goes into that rhythm to the point where you can actually see exactly what people's tastes are, what weird niche they inhabit. Your taste and preferences become mapped onto the specific structure of the rhythm."

The accompanying CD reminded me of my own weird musical niche. Many of the 78 minute disc's 32 tracks mix the voices of 20th century literary giants such as ee cummings, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and the now-obligatory William S. Burroughs with samples of Oval, Giacinto Scelsi, Kim Cascone, Scanner, and other contemporary sonic explorers. Alas, I found these skilled, sultry, and often sonically engaging remixes frustrating. Offering little innovation and taking too few risks, captivating segments usually lapse into beat-driven sections of little interest. Indeed, most of these tracks envelop the metrically fluid voices of sampled poets and composers in an all too common cloak of 4/4 hip-hop and other club-oriented beats. On this disc, DJ Spooky is better without beats.

There are two senses of "science" at play in this book, one that marks Rhythm Science a failure, the other a success. I expected, perhaps erroneously, that the book would be closer to the exploratory and lucid sense of "science." I had hoped that Rhythm Science would blaze a trail out of the current rhythmic (and cretinously percussion obsessed) cul de sac of dance music, which is sorely in need of a lyrical yet perpetually disruptive rhythmic propulsion based on irresistible pulsation, shifting meters, protean timbres, and elastic tempi. How else can we shake awake and liberate the masses of people who find false communion in the sped-up flailing and quasi-Nazi sieg heils at the latter-day Nurembergs of dance clubs and arena concerts? But Rhythm Science is not a manifesto.

Rhythm Science's other sense of "science" suggests a connection to "Myth Science" (think Sun Ra) and "Dub Science" (King Tubby, Scientist, Augustus Pablo, et al.). Alternately, the book is part of a successful lineage of exploration by disruption and verbal incantation of which classic examples include Cecil Taylor's liner notes to Unit Structures and Stockhausen's essay ...how time passes.... Personally, I prefer clear and lucid writing, but sometimes impenetrable cant nonetheless leads baffled souls to new vistas.

Published in Signal to Noise Spring 2004, no. 33, pp. 45-46

Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music
Edited by Rob Young Continuum Books, 2003

Here's an inside tip for budding book reviewers. Never accept an advance proof copy for review; you might end up quoting a passage edited out of the published edition. Included in the proof of Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music is a marvelously poetic quote from editor Rob Young that was excised from the final version: "Miles Davis called it 'Yesternow.' In the present there is embedded a tapestry of past events, timelines, narratives grand or trivial, sidelines, tracks or traces, spurs all but washed to invisibility by the weather of years."

Trying to untangle and coherently weave together the apparently disparate strings and knots of adventurous modern music will frustrate all but the most encyclopedic-minded scholars. Connections abound between sound poetry and musique concrète, Futurism and free improvisation, musical automata and sound sculpture, and on and on, yet faced with the ongoing torrential influx of new work - coupled with our era’s seemingly perpetual (re)discovery of pioneers - can anyone unravel the whole story?

Undercurrents tries to cut this Gordian knot with a collection of essays that range and sprawl across the 20th century from Smiley Face buttons, Sun Ra, and Harry Smith to Henry David Thoreau, Tristan Tzara, and Matthew Shipp. Mostly recycled from the probing "Undercurrents" and "Tangents" columns published by The Wire magazine in 1999 and 2000, this collection will reward, frustrate, delight and aggravate. By avoiding a linear, chronological approach, Undercurrents' 20 essays - grouped under headings such as "Electrification" and "Occultism" - draw interesting and intriguing connections with often fervid rhetoric that nonetheless simmers with good insights.

Erik Davis' essay "Recording Angels: The Esoteric Origins of the Phonograph" leaps and bounds from Beethoven ("I am electrical by nature") to Morse (inventor of the telegraph) back to 17th century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. In breathless, compelling prose, Davis probes the connective tissue of the telegraph, Spiritualism, radio, Electronic Voice Phenomenon, and Franz Anton Mesmer, who not only left the verb 'mesmerize' in his wake but unwittingly fashioned a prototype of psychoanalysis.

The reliably insightful David Toop makes two excellent contributions, "Humans Are They Really Necessary: Sound Art, Automata and Musical Sculpture" and "Frames of Freedom, " the latter of which masterfully recounts the 20th century’s multiple manifestations of free improvisation from the caterwauling cacophonous performances of the Dada poets to Tristano & Co. in the late 1940s through Albert Ayler to today. My favorite piece was Julian Cowley's "The Limits of Language: Textual Apocalypse: Merz, Lettrism, Sound Poetry." This inviting essay offers a road map for further exploration of the fertile yet still-overlooked field of poésie sonore. Despite the lengthy titles, every page of Undercurrents is eminently readable and free of nonsensical jargon.

The book, although engaging, is no substitute for a thorough history, nor does it advertise itself as such. But by drawing rhapsodic, pillar-to-post connections, several facts inevitably get left out. "Worship the Glitch" allocates several paragraphs to Oval but omits an oft-forgotten pioneer of skipping CDs, Nicolas Collins. Also the stuttering and skipping in early 1980s pop music attributed to the appearance of the "Fairlight sequencer" (actually the Fairlight CMI was a sampler, synthesizer, and sequencer) should be credited in tandem to another, much more prevalent sampler, the Emulator II. Appallingly absent from the discussion of granular synthesis are two pioneers, Iannis Xenakis and Barry Truax, though the former does crop up in a later essay. Otherwise insightful, Marcus Boon's "The Eternal Drone" nonsensically characterizes Lou Reed's feral and spiky Metal Machine Music as a "dronework" Boon also neglects to address the chief problem of Just Intonation, which, like any other pitch-based music, is prone to be out of tune due to fallible performers and cantankerous instruments as well as vulnerable to variables in playback equipment and room acoustics.

I wondered too, about the purpose of "Smiling Faces Sometimes: Soul Music's Grinners Versus the Backstabbers." This essay, a thoughtful and at times fanciful interpretation of lyrics to several early 1970s Soul classics, has nothing to do with adventurous experimental music. Mainstream R&B, Soul, Funk, and Jazz assuredly spawned some exploratory and experimental music; a link should have been made to a breathtaking, structurally ambitious yet neglected experimental masterpiece of that era, James Brown's elephantine I'm Paying Taxes What Am I Buying? And what about the shared sonic trajectory of lengthy one-chord workouts like the aptly titled Doing it to Death and Minimalism? Or the territory shared by Progressive Rock (Genesis, Yes, Egg, et al.), Miles Davis' live real-time jazz-rock collages like Agharta, and James Brown's elongated live version of Make It Funky from Revolution of the Mind: Live At the Apollo Volume 3? Or the quick snippets of surreal sound and dialogue that pepper popular LPs of that era such as James Brown's Reality or Earth Wind & Fire's Gratitude?

What would make Undercurrents a great book? First, some pictures. Undercurrents has not one single image. Why weren’t any of the photos that accompanied the original columns in The Wire reproduced? My desktop publishing days are long gone, but I do know that Undercurrents' font, a non-serif Helvetica variant, combined with the typesetters' refusal to hyphenate lengthy words yields unattractive, sometimes hard-on-the-eyes paragraphs. The otherwise welcome Bibliography/Discography is not only alphabetized inconsistently but frequently confuses dates of creation with dates of publication. Thus Rykodisc apparently released Freak Out! by The Mothers of Invention in 1966 - before Rykodisc existed! And Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, issued by RCA in 1975, has never been re-released (though Castle Communications did so in the early 1990s and BMG, RCA's corporate parent, followed suit a few years later). To forestall confusion, dates of creation and dates of publication should have been listed, but few music books bother, so I suppose I'm nit-picking.

Quibbles aside, Undercurrents is a good book that belongs on the shelf of every maker and maven of adventurous music. New Music novices may get lost (or inspired!) amid the avalanche of names and historical events, but forearmed with a few exemplary sources such as Joel Chadabe's Electric Sound, Roger Sutherland's New Perspectives in Music, Derek Bailey's Improvisation, and Michael Nyman's Experimental Music, any reading of Undercurrents will be much more rewarding.

