Totalism

Tonight's blog is unlikely to be a long one.  Why is that?  Well, here's what happened.  I started to listen to the listening examples given for totalism, then started to do my standard research on the composers, related pieces, etc.  This led to more articles, and more and more pieces worth checking out and listening to, more scores worth skimming through.  Now it's four hours later, it's very late, and I have only just started writing this blog.

This is some of the music that, subjectively, I seem to love the most.  John Luther Adams, Michael Gordon, David Lang, etc.--these are composers whose music I could listen to for days, and always be finding something new, always enjoying each next piece.  Totalism is (according to Wikipedia) about the balance of background complexity with surface rhythmic complexity.  I love this.  I could even reframe it as such: totalism is a method through which composers create intelligent music that also grooves and maintains a sense of fun.  This does not apply in every case (e.g. JLA's music is rarely "fun" to my ears), but it is a decent summary of why I so often and deeply enjoy it.  I can truly enjoy it on the very first listening, unlike many composers I quite like, because I can groove along with it, and thereby really involve myself in the affect.  Then, I can enjoy it more with each subsequent listening, as I pick out more and more of the legitimate intricacy and intelligence of composition going on underneath the rhythmically complex surface.

I do have one major question here: how do we distinguish between totalism and post-minimalism?  Having read some different things about both topics tonight, I've come to several assumptions, but I don't know if they are correct.  I've listened to lots of both styles before, but no one has ever been there to tell me "This one is post-minimalist; this one is totalist."  As a result, I have no frame with which to distinguish between the two.  It seems to me, from my minimal reading tonight, that totalism focuses more on rhythmic complexity, whereas post-minimalism, while placing emphasis on importance of rhythm, is not always dependent on complexity of rhythm.  It also seems that post-minimalism is usually "pretty" and centric in some fashion, whereas totalism does not feel the need to do the same, and is often dissonant (though it often maintains a sense of fun and audience-friendliness through groove).  Are my assumptions here correct?  I might be totally off-base.  Kyle Gann has a discography list of post-minimal, totalist, and rare minimalist music, which can be found here.  How do he and others make these distinctions?  He does say that the line between the two is fairly arbitrary, but I'm not even sure what the arbitrary line is based on--how do they differ?

John Luther Adams (JLA) is often an exception to several things I've stated here.  His music only occasionally has a "groove," and when it does, it is often more of an insistent pulsing, or otherwise an incomprehensibly dense rhythmic texture, instead of a groovy beat.  JLA's music is almost exclusively based on or taking inspiration from the nature of Alaska, where he lives.  His sound is wide open and often has a sense of isolation.  He talks about Alaska as a "great reservoir of silence," and this enters his music, keeping it wide open in timbre and lending value to many of his textural ideas.

One thing that absolutely anchors JLA in totalism is his rhythmic complexity.  It is not always immediately apparent, but it is almost always present.  For example, in his work "In the White Silence," the entire piece sounds to exist simply as slowly evolving textures.  However, while most of the notes last over a measure long and are legato in nature, when a note changes, it is usually in a strange rhythmic position--the second half-note triplet of the bar, or the third quintuplet of the half-measure, etc.  This reaches the ears as gradual a metric changes, but using complex changing points allows for the voices of this "chorale" to avoid changing at the same time, activating the texture of the work without it sounding like a bland, homorhythmic romantic chorale.

It's worth taking a minute to discuss JLA's massive recent work Inuksuit for 9 to 99 percussionists.  It is a spatial, outdoor work, usually spread out across a park or several acres of field or forest.  The audience is invited to wander among the performers at will, allowing each to construct his or her own experience (just like Cage's HPSCHD).  I mention the work not only because it is a recent passion of mine (and I finally get to perform it for the first time this May), but because the work has become something totally unique to the musical world--it has created a new series of mini-festivals based around itself.  I don't think JLA realized it when he composed the work, but he was creating the perfect storm for weekend percussion getaways.  It is now the norm for any city or university to host an Inuksuit--"Inuksuit Rochester," "Inuksuit Wisconsin," "Inuksuit Brooklyn," etc.  A loving and devoted community has developed around the piece, and when someone decides to put the piece together the Inuksuit crowd always comes out of the woodwork from a radius of hundreds of miles around.  They gather for the weekend to hang with other interesting and fun musicians and put together a huge percussive work, then head back to their respective homes and wait for the next Inuksuit festival.  At this point, there is an Inuksuit somewhere in the country at least once every two or three months.  JLA attends many of them, and most are run by Doug Perkins (current percussionist of eighth blackbird, champion of cool new music, and in many ways a mentor/father figure to the young chamber percussion community--I've mentioned him several times in this blog, and he continues to be relevant).  I wonder if there are currently or have ever been pieces of music that have elicited a similar response, in galvanizing many mini-festivals and creating a widespread community who travel long ways to make the piece happen once in a while in different locations.  Any ideas for pieces that have created similar movements?

