January 9, 2000
Turning Circles and Squares Into Noise
By ADAM SHATZ
THE 20th century was, in musical terms, a noisy one. I
don't mean loud
or even discordant, the customary complaints of audiences
encountering new music, whether Igor Stravinsky's "Rite
of Spring,"
John Coltrane's "Ascension" or Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock
rendition of the
national anthem. I'm referring, rather, to the way that
20th-century
composers have embraced sounds -- environmental, industrial,
often random
-- and thereby laid siege to inherited notions of musical
order. If last
century's avant-garde taught us anything, it is that such
disturbances can be
the stuff of art.
The first person to make this point was not a
musician but a painter, Luigi Russolo. A
leading member of the Italian Futurist
movement, Russolo drafted a lyrical
manifesto in 1913 calling for the "renewal of
music by means of the Art of Noises" and
scored works for "noise intoners," primitive
machines he built to replicate the ambient
sounds of the modern metropolis. While no
noise intoners have survived, Russolo's
project was extended and enriched by Edgard
Varse, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz
Stockhausen and John Cage, who from the
1940's until his death in 1992 did more than
anyone to make raw sounds a part of our
musical vocabulary.
The art of noise can be heard on two vivid
recent double albums: Sonic Youth's
"Goodbye 20th Century," a set of works by
Cage and heirs like Christian Wolff and Cornelius Cardew; and
"Treatise," a
recording of Cardew's 1967 composition by an ad hoc group of
Chicago
free-jazz musicians. Several of the composers are, like
Russolo, artists: Yoko
Ono and George Maciunas are best known for their association
with the
Fluxus school of conceptual art, while Cardew worked as a
graphic designer.
Not surprisingly, their music eschews traditional notation in
favor of
abstract drawings, games and verbal instructions. Ms. Ono's
1961 "Piece for
Soprano" asks a singer to "Scream. 1. Against the wind.
2. Against the wall. 3. Against the sky." The 193-page score
of Cardew's
"Treatise" includes not a single note among its black-ink
drawings of
squares, triangles and circles.
Outrageous? Sure, but then conventions are intended to make
those who
violate them look ridiculous. On closer inspection this music
seems prescient
of our own age, in which electronica, turntable manipulation,
sampling and
free jazz have dissolved the borders between noise and music,
composition
and improvisation, amateurs and professionals.
Yesterday's revolutionary hopes have become the premises of
today's
experimental popular music.
Cage's ideas began to spread from the classical scene to a
more vernacular
milieu in the late 1960's. Although he had an ardent following
among
avant-garde composers (Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff and
Earle
Brown), choreographers (Merce Cunningham) and artists (Robert
Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns), the doors to the classical
concert hall had
all but closed, and many of his one-time classical admirers,
notably Pierre
Boulez, were abandoning Cagean indeterminacy as a dead end.
Meanwhile, Cage's celebration of collective decision making,
his desire to let
"sounds be themselves," his embrace of chance and
discontinuity, began to
enchant rock musicians who were just discovering the creative
possibilities
inherent in studio production. As the Brazilian singer Caetano
Veloso
recently pointed out in an interview with The Wire, you can
hear Cagean
echoes in the Beatle's "Revolution No. 9." You can also detect
them in the
Constructivist jazz of Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell, in
Tom Z's
"aesthetics of plagiarism," in the "post-rock" of Tortoise and
Stereolab and
in the game pieces of John Zorn as well as in music by D.J.'s
who've never
heard Cage's name.
His ghost hovers kindly over "Goodbye 20th Century" (SYR 4),
Sonic
Youth's homage to 10 of its favorite postwar avant-gardists.
With roots in
the guitar minimalism of Glenn Branca as well as punk, the
band has always
found in noise an almost religious sense of exaltation. On
"Goodbye 20th
Century," the band is joined by its producer, Wharton Tiers;
Jim O'Rourke,
a ubiquitous producer and guitarist in experimental pop; the
Cage
percussionist William Winant; the turntable artist Christian
Marclay, and the
composers Christian Wolff and Takehisa Kosugi.
The 13 tracks range in length from Ms. Ono's 12-second scream
to Cage's
30-minute "Four to the Sixth," in which an excerpt from a
Black Sabbath
guitar solo, prepared piano, drums, marimbas and tape loops of
humming by
Sonic Youth's bass guitarist, Kim Gordon, intersect, overlap
and part ways
again and again, as if they were serenely oblivious of one
another.
Though the band's signature guitar sound conjures up a
familiar aura of
industrial ruin, no attempt has been made to render the music
any less
unruly than it is. We are presented here not with seamless
works, but with
what the film critic Manny Farber called "termite art." Such
art, Mr. Farber
wrote, "goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and,
likely as not,
leaves nothing in its path other than signs of eager,
industrious, unkempt
activity." That's a shrewd characterization of what goes on in
Mr. Wolff's
weirdly hypnotic "Burdocks." This 13-minute meditation on a
melodic
fragment has no beginning, middle or end, and yet it moves.