Published in Signal to Noise Summer 2003, no. 30, pp. 44-45

The Origins of Music
Edited by Nils L. Wallin, Björn Merker, and Steven Brown MIT Press, 2001

Neither an apologia for a madman's speculative schema (which would have been the case a century ago when the lack of mass communication made it easier to be a visionary crackpot) nor a comprehensive history, The Origins of Music grapples with the possible biological basis of music. This anthology traverses tremendous swaths of intriguing territory, beginning with birdsongs, ape calls, whalesong, and the neurology of the human brain, and concluding with speculations about universals in music. The precise answer, like much of music history before 1000 AD, remains a mystery, but these thoughtful articles teem with mind-expanding possibilities. From the idea that music and language co-evolved (rather than begetting one or the other), to music's use in sex selection (try telling that to this experimental musician!) and group bonding, to the probably fruitless quest of finding any universals in music, Origins will delight and infuriate makers and mavens of adventurous music.

As expected, the nature of music and Tonality (yes, with a capital T) loom throughout the book. Harry Jerison conjures the spirit of John Cage (and by implication, dismisses the possibility of a secret animal culture) by observing "To identify the vocal behavior of their species as musical, is, after all, a human activity." (p. 178) Bemoaning that "...young researchers in [the] cognitive psychology of music still shy away from addressing problems related to atonal music." (p. 455), Michel Imberty confirmed my suspicion that researchers usually use Tonal music (like Bach Partitas) as a yardstick.

Origins contains a few missteps, too. While I was heartened that the discoverers of a 40,000 year-old prehistoric flute (coolly described as a "flutelike perforated thighbone of a young cave bear") experimented with assorted embouchures and did not seem intent on exhuming a diatonic ur-scale (call it Cowell's Law: those seeking a musical scale will find one), I'm surprised no one thought to chart the tones made by partially covering the flute holes. Suspect too, are studies comparing the brains of musicians and non-musicians. Researchers assume a "musician" to be someone trained to make music and erroneously fail to include (or at least indicate) those who are self-taught music makers. Be wary also, of researchers using six to nine-month old infants to detect innate preferences for consonant tones. Who knows how many Tonal lullabies, TV commercials, and pop songs the young tykes have already heard by then!

My other quibbles are minor. A few of the articles suffer from unraveling clauses and poor paragraphing. I encountered very little jargon, but the editors should have pared the occasional clunky term ("rhythmicity," "featural," "emotionality," "intentionality," and the probable fount of all superfluously suffixed words, "modality") down to their simple yet still-potent roots: "rhythmic", "emotional," "mode," and so forth. Nonetheless, Origins is eminently readable and contains many gems for the casual reader. My favorites included several pages summarizing the roots of birdsong (p. 49-52), a critique of a reconstruction of Neanderthal speech ability (p. 221), a cogent explanation of Darwin's theory of natural selection (p. 331), and five speedy paragraphs recounting the history of the word "aesthetic" (p. 416). To absorb the thought-provoking ideas and potential cocktail chatter (Loud calls of modern monkeys and apes do not have a steady pulse or beat), the book should be read piecemeal. By deploying an arresting web of scholarly research, Origins also deflates the kind of amateur and pseudo-academic speculation that insists on Universal Music. Vital reading for anyone interested in the (ahem) nature of music!

Published in Signal to Noise Spring 2002, no. 25, pp. 58-59

microsound
By Curtis Roads MIT Press, (with compact disc) 2002

Given the title, you might expect this tome to profile Bernhard Günter, Francisco Lòpez, and others who work in lowercase sound. Alas, we're a few decades away from a comprehensive chronicle, yet those who are interested in lowercase sound or practitioners thereof will find Curtis Roads' microsound of great interest. While most musicians are familiar with thinking about sound in terms of waves, microsound examines ways to synthesize, process, and analyze sound in terms of particles.

Roads, a composer, granular synthesis pioneer, and author of the standard textbook The Computer Music Tutorial, writes in a clear, engaging manner about the ideas of pioneers such as Gabor, Xenakis, and Stockhausen; read chapter 2 to understand Stockhausen's famously opaque essay ".....how time passes.....". Roads' ample catalog of particle synthesis techniques (glissons, grainlets, trainlets, particle cloning, and others) as well as the description of convolution (not to mention other processing techniques) and the thoughtful chapter "Aesthetics of Composing with Microsound" are crisp and comprehensible.

The math-phobic may blanche at the equations in chapter 6 "Windowed Analysis and Transformation" but Roads' clear explanations offer good guidance for those of us who didn't make it past trigonometry. Roads remains relatively jargon-free, too; when "sonify" shows up on page 176, the term is defined ("to translate data into sound") and justified. I suspect another coinage, "pluriphonic" is less convincing and too homophonic with "pleurisy" to endure, but I am nit-picking.

My only quarrel is with the accompanying compact disc, which is helpfully packed with excerpts of pieces made with granular synthesis (including a snippet of Xenakis' Analogique A et B and several morsels of Roads' own pioneering work). The 68 tracks effectively illustrate the synthesis models discussed in the text. Why then, doesn't the text directly refer to specific tracks on the CD? Even a discreet sidebar or footnote would be preferable to continually flipping to the back of the book for a corresponding audio example. Also, the 58 minute-long CD should have included at least one complete piece. Instead of a 26 second blip, why not include all 8 minutes of Prototype, Roads' 1975 study of automated granular synthesis? But these are minor complaints.

Like Arthur Benade's Horns, Strings and Harmony of yore, microsound is stuffed with ideas for creative musicians. Those who make electroacoustic music will benefit greatly. There are three levels to working with electroacoustic music software: using the tools to create, understanding how the tools work (including the principles behind the presets and parameters) and creating the tools. The book is an entryway into the middle level and an invaluable aid to conceptualize the processing of sound. Indeed, for all listeners and musicians, microsound does what good music book is supposed to do: offer and inspire new ways of hearing and making music.

Published in Signal to Noise Fall 2002, no. 27, p. 53

Minimalism: Origins
By Edward Strickland Indiana University Press, 2000

This expansive book charts the origins of Minimalist artists such as Robert Morris and Donald Judd as well as musical Minimalism from LaMonte Young onward to Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Densely written, Minimalism can be tough going, but the bounty of information and depth of research set a standard for other musical movements in need of a historical summary: Japanese Noise and American Electro-Acoustic music. One drawback: I don't know if the hardcover published in 1993 had many illustrations, but the softcover has an overly minimal four, so you'll want to supplement your reading with a trip to the library, or by prowling through Half-Price Books.

Published in the Tentacle Summer 2001, p. 30

Dialogues with Boulez
Conducted by Rocco Di Pietro Scarecrow Press, 2001

In the late 1940s, composer Pierre Boulez was one of the original Twelve-Tone Apaches, applying serial principles not only to pitch but also to other elements of music, including rhythm and dynamics. An enfant terrible, Boulez savaged more than his share of sacred cows, famously leading a booing claque against Stravinsky, deriding his teacher Messiaen, and limning the limitations of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. His infamous Structures Book One (1951-2) for two pianos and Le marteau sans maître (1953-55) established his reputation as a composer with an astute ear for inhumanly complex rhythms and ravishing timbres.

During the Sixties and Seventies, Boulez found fame as conductor of the New York Philharmonic and BBC Symphony, where he programmed a passel of contemporary Classical Music, much to the distress of the greybeards in the audience. Boulez's busy schedule of conducting engagements coupled with his hornswoggling the French government into underwriting and appointing him head of IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) curtailed his composing, which had always flowed at a trickle anyway. An inveterate reviser, Boulez has revisited almost all of his works, subjecting them to withdrawal (Polyphonie X), orchestral transcription (the Notations for piano), and thorough revision (Mémoriale, Répons), as well as leaving many (Third Piano Sonata, ...explosante-fixe...) incomplete or open-ended. A trenchant essayist and commentator, Boulez's writings have been collected in several books, notably Notes of An Apprenticeship and Orientations.

Both an introduction and an update, Dialogues captures Boulez explaining his views on many composers including Scelsi, Feldman, Cage, and Varèse ("Look at Ameriques — there is no elaboration of material. All you have are simple juxtapositions... "). Di Pietro is an engaging interlocutor, and his well-considered questions elicit ample answers. The Dialogues range over many topics from background information on recent compositions Anthèmes 2 and the vertiginous Sur Incises, to a keen critique of Stockhausen's technique of formula composition, to a fascinating discussion of "tools" and "values" in composition. This slender but dense book will be a provocative addition to any musician's bookshelf.

