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Tomorrow Is the Question
New Directions in Experimental Music Studies
By Benjamin Piekut The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2014 Benjamin Piekut
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-12011-6
CHAPTER 1
Goodbye 20th Century!
Sonic Youth Records John Cage's "Number Pieces"
ELIZABETH ANN LINDAU
ALTERNATIVE ROCK BAND Sonic Youth have been at the forefront of experimentation in rock since their 1981 debut at the East Village's Noisefest, where they used drumsticks to beat detuned guitars with screwdrivers jammed between their strings. For nearly three decades, the group has distilled punk, hardcore, free jazz, experimental electronica, and mainstream pop into an unmistakable musical language marked by innovations in guitar tuning and technique. In addition to their well- known roots in US punk and its offshoots, Sonic Youth have a more surprising connection to experimental composition. Perhaps the most obvious example of the band's interface with "high art" music is the 1999 release Goodbye 20th Century!, a double album consisting not of original songs, but of conceptual, graphic, and indeterminate works of new music performed in collaboration with percussionist William Winant, composers Christian Wolff and Takehisa Kosugi, and sound artist Christian Marclay. Goodbye prominently features works by John Cage, a composer regarded as a father figure by a new generation of experimental musicians in not only "classical," but also jazz and rock music.
This essay examines Goodbye 20th Century!'s popularization of experimental composition and Cagean aesthetics. I am interested in how Sonic Youth have used their renown as an alternative rock band to disseminate what is typically regarded as esoteric music to new audiences. Through analysis of its renditions of Cage's "number pieces," I argue that Goodbye demonstrates a compelling new performance practice of indeterminate scores. These scores, which are often portrayed as democratic or open to people with a range of musical experiences, have nonetheless become the domain of specialists and insiders claiming a personal connection to the composer, reinscribing the very hierarchy of composer-conductor-performer that the New York School claimed to disrupt in the 1950s. By drawing on their experience as improvisers and their lush vocabulary of sounds, Sonic Youth and their collaborators offer an alternative to professional new music performances, which tend toward the sonic asceticism of high modernism. Sonic Youth challenge the presumed authority of this beautiful but austere aesthetic and serve as important promoters of Cage's work.
The band that would become Sonic Youth formed in New York City at the end of the 1970s. Connecticut teenager Thurston Moore (b. 1958, guitar, vocal) relocated there in 1976 and quickly became involved in the emerging punk scene. Through performances at clubs and art galleries, Moore met art school graduates Kim Gordon (b. 1953, bass guitar, guitar, vocal) and Lee Ranaldo (b. 1956, guitar, vocal). Soon enough, Moore and Ranaldo were playing in Glenn Branca's massed guitar ensemble, one significant hub in the emerging network of art and pop collaborations in New York during this period, which also included the short-lived no wave movement. No wave bands combined the primitivism of punk with the artiness of the avant-garde and were known for their seriousness; deliberately amateurish guitar playing; refusal of song forms, melodies, and recognizable hooks; and, above all, the use of noise and dissonance. In 1984, after two no wave–style albums and a series of drummers, the band finally hired Steve Shelley (b. 1962, drums), completing its familiar "core" lineup.
Sonic Youth's juvenile band name belies their long-held status as parental figures in the alternative music scene. Although they never achieved mainstream popularity, they are taste makers who are respected by younger musicians. They spent the 1980s "paying their dues": working day jobs, going on small tours, and recording for independent labels such as SST and ranca's Neutral Records. Following the release of the double album Daydream Nation — perhaps their most ambitious and critically acclaimed release before or since — they were signed to the major label Geffen Records in 1989. Two years later (after two albums that did not sell as expected), they convinced the label to sign the then unknown band Nirvana. Their recommendation paid off. After the huge commercial success of Nirvana's second album, Nevermind, Geffen granted Sonic Youth a contract extension, bonus, and cash advance. Despite their relatively poor album sales, the label retained Sonic Youth as a sort of magnet band that might attract up-and-coming, potentially more successful groups.