Other works are less successful, in part because such music
often depends on
live performance to be understood. Much of the music created
by Cage and
his heirs is "metamusical": it possesses a strongly theatrical
streak, and the
resulting sound is less important than how it is executed. The
directions for
Steve Reich's 1968 "Pendulum Music," for instance, instruct a
group of
performers to swing microphones suspended above loudspeakers
until they
emit feedback. Although this might be provocative in concert,
it is merely
irritating on record.
"Pendulum Music," in subordinating the performers' will to an
impersonal
process, highlights a curious paradox of Cage-influenced
music. By
renouncing control of the final product -- by refusing to
"bring order out of
chaos," as he put it -- the composer encouraged an unusually
participatory
approach to performance. Yet his acceptance of chaos and his
blithe
rejection of human intentions also exposed a disregard for
individual
expression, for the self-assertion that is virtually
synonymous with freedom
in Western music, from the violin concerto to the jazz solo.
This clash of tendencies characterized the short, turbulent
career of the
British composer Cornelius Cardew, whose "Treatise" has now
been
recorded in its entirety for the first time. An instructor at
the Royal
Academy of Music and a member of AMM, a seminal
electro-acoustic
improvising ensemble, Cardew was the British avant-garde's
charismatic
leader in the 1960's. After studying with Mr. Stockhausen in
the late 1950's,
he rejected traditional notation' and became a champion of
Cage's methods.
Seeking to break down the barrier between skilled and
unskilled musicians,
in 1969 Cardew established the Scratch Orchestra, whose
activities ranged
from "playing conventional instruments" to "making motions
with a hand or
arranging a scarf."
Some of England's most important musicians of the 1970's and
80's,
including Brian Eno, Michael Nyman and John Tilbury, were
graduates of
the orchestra.
Unlike Cage, for whom sound experiment was an end in itself,
Cardew was a
passionate activist who regarded music as a means to radical
social change.
After converting to Maoism in the early 1970's, Cardew
assailed his mentor
in a screed called "Stockhausen Serves Imperialism" and turned
violently
against Cage's methods. The very principles he had upheld,
graphic notation
and chance, he now disdained as counterrevolutionary
deceptions. Consistent
if nothing else, he repudiated his earlier work, squandering
his considerable
artistry on simple agit-prop pieces for "the workers," notably
with "A
Thousand Nails in the Coffin of Imperialism." The workers
failed to notice,
and he grew increasingly despondent. After trying his hand at
Marxist pop
songs, he was killed by a hit-and-run driver in 1981 at the
age of 45.
A LTHOUGH Cardew's Maoist phase proved ruinous to his art, the
Cagean
works from the 1960's are long overdue for revival. In
"Treatise," Cardew
drew upon his knowledge of graphic design as well as
composition. Cardew
was hardly alone in suggesting affinities between music and
visual art;
Morton Feldman used to hang his scores on the wall as if they
were
paintings.
Yet Cardew broke new ground in writing a piece entirely in
nonmusical
symbols.
"Treatise" engages performers in an interpretative game,
challenging them
to translate its images into musical sounds.
In an essay on the "disadvantages of a musical education,"
Cardew wrote that
"Treatise" would be played, ideally, by children, musical
innocents.
The musicians on the new recording of "Treatise" (Hat[Now]Art
2-122) are
hardly innocents. They are Mr. O'Rourke, who contributes eerie
synthesizer
ripples; the cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm; the clarinetist
Guillermo Gregorio;
the pianist Jim Baker and the vibraphonist Carrie Biolo. But
they are some
of Chicago's most exploratory improvisers, and they have
undertaken
Cardew's project with sympathy and a suitably doctrinaire
sense of purpose.
Out of nearly 200 pages of drawings, they have fashioned two
and a half
hours of creepy, almost unremittingly somber music. As
conducted by Art
Lange, the work is quiet, severe and nearly stationary in the
manner of
Feldman's music.
And though it's odd to speak of fidelity to a noteless score,
the recording
certainly honors the spirit in which the work was composed. We
are dealing,
after all, with a treatise, and who ever heard of a treatise
being fun?
At the same time, "Treatise" cannot help betraying its
composer's intentions
by the very fact that it is a recording. "What we hear on tape
or disc is
indeed the same playing but divorced from its natural
context," lamented
Cardew, for whom the "natural context" -- the act of making
and sharing
music in a room and of smashing hierarchy -- was everything.
It might
please him to know that "Treatise" continues to elicit
interest among
musicians. But I think he would be more excited by the fact
that "musical
innocents" around the world, in clubs and behind turntables
and in the
streets, are composing treatises of their own.
Adam Shatz's most recent article for Arts & Leisure was about
the musicians
John Zorn and Arto Lindsay.
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