Published in the Tentacle Summer 2001, p. 29

Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language
Edited by Brandon LaBelle and Christof Migone
Errant Bodies Press and Ground Fault Recordings, (with compact disc) 2001

Music, Electronic Media and Culture
Edited by Simon Emmerson Ashgate, 2000

Topical anthologies tend to take one of three paths: encyclopedically encapsulating the subject, or summarizing the state of the art, or curating a complex combination of historical and current work. Writing Aloud ambitiously strives for the latter and veers from the brilliant to the inexplicably pedestrian. The book's essays, interviews, scores, and photographs sprawl gloriously from Bart Plantenga's arresting cross-cultural overview of yodeling to David Dunn's score for Madrigal to Nicholas Zurbrugg's knotty but ultimately rewarding ruminations on connections between sound poetry and the avant-garde. Apart from some dubious poetry and unremarkable photos, there are many other fine essays as well as intriguing interviews with Robert Ashley and Alvin Lucier.

I was thrilled by the CD's archival tracks (Arthur Petronio: Tellurgie from 1965, Vito Acconci's Body Building in the Great Northwest, and Marina Abramovic's Freeing the Voice, both from 1975) and can easily recommend most of the remaining pieces such as the extract of Chion's Gloria and Whitehead's Market Share. A few of the tracks, seeming to have nothing to do with language or writing, mystified me, though. For those interested in the long-form intersection of text and music, Randy Hostetler's Once Upon a Time, Glenn Gould's Solitude Trilogy, and J.K. Randall's unnerving intimacy (a polemic) merit investigation. Quibbles aside, this bold anthology is a bargain.

By contrast Music, Electronic Media and Culture is more consistent, but takes fewer risks. I was mildly annoyed at the bibliography blithely listing CD release dates instead of those all-important dates of creation. While it's unlikely that most adventurous musicians will think Stockhausen's Kontakte and Wishart's Red Bird were composed in the early 1990s, others might be misled.

Nonetheless, despite the occasional ungainly terms such as "problematise" and "paradigmatic", the essays are well written and teem with marvelous insights, such as "The modern tendency to regard tradition as a series of historical objects and as the antithesis of innovation... fails to acknowledge that traditions, to have continuing social currency, tend to change constantly. A contrasting Japanese attitude towards history and tradition is best exemplified by the case of a national shrine — a fourteenth century Buddhist temple — which is completely rebuilt from new materials every two years, and in which the tradition is regarded as not residing in the object itself but in the continuing knowledge of appropriate materials and building techniques." (Simon Waters, "Beyond the Acousmatic").

And this jolt from editor Simon Emmerson: "We should not forget that the phrase avant-garde was first used by Henri de Saint-Simon in France (1825) at almost exactly the same time as Mendelssohn's inauguration of the museum culture in Western concert music with the revival of Bach's St. Matthew's Passion (1829) — the past and the future at once..."

Robert Worby's "Cacophony " offers eminently readable pillar-to-post explanations of Fourier analysis, harmonic partials, and guitar pickups as well as good summaries of the Futurists, early Minimalism, and Industrial music, though I wish he had devoted a few more sentences to Japanese Noise. Also included is Chris Cutler's indispensable "Plunderphonics," which outlines historical antecedents (Hindemith and Respighi, yikes!) and masterfully explores the swirl of contentious copyright issues. Unlike the recent Arcana essays edited by John Zorn, I suspect neither of these fine anthologies will get much press, but they are both well worth owning.

Published in the Tentacle Summer 2001, pp. 30-31

Modulations: A History of Electronic Music Throbbing Words On Sound
Edited by Peter Shapiro Caipirinha, 2000

Modulations, a vertiginous documentary on electronic music released in 1998, now has an accompanying book. Like the movie, the book version of Modulations mentions the pioneers of electronic music, but after an introductory chapter, the informative essays focus on disco, house, jungle, downtempo, and other underground but essentially pop-derived musics. The book's excellent design and stylish monochrome photos invite the eye across the page, which makes me regret the book's yawning gaps. The absence of computer music (where's Music V and its offspring Csound in the technology chapter?), Japanese (and other) Noise, lowercase sound, acousmatic music, and field recordings confirm that Modulations' idea of Electronic Music remains rooted in the pop song.

Published in the Tentacle Spring 2001, p.23

The Art of Electronic Music
Compiled by Tom Darter and edited by Greg Armbruster Quill, 1984

Vintage Synthesizers
By Mark Vail Miller Freeman Books, 2000

Every musician I know can cite a music magazine that inspired and influenced them. For me, Keyboard (née Contemporary Keyboard in 1975) embraced and profiled artists ranging from the then-ubiquitous Keith Emerson to Cecil Taylor to Glenn Gould. Alas, their catholic embrace is all but extinct; unlike many new music magazines today which plaster a semi-popular star on the cover and hide Salvatore Sciarrino or Bernhard Günter somewhere inside, Contemporary Keyboard put a variety of musicians on the cover, including all of the aforementioned keyboardists. Inside, a diverse panel of columnists addressed topics such as classic jazz progressions (Billy Taylor), George Crumb's Makrokosmos III (David Burge) unusual modulation routing (Bob Moog) and Thaddeus Cahill's Telharmonium (Tom Rhea). The folks who published CK also had the savvy to anthologize and republish their best material in magazine one-shots like Keyboard Wizards and in books like Synthesizer Technique, The Art of Electronic Music and Vintage Synthesizers.

Although out of print, The Art of Electronic Music is easy to find, since the bulk of the book - recycled interviews with 1970s titans Keith Emerson, Tomita, Jan Hammer and others - make it look very out of date and thus tends to be priced inexpensively at garage sales and used bookstores. Laced with anecdotes, the interviews with those bygone titans focus mostly on gear, musical influences, and struggles with obstreperous equipment. Some of the interviews have aged well; highlights include Vladimir Ussachevsky's informative account of the early days of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio and Brian Eno's provocative discussion of Oblique Strategies.

What makes the book essential are the first few chapters on early electronic music. Culled from Tom Rhea's Electronic Perspectives column (which to this day demands to be published as a coffee table book) these chapters ("Electro-Mechanical Instruments", "Photo-Electric Instruments" and "Music and the Computer") offer a glimpse at the fits and starts of inventing electronic music instruments. Diagrams, photos, and lucid layperson explanations of instruments such as Hugo Gernsback's Pianorad, the Ondes Martenot and Trautonium along with more popularly known instruments like the Theremin and the Hammond organ make this book worth the price of admission.

Vintage Synthesizers picks up where The Art of Electronic Music left off. For those who own a vintage synth or two, the book may have the same effect as those nudie photography books from the 1960s. Advertised in magazines like Man's World and True Detective, those "studies of the nude form" ostensibly published for aspiring photographers, served only to satiate base lusts. A calm look at Vintage Synthesizers yielded some interesting observations. Except the FM synths and Buchla-designed instruments, most of the instruments in the book have piano-style keys with all the tuning and tonality implied therein. The orchestral and usually organesque use of synthesizers proves that new instruments don't always translate into new music, so why should adventurous musicians bother with the book?

Aside from the first-person accounts of how designing a mass-produced object can constrict the inventor's impulse and compromise an instrument, adventurous musicians can use the synthesis concepts described in Vintage Synthesizers as a springboard for designing their own instruments using Csound or other software synths like VAZ or Reaktor. Instrument builders may also find the better panel designs (particularly the Roland Jupiter 8) useful for their own projects. Subversives can also use the implied parameters of the successful instruments as a baseline from which to jettison the prerequisites of a mass-produced object such as reproducibility, stability, predictable life-span, fixed controls, and so forth.

Published in the Tentacle Spring 2001, pp. 22-23

I picked my favorites from reviews appearing in the Seattle Weekly, the Tentacle, the Stranger, Signal to Noise and other magazines from 1999 to 2003.

Harry Partch: The Wayward
(Wergo, CD)
It is an unfortunate irony that most fans of Harry Partch (1901-1974) - including this writer - know and love the work of this masterly thinker and musician through his recordings rather than live, corporeal performances of his work. A giant of the 20th century, Partch was a stubborn iconoclast, a visionary theorist, and a musical revolutionary.