A fun little video about the making of the Inuksuit recording,

which is a wholly remarkable recording--it never should have

worked nearly as well as it did, and it makes for an incredible album.

With Inuksuit, again JLA has created a work about atmosphere, not groove, but using incredibly intricate rhythmic relationships in order to create the shifting atmosphere.  He stacks rhythms using unique notation methods, and it ranges from static droning to a wall of frenetic percussive chaos.  Alex Ross of the New Yorker called it "one of the most rapturous experiences of my listening life."  It's a heck of an experience.

JLA is also important right now as the most recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, which he won just last weekend for his orchestral work Become Ocean.  I have yet to hear the work, but I cannot wait to (it's not yet available anywhere).  It's classic JLA, for a multitude of reasons--symmetrical form, long cascading waves of intensification and subsiding, lush string sounds, strongly and actively environmentalist, and deeply entrenched in Alaska and Alaskan issues.  All of these are hallmarks of nearly all JLA's works.  His totalist style allows his music to float, free of rhythmic chains, through its own unique rhythmic complexity.  This, added to the intelligence running through the pitch material, scoring, etc. is where the term totalism becomes appropriately descriptive of his work.

Rock and the Avant Garde

In connection with my last post about jazz connections, it's worth taking some time to look at rock's interactions with this lovely world of concert music.  These tend to come in two types, determined generally by performance setting: we are either talking about 1) concert music using rock styles and techniques, or 2) rock music using concert styles and techniques.  In other words, option 1 is music played in a concert hall, often by more "classical" musicians, often composed using concert notation; while option 2 is rock music played in rock concert venues and settings, often by more "rock"ish musicians.  It's a question of presentation that makes this artificial separation.  I have strongly caring feelings toward both--much of the classical music I love is rock-influenced, and much of the rock music I love is concert-influenced.  Today, I'll be focusing more on the former.  Why?  I'm not sure.  Because I'm exhausted and that's what I happen to be leaning toward right now.

One man who has been working on this frontier for decades is Rhys Chatham.  He began his career as a piano tuner for La Monte Young and harpsichord tuner for Glenn Gould (WHOA).  He moved on to study extensively with La Monte Young and become active as a composer and performer in that scene of minimalism.  Eventually, in the late 70s, he began on what would become the focus of his life's work: guitar ensemble music.  His works are influenced by rock and punk, as well as early minimalism.  Often they have a vibe of process to them, as he focuses on one or two techniques or attributes to follow through to their full potential to compose a piece.  He has worked with classical musicians like Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, and Pauline Oliveros, and rock musicians such as members of Sonic Youth and more.  I listened to a large sample of his first evening length work, and his first work for 100-guitar ensemble: An Angel Moves Too Fast To See.  Listening without video, I could easily see this as either 1) a highly effective classical composition, performed by modern chamber musicians with a great sense of groove, or 2) a very smart rock tune, in the progressive but drivingly groovy vein of Rush or Floyd.  As far as I can tell upon further research, Chatham's works tend to be performed in classical concert settings, which is interesting.  Are they sometimes performed in rock settings?  I hope so.

I can see that I've been clearly separating these two ideas of rock-ish classical music and classical-ish rock music, as designated by performance setting.  Does music NEED to be distinctly one or the other? No, but it usually is.  I have no idea how one would branch this gap.  One good step would be performing concert music in a rock setting or vice versa.  I've definitely seen that in a few places.  For instance, the prog rock percussion quartet Kraken, based in Ithaca, has been known to slip some concert music into their live shows, seamlessly with their rock tunes.  At a show last August, they used Reich's Music for Pieces of Wood and merged it into their own rock tune "Mad Libs."  They also used several movements of Jason Treuting's meditative work "Amid the Noise" as quieter parts of their show.  On a more famous note, one group doing things like this today is Radiohead, and especially its guitarist, Jonny Greenwood.  Greenwood has often been known to play Reich's Electric Counterpoint during otherwise rock concerts.  Greenwood is also an avant garde composer in his own right.  He is good friends with Krzysztof Penderecki, and the two have collaborated on several works together.  Greenwood is also an INCREDIBLY effective film composer, having scored Paul Thomas Anderson's most recent two films (There Will Be Blood and The Master) and Lynne Ramsay's film "We Need to Talk About Kevin."  But amidst all this, he is known to the world almost exclusively as the guitarist from Radiohead.