In 1996 Sonic Youth rented and moved into Echo Canyon Studios in New York's financial district, hiring Wharton Tiers (who had produced their debut album, Confusion Is Sex) as sound engineer. The move dramatically changed their recording process. Previously, they had had to woodshed their songs over weeks or months of rehearsals and live performances before cutting albums in order to take full advantage of limited and expensive studio time. But with the relatively cheap rent at Echo Canyon, they could afford to rehearse in the studio. Instead of carefully working out their songs before entering a recording session, they were able to make recording part of their compositional process. They soon began recording long, unplanned improvisations and mining the results as raw material for their albums. Their 1998 Geffen release A Thousand Leaves reflects this new creative mode. It was recorded at a leisurely pace and features long, gradually unfolding tracks that can sound more like demo tapes than tightly crafted singles. It was also their strangest and most adventurous album to date. Band biographer David Browne remarks that the album's eleven-minute processual track "Hits of Sunshine (for Allen Ginsberg)" "had more in common with minimalist composers like Steve Reich than it did with any of Sonic Youth's punk or no-wave antecedents." Their experiments reflected both their new recording process and an apparent acceptance that they were never going to break into the mainstream as Nirvana had done. This resignation seemed to free them from any lingering sense of obligation to please Geffen or their audience.
During the same year, the band established their own label, Sonic Youth Records (SYR), and used it as a venue for the discarded materials from the Echo Canyon sessions. The first three SYR albums featured extended, feedback-filled free improvisations that bore little resemblance to the noisy but more or less conventional rock tunes released on Geffen. The label has been described as "a repository for any material that [is] too extreme for Geffen to handle," and Sonic Youth's "avenue via which to release their most avant waxings." As one reviewer warned the group's fans, "If you like weird stuff, this is for you." The album SYR3: Invito Al Cielo represents the band's first recorded collaboration with experimental guitarist Jim O'Rourke, who mixed their 2000 album NYC Ghosts & Flowers at Echo Canyon and subsequently became an official member for their next two albums.
Sonic Youth's history of performing experimental compositions actually predates SYR 4: Goodbye 20th Century! In 1997 Kosugi, who had been the musical director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) since 1995, approached Moore about joining his group's musical ensemble. Moore immediately agreed, having taken an interest in both electronic music and the history of modern dance. The previous year, he had attended a performance of the Cunningham/Cage collaboration Ocean (1994). He eagerly described the experience to Time Out New York.
The music just blew my mind, specifically the electronic music they were processing through the speaker systems. Afterward, I went up and looked at all the gear and was amazed to see that it was actually kind of lo-fi; it was deceptive because of the high-mindedness that people attach to the work of Cunningham. You would think that these guys were punk rock.
After accepting Kosugi's invitation, Moore accompanied MCDC performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's (BAM) Next Wave Festival in 1997. This also represents one of Sonic Youth's earliest musical interactions with O'Rourke, who played in the ensemble. Moore, O'Rourke, and Kosugi improvised musical accompaniment for BAMevent, a collage of choreography drawn from preexisting Cunningham pieces. Andrew Russ joined the trio for a performance of Cage's Four — which would later appear on Goodbye — to accompany Cunningham's Rondo. (Most chroniclers of Sonic Youth's career locate Goodbye's inception at the 1998 Amoeba Music gig with Winant described below, but Moore and O'Rourke's performances with MCDC show earlier familiarity with this repertoire.)
In May 1998 Sonic Youth was invited to play at the San Francisco record store Amoeba Music. The first three SYR albums had been released over the previous year, and the musicians wanted to draw on that body of repertoire for their appearance. They engaged virtuoso percussionist and longtime friend Winant to join them. Winant's list of collaborators reads like a who's who of innovative musicians in experimental classical, rock, and jazz: Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Pierre Boulez, John Zorn, Iannis Xenakis, and Cage himself, to name a few. (Ranaldo later described him as "Cage's percussionist in the last decade of his life.") His rock credentials include drumming with the avant-rock band Mr. Bungle and as part of a trio with Moore and percussionist Tom Surgal. Following the Amoeba performance, Sonic Youth asked Winant to appear as a guest artist on the fourth installment of the SYR series — another album of free improvisations, band members assumed. But given Sonic Youth's appreciation of the contemporary composers he often worked with, Winant suggested recording an album of experimental compositions, telling Moore, "You're probably the only band I know [that has] an affinity for this school of music." Along with O'Rourke, the band soon became engrossed in the project. Having performed with him accompanying the MCDC, Moore and O'Rourke invited Kosugi to join the project. Composer Christian Wolff and turntable artist Christian Marclay were added to this motley crew of musicians, as well as Gordon and Moore's five-year-old daughter Coco, who would perform Yoko Ono's Voice Piece for Soprano (1961). The resulting album, SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century!, was recorded and released in 1999.