What makes Harry Partch great? Here's an unjustly brief summary: Partch's insistence on corporeality - that concerts should break free of the tight shoes, tight coats (and by implication, tight asses) of formal concert life - and merging the roles of musicians, dancers, and actors by fusing dance, drama, poetry, music in his live performances. Partch's book Genesis of a Music offered perhaps the best way out of the so-called problem of tonality and established him as a seminal figure of the microtonal movement. Inspired by Helmholtz's On the Sensations of Tone and spurred by early attempts at modifying traditional instruments, Partch revived and systematized just intonation unlike any theorist before or since. But wait, there's more.

Partch's insistence on documenting his work makes him one of the first 20th century composers to take a direct hand in recording and distributing his own music. Like Sun Ra and his Saturn label, Partch used his GATE 5 label to market his music through the non-traditional channels of mail order and performances. Asserting that music also resides in the act of speaking, Partch championed "speech-music." This insistence that words should not be disfigured by singing techniques that distort the sound and sense of words brings much of his work into the realm of sound poetry, but that connection is best explored in a book (or an ambitious graduate thesis) rather than a mere review.

Most importantly, Partch designed and built his own orchestra of instruments. Some, such as the Kithara, Harmonic Canon, and the Marimba Eroica, were derived from Asian, African, and other ancient instruments. Others are crafty subversions of more recent instruments (Chromelodean, Adapted Viola) or utterly original creations (Cloud Chamber Bowls, Bloboy, Mazda Marimba). Partch's construction of an entire orchestra is a bold rejection of 300 years of Western music and a resounding declaration that music and musical instruments lurk not only in history but in the discarded objects of everyday life. So what does it sound like? The music of Harry Partch is driving, percussive, poetic, satirical, and charged with a vivid urgency that sings and dances.

The Wayward is arguably Partch's masterpiece, though some of the ever-militant Partchniks can no doubt make a case for Delusion of the Fury or the stunning satire Revelation in the Courthouse Park. The subtitle of the facsimile score (just issued by German publisher Schott) of The Wayward describes it best: "A collection of musical compositions based on the spoken and written words of hobos and other characters - the result of my wanderings in the Western United States 1935-1941."

Four pieces - "Barstow," "San Francisco," "The Letter," and "U.S. Highball" - comprise this recording of The Wayward. Alert Partchniks will recall that in Appendix III of Genesis of a Music Partch mentions "Ulysses at the Edge" as the fifth item in The Wayward. Written for trumpeter Chet Baker, "Ulysses," in addition to Partch's instruments, also calls for baritone saxophone and either alto sax or trumpet. I suspect it was excluded from this recording for its dramatically different instrumentation and post facto inclusion; "Ulysses" was written in 1955, more than a decade after the other works in The Wayward.

Partch revised and recorded these four pieces several times during his lifetime, so a new recording like this one competes with older, composer-supervised recordings not only in sound quality but in spirit. Partch wrote that his "records have been a rather sad compromise" yet in my heretical opinion, the appealing close-miked immediacy of Partch's recordings transmute his corporeal compositions into masterly electro-acoustic music. On CD, The Waywardis a road novel for the ears, a moving, aural recollection of the speech, sights and sounds of riding the rails.

Since 1990, Dean Drummond and Newband have been custodians of Partch's instruments, so the appearance of a new recording of The Wayward is an event. Drummond, who joined Partch's ensemble in the late 1960s, and his fellow musicians give The Wayward a good run for the money. Listeners may be surprised this disc's excellent if slightly remote sonics; you really hear the band on-stage, which adds to the live feel of the performance. Ears attuned to Partch's recordings may also be startled by differences in the phrasing and delivery of the vocal parts. Alas, without a score in hand and equipped with only a shelf of recordings, what we're really after is the spirit of these pieces.

The disc begins with "Barstow," Partch's most accessible piece. Framed by motoric percussion, these eight inscriptions from a highway railing are by turns pathetic, informative ("Gentlemen... / Go to 530 East Lemon Avenue / Monrovia California / For an easy handout"), despairing, sardonic, funny, and boastful. Strangely, this "Barstow" begins with a recitation of the title and subtitle, a strange vaudevillian touch heard before each piece on this CD. While it is fine to hear once, why include it? Partch did not always do so on his own recordings and this announcement, though soon forgotten, may prove tiresome to those who listen repeatedly. Nonetheless in this "Barstow," baritone Stephen Kalm and bass-baritone Robert Osborne successfully create the multiple voices and histrionic tone required by the text. The best version is still on the out-of-print The World of Harry Partch LP but this one is very good, too.

Described by Lou Harrison as "a spell of about the foggiest and dampest music I have ever heard," "San Francisco" is a setting of two newspaper vendor cries ("Eggzammahnay papay / Eggzammahnay papay / heer's yer papay...") heard on a foggy night in the 1920s. Newband proceeds at a mournful yet nonetheless effective tempo, much slower than Partch's own recordings on Enclosure 2 (innova) and The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 2 (CRI). I don't know why Newband used a cello instead of Partch's Adapted Viola (for which Partch extended the fingerboard and has a tender, more confined, boxier sound than a standard cello) but my chief complaint is that the voices are just a tad too operatic. Additionally, I had hoped to hear the lonely and mercenary desperation conveyed by earlier recordings.

Kalm acquits himself well in the hilarious and moving camaraderie of "The Letter," however Partch's own phrasing, perversely consigned to CRI's The Composer/Performer disc, is unsurpassable (it's also on the out of print The Music of Harry Partch CD issued by CRI in 1989). You can hear that Partch not only understood but lived every word of "The Letter" in his voice.

Comprising the bulk of The Wayward, "U.S. Highball," which Partch called "the most creative piece of work I have ever done," fares better. Both Kalm and Osborne shine; as in "Barstow," their voices ably cover the emotional territory demanded by the text. The instruments deftly maintain the propulsive drive of the music, making this performance as satisfying as the recording on The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 2 (CRI). This CD may please some and infuriate others, but this intriguing and provocative supplement to Harry Partch's recordings should have a (perhaps controversial) place in every Partchnik's collection.

ohm: the early gurus of electronic music 1948-1980
(ellipsis arts..., three-CD set)
Aside from the near-mythic 100 cd IDEAMA (International Digital Electro-Acoustic Music Archive), which multi-cd set has attempted to cover electronic music so broadly? ohm features excerpts by many of the major innovators of electronic music including Cage, Stockhausen, Ussachevsky, Oliveros, Subotnick, Lucier, Reich, Dodge and a raft of egregiously unheralded composers. Usually excerpts make me cringe, but ohm is a good set: along with many of the classics, a spiffy booklet sketches a thumbnail history of the medium. Purists, however, will grouse about the surfeit of excerpts, minor gaffes, and the perhaps strange choices of recordings, as well as descry absent favorites (where's Michel Chion?). Indeed, the booklet has a few piddling oversights, but currently there is no better introduction to electronic music. Incidentally, the IDEAMA remains under lock and key, imprisoned by a copyright tangle rivalling the Gordian Knot.

Mauricio Kagel: Heterophonie/Improvisation ajoutée
(Wergo, CD)
Mauricio Kagel: Sankt-Bach-Passion
(Montaigne, CD)
I like to think of Mauricio Kagel as the trickster of the postwar avant garde. Unlike Boulez, whose febrile polemics and stream of MOR 20th century classical releases for DG make good newspaper copy, or the textbook-friendly schemes and scores of Stockhausen, Kagel, who never followed the party line of post-Webern serialism, is harder to pin down. Despite being a pioneer of electronic music and film-maker as well as an author of some grand and at times prankish musical schemes (his hefty Exotica for extra-European instruments is gorgeously difficult listening while Tactil from the same DG CD deploys long throbbing tines in a sideways homage to Jobim & company), Kagel remains relatively unknown, which makes this Wergo reissue much welcome. The disc contains two pieces, Heterophonie, performed by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by the stalwart Michael Gielen, and Improvisation ajoutée for organ. Composed in 1959-61, the criss-crossing mumbled and grunted polyphony of Heterophonie reminds me of Morton Feldman's For Samuel Beckett, but louder and spookier. The real treat of the disc is the riotous Improvisation ajoutée from 1961. Organist Gerd Sacher and two assistants careen through an alluring variety of clustered textures derived from traditional (you know, playing the keys) and non-traditional (and given the church setting, mayhap subversive) techniques (manipulating the stops, vocalizing, clapping, etc.). Those familiar with Improvisation ajoutée probably know the piece from an impossible-to-find Columbia-Odyssey Music of Our Time LP. That rowdy recording by David Tudor remains a classic; Sacher offers a cooler, restrained performance (for one thing, the maniacal laughter isn't as loud), but a fine one worth hearing nonetheless. An updated, and, according to the composer, a final version of Improvisation ajoutée appeared on a Koch CD about 10 years ago; Kagel added a choir and ran the master tape through an Eventide Harmonizer, creating (to my ears) an entirely different piece.