Jonny Greenwood performing Electric Counterpoint

at a rock show in Krakow, Poland, 9/11/2011

As a percussionist, I have never seen as much separation between rock music and classical music as I think many other musicians do.  We percussionists play an awful lot of rock-influenced music, all the time.  Plus, most of us also actually play rock music, and in a given day we will often work on both in the practice room.  We all talk about both, and rarely make much separation in discussions between them.  Our rep classes often include both rock--old and new--and concert music.  So we try to stay connected to both the "popular" idiom and the concert idiom, and mixing them is everyday.

One up-and-coming composer who is branching these divides is percussionist/composer Ivan Trevino.  Ivan is a recent graduate of the Eastman percussion studio, and he is currently EXPLODING in the percussion world.  In the past 2 years, he has gone from mostly unknown, to having his music performed at MOST music schools in the country.  There have been over a dozen performances of his works on IC student recitals this year alone.  All of Ivan's music is very audience-accessible, it all grooves really hard, and it all is basically rock music written for percussion instruments.  He is currently in the process of branching out into wind/brass and string instruments, but as of yet, all his music is for percussion.  Here is his work that has received the largest exposure, due to a well-publicized performance at PASIC 2013 (Percussive Arts Society International Convention).  The work is Catching Shadows, and is played here by the commissioner, the Eastman Percussion Ensemble (including several good friends of mine).

Catching Shadows (2013), Ivan Trevino

Performed by Eastman Percussion Ensemble, 11/2013

Little fun fact: the work started as a marimba duet, and I was lucky enough to perform it with its commissioner, Eastman Prof. Michael Burritt, about a week after he premiered it with Ivan.

Ivan's works are taking the percussion world by STORM right now.  Why?  Most people like rock music, and most percussionists love both rock and percussion music.  Mixing them seems obvious, but it hasn't been done this effectively and effortlessly until now.  And Ivan seems to be able to put forth these pieces unceasingly, each one as effective as the last.  The world is eating up his rock/classical music.

Even Reich has ventured down the road of rock music, to an extent.  His work 2x5, for the instrumentation of two rock bands (two groups each of two guitars, one electric bass, piano, and "drum set") is an incredibly beautiful and effective work.  Its sound is right in line with most of his compositions of the last decade or two, with the exception that the untuned percussion (drum set) part adds a purely rhythmic element that is mostly new.  It doesn't sound much like rock music, but it uses rock's timbres and palette, and takes some inspiration from it.  This is much more conservatively close to classical concert music, but pretty adventurous for a composer in his late 70s.

Reich's 2x5, performed by Bang On a Can All Stars

This performance is by Bang On a Can All-Stars, which for decades has been blending large elements of rock into concert music.  The ensemble, usually consisting of percussion (often drum set), guitar, bass, piano, cello, and clarinets, uses amplification, a sense of groove, and rock techniques and styles in a wide variety of compositions written for them, often by Bang On a Can founders David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Michael Gordon.  They are an INCREDIBLE joy to experience live, and I hope to see them many more times.  I have several times driven many hours to see them perform, and I would do that any number of times.  They're unbelievable.

Jazz and the Avant Garde

It seems quite natural to me that jazz would and should find common ground with both the worlds of experimental music and the avant garde.  As far as avant garde music goes, jazz is a rapidly developing art form the was invented only 100 years ago and has made rapid and tremendous strides since then in many different directions.  All of these directions were "avant garde" for a time, be it the first bop (Bird and Dizzy), the first cool jazz (the California scene), and more.  Jazz met with classical music in the works of several composers, especially Bernstein (who actually composed at least one work for big band, Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs), and Duke Ellington, a jazz composer/bandleader who composed several works for "classical" ensembles.  And where worlds like these collide, that is where we find a new area of the avant garde.

Bernstein, Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs (1949): composed for the Woody Herman band--part of the same project that also resulted in Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto

It was only a matter of time before jazz and the more adventurous region of the avant garde met and formed a union.  We see examples of this in many works of John Zorn, such as Forbidden Fruit (work for string quartet, with many jazz elements).

That said, it seems to me significantly more inevitable that jazz would meet with experimental music frequently and in a big way.  Both have strong ties with improvisation; both have required a great deal of physical invention in the last 100 years (new ensembles, new instruments e.g. drum set, etc);  both have required innovations in electronics (amplification of instruments for jazz, all sorts of stuff in experimentalism).  The key here is that both have a huge stress on musical play.  Jazz started as a way for talented musicians to make up stuff together, on the spot.  The earliest jazz was collective improvisation, with full groups improvising at once to create on-the-spot compositions.  Though collective improv is now rare in the jazz idiom, improvisation is still a key and central facet of the art form, and groups are flexible to adapt on the go during performances.  Similarly, experimental music has always been about playing with sounds, playing with electronics, playing around with instruments, and general interplay of musicians to create--always something new, always unexpected.