In order to accommodate the diverse group involved in the recording sessions, Winant chose a repertoire open to many different types of musicians and instruments. Most of the works use images ("graphic scores") rather than traditional western music notation to convey instructions to the performer. These include Pauline Oliveros's Six for New Time, commissioned especially for the album, Kosugi's +– (1987), an excerpt from Cornelius Cardew's Treatise (1963–67), and Wolff's Edges (1969) and Burdocks (1970–71). Other pieces on the album ask the performers to carry out a process, such as the dynamic swell in James Tenney's Having Never Written a Note for Percussion (1971) or the swinging suspended microphones that gradually come to rest in Steve Reich's Pendulum Music (1969). Like the Reich work, Ono's Voice Piece contains prose instructions, bluntly telling the performer to "Scream. 1. against the wind 2. against the wall 3. against the sky." The sounds of screaming and feedback are topped only by the band's performance of George Maciunas's Piano Piece #13 ("Carpenter's Piece") (1962), which instructs the performer to hammer nails into the keys of a piano. Listeners who purchase SYR4 on CD can watch a film of this instrument's demise by inserting the disc into their computers.
Goodbye features performances of graphic works by two composers of the "New York School," the phrase coined to describe the loose association of experimental composers Cage, Wolff, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and David Tudor and numerous abstract expressionist painters during the 1950s. These composers pioneered the indeterminate notation featured on Goodbye: pitch, timing, volume, and other sonic parameters were notated relatively using new types of instructions, which were often reinvented for each piece or series of pieces. The resulting music was "indeterminate with respect to its performance," to use Cage's words. In contrast to the increasingly prescriptive aleatoric and integral serialist works of the mid–twentieth century, indeterminacy appeared to hand control of musical parameters over to the performer.
In current mainstream practice, performing indeterminate works is not so liberating and open as its notation suggests. The freedoms of indeterminate music are often described as deceptive, or as tests of a performer's discipline and seriousness. Cage's works are thus susceptible to abuse by negligent performers. His oft-quoted caution is "Permission granted. But not to do whatever you want." In an interview with Peter Gena, Cage likened following a score to following a recipe: in both situations, it's important to know which parts of the written instructions can be altered slightly and which are essential to the integrity of the work (or flavor of the dish). "Some may even think that the ingredients listed are not important, and that others can be substituted. And you know that they'll do it when they look on their shelf and discover that they don't have the ingredients. On occasion, cooking with other ingredients than those given will result in a discovery, but on other occasions it will simply result in a misunderstanding, or a misrealization."
The special challenges indeterminate works pose for musicians have inspired record labels to document, when possible, Cage's approval of their releases. The Mode Records album of Cage's orchestral works 101, Ryoanji, and Apartment House 1776 is typical. This recording was made at a 1991 festival devoted to the composer with Stephen Drury conducting the New England Conservatory Philharmonia. The liner notes reassure us that "John Cage was in residence throughout the festival, coaching the players and attending performances. These recordings were made under his supervision." Cage is pictured happily shaking hands with the performers, and the phrase "Composer supervised recordings" is emblazoned on the back cover. Some argue that familiarity with Cage and the extant performance tradition of his works is a prerequisite for attempting his scores. In a 2003 interview, the respected conductor Petr Kotik argued that "correct" performances of Cage's music could only be achieved by studying recordings of pianist David Tudor and others who worked closely with the composer.
The very notion that you can buy the sheet music without knowing anything about it and can read everything out of the notes and instructions is just as nonsensical as the idea that you could learn to play the flute on a correspondence course, by e-mail. ... If you want to play Cage well, you obviously have to respect the score, but that doesn't tell you everything.
Certainly notation alone is insufficient information for the idiomatic realization of most music. Understanding of written music is deepened by knowledge of performance traditions, whether such knowledge is gained aurally through live performance or recordings or by written accounts. But with this particular repertoire, which purports to be open and spontaneous, exhorting performers to steep themselves in past performance traditions seems contradictory.
Because Cage often gave performers the opportunity to generate content or choose from a number of options within the context of his compositions, his work frequently draws comparisons to improvisation. Cage, however, consistently protested any resemblance between his work and improvisation, which he viewed as unattractively reliant on stylistic convention and personal habit. Although his works ostensibly call for spontaneous performer decision making, it is within a framework designed to bypass intention and taste. Ideally, Cage's indeterminate works would lead composer, performer, and listener to chance encounters with new sounds or musical effects, not facilitate the intentional creation of these effects. Sabine Feisst has summarized Cage's critical stance toward improvisation as follows.
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Excerpted from Tomorrow Is the Question by Benjamin Piekut. Copyright © 2014 Benjamin Piekut. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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