Passions conjure comparisons to J.S. Bach, something few composers want or welcome, so Kagel's Sankt-Bach-Passion is a daring venture. Back in the late Sixties, Penderecki fared well with his Saint Luke's Passion, a marvelous amalgam of Baroque and mid-20th century techniques, but here Kagel takes a different tack. This 100-minute work for an array of soloists (including soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and Gerd Sacher on the organ), several choirs, and the Stuttgart Symphony draws a reverent sonic portrait of Johann Sebastian's life using texts from the cantatas, letters, and official documents. Those who desire unstinting spikiness should know that Sankt-Bach-Passion is not as aggressively avant as Improvisation ajoutée or Heterophonie or his string quartets from the late Sixties. By the time Kagel started composing the Passion in 1981, he had consolidated his avant garde techniques with more traditional ones, but masterfully so; there's no cloying wink and a nod but a deft integration of traditional and then-experimental techniques. One Kagel fan described it to me as for completists only however, if you're willing to peruse the fat booklet's translations while listening (vocal music's version of subtitles), you can look forward to a marvelous, moving journey.

Iannis Xenakis: Eonta
(Chant du Monde, CD)
Those wanting to investigate the startling sonic galaxies of Iannis Xenakis must sort through a constellation of releases on dozens of small and smaller labels. Where, then to begin? Here. Chant du Monde has reissued a superb out of print recording of Xenakis' early chamber and orchestral music: Eonta, Pithoprakta and his breakthrough piece of 1955, Metastasis, conducted by its dedicatee, Maurice Le Roux. These three works are essential Xenakis: the terrifying banshee brass of Eonta (with longtime Xenakis champion Yuji Takahashi on piano), the layered strings (each of the 61 string players have their own part) of Metastasis, and Pithoprakta, whose ferocious eruptions can still - after forty-seven years - teach Black Metal a thing or two. Along with the indispensable Electronic Music on EMF, this disc is the place to start with Xenakis. One reservation: given the CD's short (39 minutes) running time, this should have been a mid- not full-price reissue, but it's worth it nonetheless. Recorded in 1965, there is some hiss, but overall the sound is fine.

Stuart Dempster: On the Boards
(Anomalous Records, CD)
Amidst the perpetual flood of experimental records by cleverly-christened DJs and other obscurely monikered musicians, it's heartening to see a pioneer get his due. A stalwart of Seattle's avant music scene, Stuart Dempster is best known for his entrancing and playful approach to the trombone and didjeridu. Mysteriously, despite a crucial presence at the Big Bang of Minimalism (Terry Riley's In C) and the cult status of his seminal ambient LP In the Great Abbey of Clement VI at Avignon, Dempster remains under-represented on CD. On the Boards captures Dempster live and in sumptuous form, from the whirling didjeridu tones and jackal-throated sussurations of Didjeridervish to the vaporous chanting and calming rumble of a brass didjeridu in JDBBBDJ. Dempster also has a knack for finding humor in the sacred; his panoramically placed trombone blats and borborygms in Don't Worry It Will Come make for some mirthful (albeit faux) musique concrète. Inhabiting the alluring twilight between the aggressive avant musician and tranquillity-seeking New Ager, the gently exploratory On the Boards is mellow in the best sense of the word.

Merzbow / Kouhei Matsunaga
(Tigerbeat 6, CD)
Ah, where to begin with Merzbow? Appraising this master of Japanese Noise presents the same problem as Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) and Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) - how to assess musicians who make mounds of music without having heard most of their work? First, some full disclosure: I own but a mere handful of Merzbow's dozens of solo and split CDs an almost-hefty stack of his countless appearances on compilations. Scholars of the future will have to assess Merbow (and other Noise artists) thoroughly, and I hope, soon: Noise (and to my ears, its most valuable lesson, that a timbral feast awaits those willing to delve into extreme distortion) has too long been ignored by college music departments.

On this split CD, Merzbow and Kouhei Matsunaga contribute three tracks each. Of Merzbow's half, the first track, nakasendow, moved me the most. Based, according to the liner notes, on that seminal specimen of post-Webern serialism, Messiaen's Mode de Valeurs et d'Intensite, nakasendow shreds a pinging piano note into icy, speaker-cone piercing splinters of feedback. As with the best Noise, the overwhelming accumulation of textures invites the ear inside into the music's contours; sudden shifts in timbre give the piece a thrilling form. Merzbow's other tracks earth nazareth and shadow barbalian (imagine those masters of early 70s instrumental funk, the JB's, noised up for the dancefloor) are fine too, but sound less focused and lack the compelling drama of nakasendow.

Using scratchy textures, planes of distorted sound, chunks of analog synth sounds and a scattering of straight-ahead beats, Kouhei Matsunaga's three tracks present a quieter, at times gossamer take on Noise and offer a superb clinic on tasteful panning for those working with digital sound. It is rare to hear the stereo field used with such elegance. Sounds lurk and surge from speaker to speaker at just the right time. The most ambitious piece, the garden of earthly delight (center), ensconces a piss-take of early 90s industrial amidst arresting spaceborne soundscapes. A fine listen from start to finish, Merzbow / Kouhei Matsunaga ranges from good to exemplary.

Various Artists: State of the Union 2.001
(EMFmedia, CD)
It's an unwritten rule that successful avant musicians help their obscure (and probably hungry) comrades. Elliott Sharp, co-mastermind behind last summer's Volume: Bed of Sound exhibit at the Henry, has done good and compiled a nifty budget-priced 3 CD set of short snippets by 171 known and unknown sound artists. Designed for shuffle mode, State of the Union 2.001 explores the undertow of today's adventurous music from lowercase sound and harsh noise to witty word haiku and plunderphonic collage. Organized alphabetically, cult heroes Merzbow, Z'ev, Fred Frith, Koji Asano, Alan Licht, and Ikue Mori abut lesser-known lights such as Annie Gosfield, Frank Rothkamm, Elio Martusciello, and Vivian Sisters. Regrettably, slivers of Rock and Pop creep in too. Just like Rock musicians who "go experimental" and end up feebly recreating what John Cage & Co. did 30 years ago, a few of State's musicians have stumbled down the same path. For crackling chicken-scratch guitar and booty-bompin' bass, dig out those Chic records, or exhume those interstitial grooves in Earth Wind & Fire's Gratitude. Despite that piddling reservation, State is a fine introduction to the sonic saboteurs of today and handy for filling up mix tapes (and CDs) with intriguing, off-kilter moments.

Gloria Cheng: Piano Dance - A 20th Century Portrait
(Telarc, CD)
The 20th century saw composers and performers do practically everything to the piano, such as placing screws and bolts between the strings, feeding it hay, and drowning all 88 keys in a Texas pond. Although Piano Dance doesn't include our century's radical (and at times gloriously impractical!) piano experiments, this 23 track cd does offer a satisfying variety of innovative music. Regardless of genre, most piano anthologies strive to offer "the hits," but pianist Gloria Cheng's choices are intriguing. Aside from the usual suspects - Bartok, Scriabin and Debussy - lesser-known but equally deserving composers such as Henry Cowell, Gyorgi Ligeti, Alberto Ginastera, and Francis Poulenc are represented, too. Cheng has an understated virtuosity; with a superb touch and confident phrasing, she plays Philip Glass' rippling Modern Love Waltz, Stravinsky's obscure but surprisingly gospel-tinged Tango, and Ligeti's Hungarian Rock with aplomb. The recording lives up to Telarc's well-deserved reputation for superb sonics.

Matthew Shipp Quartet: Matthew Shipp's New Orbit
(Thirsty Ear, CD)
In jazz, adventurous bandleaders must meet the challenge of prodding their players into new territory while maintaining group cohesion. This cd is mistitled, and fortunately so: Shipp's understated though always-muscular piano playing and soloist-friendly compositions pulls his all-star cohorts into orbit with him. The album's standout is trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, who eschews histrionic trips into the stratosphere for the trumpet's stately and sometimes melancholy middle register. Listeners will be immediately enspelled by Smith's introduction to Chi, which pays homage to the brooding echo-tinged trumpet of 1950s Lift to the Scaffold-era Miles Davis, but his knotty duet with bassist William Parker in Paradox Y is equally mesmerizing. Faced with Parker's sawing double stops and frayed harmonics, Smith follows along with muted trumpet honking, bleating, and, it seems, doing all in his power to sway Parker from his obstinate doom-laden path. Shipp is fine form throughout the album too, and begins Paradox X by plucking the upper strings in the piano's interior. Occasionally the meek pianissimo refuge of the desperate free-improvising pianist, Shipp boldly plunges ahead and plucks away. Drummer Gerald Cleaver responds with bewitching borborygmus from a muffled floor tom, transforming the leader's pluck(ing) into a disorienting undertow. Matthew Shipp's New Orbit also has quieter pastoral moments, particularly in Shipp's solos in New Orbit and Orbit 2, but unlike his previous disc, the aptly-titled Pastoral Composure, this disc cooks.

Steve Martland: Horses of Instruction
(black box, CD)
James Dillon: Vernal Showers
(Montaigne, CD)
A swirling stew of rock, funk, and Stravinsky, Steve Martland's music is relentless and driving. The UK-based composer first attracted notice as a classical composer with two CDs on the Factory label (particularly the unforgettable Drill for two pianos). So why would the New Order crowd dig Steve Martland? A former student of radical Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, Martland has been highly critical of the British Classical Music Establishment(tm) and followed the path of composer-performer, conducting and writing for his own band of trumpet, trombone, saxes, guitar, piano, bass, drums, xylophone, and the occasional violin. Rhythmically vital and engaging, the pieces on Horses of Instruction are at times reminiscent of late-period Soft Machine (remember Hazard Profile from Bundles?) or a funkier and nearly bombast-free Michael Nyman Band: sections of music suddenly give way to greater rhythmic intensity or a few odd-metered bars of tender melody. Originally written for the Bang on a Can All Stars, Horses of Instruction chugs along with mixed tempi and trenchant syncopation. Kick transforms a 17th century English fiddle tune into a pounding dance while in Beat the Retreat, soprano saxes and clarino trumpet chase each other, hocketing all over the place. The danger (as those who adore prog-rock can attest) is that music built of discrete, accumulating sections can quickly bloat or wander; Martland is usually quite economical. Only Eternal Delight with its riff mongering better suited to jam bands, seems well, a bit too eternal, but that is a minor slight against a sharp album.

Along with Chris Dench and Michael Finnissy, James Dillon was tagged as part of the New Complexity in the early 1980s (Brian Ferneyhough was penciled in there too, though his intimidating Unity Capsule cropped up a few years earlier). Viewed by some as the successors to the postwar avant-garde, the New Complexity crowd pushed the limits of instrumental virtuosity ­ tonal, temporal, timbral, and other technical limits be damned. Without losing sight of the lyrical impulse, Dillon's chamber music on Vernal Showers does just that, from the glissandi careening up and down the fingerboard in Parjnaya-vata for solo cello to the frenetic textures of the String quartet no. 2. Traumwerk for two violins is the most easily digested piece here and rightly begins the disc. The work's 12 brief movements chart a bleak, desperate territory; the lonely asides and sinuous, scraping lines are reminiscent of George Crumb's Makrokosmos series. Longtime champions of Dillon's music, the Arditti String Quartet performs with dedication and resolve. The Nieuw Ensemble joins the fray for Vernal Showers which begins with a vibrato-less string quartet and eases into nervous exciting figurations echoed by the chamber ensemble. Unlike the sometimes murky recording of Dillon's previous CD on Montaigne, Ignis Noster, the recorded sound is spacious but focused.

Cecil Taylor: Conquistador!
(Blue Note, CD)
While Blue Note dredges their vaults for funky hard bop, it is easy to forget that the label did record some of the out jazz innovators during its heyday in the 1960s. Of his seminal Blue Note releases, most Cecil Taylor fans I know prefer the superb Unit Structures, but Conquistador!, originally comprised of two side long pieces - With(Exit) and the title track minus the exclamation point - remains a barn burner. The bonus track, an alternate take of With(Exit) was a revelation for me back in the 1980s. Contrary to what my prog- and bop-sodden peers at the time claimed, the alternate take confirmed that the Cecil Taylor Unit's vertiginous music was not the luck of clumsy, overtalented instrumentalists but masterfully created spontaneous composition by musicians who, in the heat of creation, retained "the long ear" - an unerring sense of overarching structure.

Philip Glass: Violin Concerto
(Naxos, CD)
First, a history lesson: Until the mid-1990s, a single pricing structure governed the record industry. Most of the major classical and jazz record labels released back catalogue in three tiers: full price ($13.99+), mid-price ($9.99 to $12.99) or budget (under $9.99). Why the .99 price points? Ask Fernand Braudel. Price proved an astonishingly good indicator of the remastering job - or lack thereof - and reliably reflected the quality of the accompanying documentation such as liner notes and performer credits. The majors also hatched the clever scheme of releasing an avalanche of vintage recordings at budget price, letting them lapse out of print, then remastering and repackaging the music at full price. Then, in the mid-1990s the classical and jazz budget tiers were substantially crippled by the flood of indie and small-label cds, especially those issued by Naxos. Refusing to pay big name performers and big name orchestras superstar prices (e.g. the Berlin Philharmonic charges $100,000 to record a symphony), Naxos finds good to stellar unknowns, pays musicians flat fees and sells their releases for under $7. As with any label, not every recording is outstanding, but this cd is an excellent entryway to the chugging arpeggios of Philip Glass' post-Einstein On the Beach music. Good liner notes, recordings and performances. A bargain for under 7 bucks!

Annea Lockwood: A Sound Map of the Hudson River
(Lovely, CD)
Sound pioneer Annea Lockwood trekked to the beginning of the Hudson River and made field recordings downriver to the Atlantic Ocean. More than a documentary, Lockwood's piece gradually immerses the listener in a hallucinatory rhythmic and timbral latticework of rippling, creeping and rushing water.

The Third Eye Foundation: Little Lost Soul
(Merge Records, CD)
"Intelligent dance music," a candidate to supplant the overused rubric 'electronica', only hints at the lushly eclectic stew simmering in Little Lost Soul. Based on sped-up and sputtering dub-inflected drum machine rhythms, drum n'bass easily becomes mindless mush, but Third Eye Foundation's Matt Elliot uses the genre's bristling rhythms to accentuate his marvelous textures. The gauzy synthesizers coupled with the warbling and grainy accelerated vocals on "I've lost that loving feline" recall 1980s-era David Sylvian, but without the lyrics, as most of the vocals are wordless and either sped up or slowed down. The album is rife with aural treats, but particularly ravishing is the vinyl fuzz at the beginning of the "Goddamned you've got to be kind" and its rubbery flute-like calliope coda. Also, the surprising buzzing baseball-card-in-a-bicycle spoke percussion at the end of "What is it with you" is a delight. Although Elliot doesn't follow standard song structures, Little Lost Soul is not difficult listening. True, instruments can make a brief appearance then vanish such as the backwards rhythms in the cabaret-Goth epic "Lost" and warped wordless voices can enter unexpectedly as in "What is it with you," but the music is so seamless even while it slithers in an entirely different direction. By the time you get to the erratically looped melancholy voices in "Are you still a cliché?" it all makes utter sense.

oval: ovalprocess
(thrill jockey, CD)
Unlike pop stars who, ten years after their last hit, still stand a good chance of being spotted in Butte, Montana, experimental musicians retire to music textbooks, pigeonholed for one idea. Cage and his silent piece, 4'33, remain the best example, but today's experimenters suffer the same fate. oval (aka Markus Popp) will probably spend the rest of his career mistakenly tagged as the guy who first made music out of skipping cds. Those laurels belong to Yasunao Tone, Nicolas Collins, and a host of lesser-known sonic explorers who, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, applied slivers of perforated tape, thick marking pens and silk strands to the surface of Milli Vanilli, Color Me Badd and other abhorrent compact discs. Like any instrument, sabotaged cds can assault or serenade the listener, and oval opts for the latter. Popp's cds gently skip, chirp, stutter and sink into a wistful downtempo bliss. You'll have to wait or fast forward through 16 minutes of silence to hear the last track, a sumptuous melange of wheezing cds, plaintive howls and aural slivers of "normal" instruments. Even without the arty packaging (no track titles, minimal credits and a discreetly embossed cover), ovalprocess is a stunning record.

Matthew Shipp Quartet: Pastoral Composure
(Thirsty Ear, CD)
Although music writers invariably impose expectations on their favorite artists, progress really resides in the ear of the listener. Longtime fans of Matthew Shipp are in for a surprise: Pastoral Composure offers an accessibleintroduction to one the most exploratory and intriguing jazz musicians of the 1990s. Shipp, a pianist and bandleader hailed for his propulsive, virile playing, leads a straight-ahead date shorn of the angular aggression found in his earlier work. Lumbering along with tasty, if ponderous themes, Gesture and the title track are sturm und drang hard bop. Visions and Progression cook too, and could have been released by Blue Note in 1966. Recalling Miles Davis Quintet's famed rendition of If I Were a Bell, the quintet fires off the nursery song Frère Jacques, eventually plunging the theme into rugged cacophony and ending with a wry solo by avant-bassist William Parker. Shipp offers a delectable solo piano rendition of Ellington's Prelude to Kiss whose twinkling coda is a delight. Diehard fans will devour the other solo piano track, XTU (imagine Errol Garner funkifying Anton Webern), and wonder, if not worry, what will Shipp do next? Fans of Shipp's breakthrough record DNA and earlier work such as 1992's probing Circular Temple may be disappointed, but Pastoral Composure is an excellent record and a fine tonic to Wynton Marsalis and his band of moldy figs.

Thomas Adès: Asyla
(EMI, CD)
Major labels tend to take the safe route with contemporary living composers and either hype an eminently forgettable mainstream mediocrity such as Richard Danielpour, co-opt a long-slaving cult composer such as John Adams or Steve Reich, or worse, issue Hollywood film scores or covers of folk tunes by conservatory-trained musicians (now touted as 'heritage music') under the anesthetizing rubric of a 'Classical' imprint. Happily, EMI has treated Thomas Adès as an adventurous composer should be treated by releasing quality recordings of his compositions. Touted in England as the next Great Hope of Classical Music, Thomas Adès is the latest and worthy successor in a long line of 'Great Hopes' from Benjamin Britten to Harrison Birtwistle to George Benjamin. Adès's music is dissonant yet lyrically and transparently fleet-footed. Asyla for full orchestra seethes with alluring textures from the serpentine quasi-gamelan in the opening bars to the sly anthemic allusions to techno in the third movement. Other orchestral and chamber pieces on the CD, such as These Premises Are Alarmed and the spiky Concerto Conciso, remind me that major labels do indeed release recordings of daring, worthwhile orchestral music.

Tom Johnson: The Chord Catalogue
(XI Experimental Intermedia, CD)
Johnson, a Downtown NYC minimalist in the 1960s and early 1970s best known for his Four Note Opera and Doodling, a text piece for piano, has finally recorded The Chord Catalogue, a literal and linear rendering of all 8,178 chords possible in the octave of a piano. Simultaneously enervating and mesmerizing, I found myself veering wildly between Apollonian listening (should I focus on the intervals and the deliberately awkward Chopsticks rhythms?) and Dionysian absorption (or should I drown in the aural mirages of nonpiano sounds?). This hour-long piece is difficult listening of the highest order, an unabashed piece of process music posing a delicious aural dilemma to the ears.

Pioneers of Electronic Music
(CRI, CD)
This CD is a superb introduction to the seminal works of electronic music in the United States. Along with classics such as Vladimir Ussachevsky's Sonic Contours and Otto Luening's Low Speed, this compilation offers a rich selection of music made at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center from 1952 to 1969. One highlight is Alice Shields's Transformation of Ani; derived from the composer's singing and recitation of texts from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Shields' transformed voice scrapes, roars, and screams to a searing conclusion. The liner notes, also by Shields, outline the history of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and profile some of the prominent composers who worked there. Those seeking more music from this fertile period should also investigate Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center 1961-1973 (New World Records 80521-2) and Milton Babbitt's Philomel on Electro Acoustic Music (Neuma 450-74).

Conlon Nancarrow: Studies for Player Piano
(Wergo, five-CD set)
Wergo has reissued these breathtaking recordings of Conlon Nancarrow's studies for player piano - and at mid-price. A veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Nancarrow escaped U.S. government harassment in the early 1940s and emigrated to Mexico, where he spent the remaining decades of his composing life painstakingly punching piano rolls of astounding polyphonic and polyrhythmic complexity for his Ampico player pianos. Unleashing an ear-blinding torrent of notes and complex rhythms, Nancarrow's studies are by turns thrilling, whimsical, angular, bluesy, and always propulsive. Just as Stravinsky's bold and brazen rhythms in the Rite of Spring revolutionized rhythm in the twentieth century, I suspect Nancarrow's innovative explorations of rhythmic and tempo-based polyphony will continue to inspire and astound composers and new music lovers well into the twenty-first. Essential.

Patricia Barber
Back in college, I was Roland Barthes on speed. Steeped in semiotics (just wittily apply any flavor of literary criticism to everyday actions and objects and presto, you're a semiotician) and revved up on generic fruit pies, I discovered that every lyric was a fortress guarding an immutable secret. With the right allegorical key, Truth would be known, Lester Bangs would be right, and opaque lyrics like "Telegram force/and ready/I knew this was a big mistake" would unfurl their wisdom. After a semester of failing to exhume the arcane phenomenology of James Brown's "There It Is (part one)," I realized every lyric might not have a secret.

It is a tradition in music journalism to quote lyrics, but like those early 70s high school English textbooks that schlepped the words of Dylan, Lennon, and Paul Simon into a let's-hook-the-kids chapter usually titled The Poetry of Rock, what good is it? Fragrant with secrets, Patricia Barber's lyrics are more poetic than most - "If I were blue/like David Hockney's pool/dive into me and glide" - yet without hearing the melody and her wan, wistful voice, it's like listening to someone describe last night's sunset. With her trio, Barber draws on classical, jazz and the avant, but if there is an allegorical key to the Chicago-based jazz singer's music, it is her voice. Like another master of modern sprechstimme, David Sylvian, Barber sings, speaks, intones, whispers, purrs, invoking ordinary words to echo those lonely moments we have all felt to be uniquely ours.

Daniel Menche/inBOIL
It happens in every genre of music; a few names stand out while others amass a solid body of work and yet remain cult figures. Apart from the three Ms (Merzbow, MSBR, and Masonna) other artists like Daniel Menche and inBOIL effectively explore the sometimes loud and abrasive frontiers of Noise and Power Electronics.

Daniel Menche shies away from labels and rightly so: Noise or even the lesser-used Power Electronics does not describe the dramatic and complex sound structures wrought from supposedly 'ugly' sounds. From his collaborations with MSBR on Collabodestructivists (Isomorphic) to his recent solo CD The Face of Vehemence (Ground Fault), the Portland-based sound artist strives for what he calls vehement beauty, a concentrated, trenchant lyricism that draws on the full spectrum of sound. Menche's arresting work encompasses drones, sound collages, and the shrieking roar of over-amplified and processed electronics.

Opening the show is inBOIL, the electro-acoustic project of Carl Farrow. Using amplification, sampling, and looping, inBOIL aurally magnifies a small, often overlooked sound like a tinkling bell or a drop of water into a turbulent, thunderous tsunami of sound. Think of inBOIL as noisy minimalism. The drama (dare I say the music?) rests not in the finale - heck, most symphonies end with a bang - but in the process of uncovering and expanding our perception of the source material. In addition, Robert Jenkins lectures on the Absurdist Cabaret. I won't presume to blather about the probable bullet points of Jenkins' lecture, but a human voice should contrast nicely with the wordless fury of Menche and inBOIL.

John Moran and Eva Müller
Lip-synching is everywhere: in movie musicals, on venerable TV programs like Soul Train, Solid Gold, American Bandstand, and in their descendants, music videos. Outside of those contexts, why do we condemn musicians who mouth the words to their songs as fakes? I suspect the root of the public's (in this case, anyone over 15) aversion to the computer-driven, digitally enhanced Boy Band or Pop Diva du jour is a perceived lack of risk or dearth of obvious work in the performance - thus all those spastic dance routines. Indeed, part of the appeal of live performance is watching someone else work. So upon entering a dark room filled with strange sounds, it's no surprise that newcomers to performer-less sound art (before recordable CDs, we used to call it tape music) listen reluctantly and, unsure of what it means, do so skeptically.

New York composer and performance artist John Moran has inverted the equation, making lip-synching essential to his performances. Moran fuses music, snippets of conversation, and sounds from everyday life into a dizzying, often humorous soundtrack, and then has live actors lip-synch the words. Freed from singing, a task that has compromised the acting in countless operas, the actors (in this greatest bits show, Moran and the protean dancer Eva Müller) have a greater freedom of movement and serve as a visual anchor for the sound. Helpful too is Moran's tendency to repeat words and phrases, easing into sly juxtapositions and revealing through repetition the multiple meanings in his extracted texts. Impossible to classify, Moran's hybrid of opera, dance, and experimental sound is surprisingly accessible, witty, and sometimes laugh-out loud funny.

Kurt Elling
While rock and classical music boast an intimidating array of great singers, the pantheon of jazz vocalists seems rather small. Given the improvisatory demands of jazz, this should be no surprise. Along with hitting the notes and remembering the words, jazz singers are expected to improvise, phrasing the lyrics before, through, or after the beat. Some singers also incorporate vocal techniques like falsetto, vocalise (wordlessly careening through the melody), and scatting (no, not coprophilia, but exuberant, usually rapid-fire nonsense syllables); a few concoct new lyrics on the spot, like the Blues shouters of yore.

Male jazz vocalists face an additional challenge. Aspiring female jazz singers can model their voices on any one or more of a long list of greats (starting with the peerless Ella Fitzgerald, then Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Abbey Lincoln, and more recently, the elastic acrobatics of Anita Baker and the severely underrated Sade), but every male jazz vocalist must confront that swingin' 500 lb. gorilla: Frank Sinatra. The history-minded can cite Louis Armstrong, Billy Eckstine, Mel Tormé, Tony Bennett, (and even obscure cats like Babs Gonzales and Kenny Hagood) all they want, but the ubiquity of Frank has exerted an enormous, unshakable influence.

I'm not foolish enough to proclaim Kurt Elling the new jazz vocal messiah; after a clutch of records, including the marvelous CD Flirting with Twilight on Blue Note it's too late for that. Yet he is the first male jazz singer I've heard in a long time who is not beholden to the ghost of Ol' Blue Eyes. From courageously sustained notes and dexterous, on-the-money vocalise to gutsy falsettos and soulful phrasing that shuns cocktail clichés, Elling sounds fresh and new.

9/11/02
Classical music has two incontestable roles in our nation's cultural life: to herald grand events (like the Olympics) and to memorialize solemn occasions. Whether September 11, 2001 demarcates a historical era will remain open to question for years, perhaps decades. No matter what NYC-based TV networks, cliché-hungry reporters, and zeitgeist-hunting Op-Ed pundits may say, it is certainly not the date "everything changed." After all, our civil liberties have been discreetly evaporating since the Reagan years. Also, is anyone really surprised that much of the world loathes the United States for its foreign policy rooted in economic expansion and a lust for oil?

No one can predict which pieces amid the imminent flood of classical works commemorating 9/11 will endure. Examining World War II for a historical precedent isn't much help, either. From piles of patriotic compositions, two great pieces emerged before the war ended: Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time (written in POW camp in 1940) and Shostakovich's harrowing Seventh Symphony (composed during the siege of Leningrad in 1941). Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) appeared immediately afterwards, but the best of the bunch, Penderecki's unforgettable Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, cropped up later in 1960. Sometimes sonic monuments take awhile.

Reaching for the Big Statement is risky. Although part of me cringes at what may flow from a composer's pen (or speakers) in remembrance of 9/11, I also admire the courage of those making the attempt on September 11, 2002: local composer Laurence Berteig, who premieres An American Requiem and the duo of Lisa Hutton and Mark Polishook, who devised Revisiting September 11, 19[72], an installation which juxtaposes radio broadcasts from 9/11 with images from 1972. History abounds with monumental duds like Beethoven's Wellington's Victory (1813), so I wish all of them the best of luck in making mourning music.

William Hooker
Unlike most drummers, William Hooker uses every square inch of his drum kit. Not content to mark time or archly punctuate the proceedings with a tasty lick, Hooker is one of the few out-jazz drummers who fuses the ferocious energy of rock (remember Led Zeppelin's pummeler-in-chief John Bonham?) with the deft melodic pulsation of master jazz drummers such as Elvin Jones and Tony Williams. Active in adventurous music since the early 1970s, William Hooker remains idealistic. "I'm asking for light, love and power," says Hooker. "To try and stay as fast and as quick - to pick up on the musical language as soon as it's said. To try to be an improviser that's on top of his game."

While some of his out-jazz peers made it to the safe shores of academia, Hooker has remained at the top of his game and cultivates a vital and exploratory spirit. His collaborations with Sonic Youth strummer Lee Ranaldo and a variety of turntablists including DJ Spooky, DJ Olive, and Christian Marclay have attracted audiences normally wary of adventurous improvisation. His latest CD, Black Mask (Knitting Factory) features three tasty duets with Andrea Parkins, Jason Hwang, and Roy Nathanson. The disc not only showcases William Hooker's enormous energy but exhibits the sensitivity of an alert accompanist and collaborator.

Joining Hooker for this gig is the protean Eyvind Kang, an avant violinist and composer equally at home with making brooding electroacoustic music and dovetailing with the ever-smoothening Bill Frisell. Also on the bill is Portland accordionatrix Miss Murgatroid and Bill Horist, whose marvelous deconstruction of the guitar with various household implements is not to be missed. Late word has it that at midnight, Hooker will also accompany Sea Level Inferno, an abstract film made in collaboration with Matthew Kohn, but go to the gig for the inside dope.

Olivier Messiaen
Who was Olivier Messiaen? A pious, humble composer whose cosmic organ music can still scare the bejeezus out of all those well-meaning mulleted "teen pastors" and spiky gel-haired "youth ministry coordinators" strumming guitars to Our Father in churches today. From planting the seeds of avant garde music for postwar composers like Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen to transcribing and integrating the complex tones and rhythms of birdsong (remember St. Francis of Assisi?) into his own music, Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was an experimental musician who did it all for the glory of God.

Although best known for the Gershwin-gone-gamelan of the Turangalîla Symphony and the desolate majesty of Quartet for the End of Time, the core of Messiaen's work is organ music. He treated the organ like a synthesizer (oh wait, the organ is a synthesizer with pipes instead of circuits), using unusually bleak tones and murky textures to convey humanity's loneliness and longing for the divine. As you might guess from titles like Apparition of the Eternal Church, The Celestial Banquet, and The Glorious Body (Seven Visions of the Resurrected), the music encompasses many approaches to the sacred, from simple diatonic devotionals to archetypal ambient blocs of sound to time-freezing voluntaries that herald the coming galactic apocalypse.

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Messiaen's death, organist Paul Jacobs is touring the country playing all of the composer's organ music in two five-hour marathon concerts. Since some pieces like La Nativité du Seigneur clock in at close to an hour, there will be several breaks during both concerts. Bring a discreet cushion for your behind.

Bugs Bunny on Broadway
It's every musician's fate: you never know where your music will end up, or how it will be used, loved, loathed or ignored. Just as Vivaldi probably had no idea that his music would accentuate the comforting clasp of countless massage therapists, I'm sure Wagner never imagined that most Americans would know Ride of the Valkyries from Elmer Fudd singing "Kill da Wabbit, kill da wabbit...".

So how did classical music end up in cartoons? Classical composers wrote good tunes by the bushel, and the folks who produced Warner Bros. cartoons in the heyday of the Thirties and Forties figured they could save money by using works in the public domain. Rather than pay for reams of new music, it was cheaper to hire arrangers such as Carl Stalling or Milt Franklyn, who then rearranged the music, adding their own work as needed. Tin Pan Alley songs owned by Warner Bros. publishing arm crept in too, but a fair chunk of the classic cartoons relied on Wagner, Smetana, Strauss, Rossini, and other Dead White Guys.

History aside, this concert looks like fun. Conductor George Daugherty and the Seattle Symphony perform the original arrangements synchronized to Warner Bros. cartoons projected onto a giant screen. If you grew up watching battered, decades-old prints on TV, the new big-screen prints and digitally re-recorded voices of What's Opera Doc?, The Rabbit of Seville, A Corny Concerto, Rhapsody Rabbit, and Baton Bunny should be a revelation.