And though collective improv has all but died out in jazz, it has grown in experimental music in recent decades.  There are many groups dedicated to experimental improvisation.  A favorite of mine is Meridien, a trio consisting of Ithacan Nick Hennies, former Cornell professor Tim Feeney, and Greg Stuart.  

Meridien, in a performance from 2012

In fact, I am part of an experimental improv group called the Convergence Quintet, with fellow IC School of Music students Aaron Walters, Tom Smith, Andrew Hedge, and Christina Christiansen.  We hope to have some videos online at some point, but at the moment we have a recording from an early rehearsal that can be found here if you want to check it out sometime:

Convergence Quintet, "rehearsal" 10/26/13

All this goes to say that jazz and experimental music have vast amounts in common, especially a sense of play, and the idea of not knowing what exactly will happen in a work.  They were bound to meet, and in very colorful ways, like John Zorn's game piece Cobra.  I would sincerely love to play Cobra someday (emphasis on play).  It looks massively fun to be a part of.  I do not have any idea how exactly it works, but it must be fun when you're with a group of musicians who dedicate themselves to the piece alongside you.

Cobra also brings up the question of the line between music and performance art.  Sure, the players are all making sounds with musical interments, but so much of it is interplay between people and a very active referee, who does not play an instrument -- he only referees, which is much closer to acting than music-making (though perhaps now that I say that, an orchestral conductor may also be rather closer to an actor than a music-maker -- not sure what I think about this, but it's worth pondering.  Maybe when I'm less tired.)  This work relies on the acting, visual interplay, and outright performing in addition to the music to create its overall effect.  In this way, it is as much a work of performance art as it is a piece of music.

Electronic Music

As I began to look into several major examples of innovations in electronic music, something struck me: many of these composers seem very connected.  Pauline Oliveros and Morton Subotnik both helped found the San Francisco Tape Music Center.  Both also taught at Mills College.  Subotnik helped to found CalArts in 1969, and was its first Associate Dean.  David Rosenboom is currently a professor and Dean of the School of Music at CalArts.  Contrastingly, Alvin Lucier has been doing his own thing in Connecticut, and Varèse's career took him between much of Europe and various parts of the US, including NYC and the West Coast.

This tells me that electronic music is one area of music that did not relegate itself entirely to the New York scene, and whose principal development may have even been more central to the West Coast.  We have seen avant garde composers on the West Coast before now (Henry Cowell, LaMonte Young, etc.), but this is a movement for which the West Coast is central to its development.

I'll be honest, I have little interest in most of the important, pioneering steps in this movement, i.e. Varèse, Oliveros, etc.  I am not against it; I'm glad that this music exists, and I can certainly see how it might lead to music that would interest me more.  Why doesn't it interest me?  I can't be entirely certain, but I can try to examine it.  For the most part, there is nothing for me to grab onto.  Without a tonal center OR rhythmic pulse OR single drone or other sonic artifact that grounds it in one place, I find myself searching for something that isn't there.  Much of this music is arhythmic and atonal, but very busy.  Often when these conditions occur in music, I find myself lost in a sea of uninteresting confusion.  Lots of stuff is happening, but I can't find a reason or way to care about it.

Case and point here are works like Varèse's groundbreaking "Poème electronique" and Morton Subotnik's "Silver Apples of the Moon."  (Note: WIkipedia informs me that the Subotnik is important for being one of the first electronic works that IS rhythmic, but I hear most of its sounds as being utterly unrelated to the underlying, background pulsing.)  I hear a lot of interesting sounds here that would be interesting on their own, but they are thrown together with compositional intent that I can't even begin to fathom, and so it just sounds like unrelated sounds trying desperately to be related.

This brings me to Alvin Lucier, the only composer we are looking at today with whose work I can connect and find something interesting and worth listening to.  Our example of his work is Music on a Long Thin Wire (1977), a sound installation in which a piano string is stretched across a room, oscillators and magnets are coupled with it, and with these it produces a long, slowly changing tone.  To be honest, I don't fully understand the science of what's going on here, but it sets in motion a fascinating sonic experiment.  I can say the same of most of the several other Lucier pieces I have encountered.  In Music for a Solo Performer (1965), he attaches electrodes to his head in order to use his brainwaves as a method for controlling sound output through percussion instruments.  Again, I'm confused on the "how," but the "what" is very interesting.

Wonderfully overdramatic shot of Alvin Lucier at one end of the wire

Music for a Long Thin Wire sets up a deep sonic atmosphere.  I can start it, sit down, and zone in and out as it changes gradually.  I will listen intently for a while, then zone out for a bit, then be pulled back in as I hear it alter slightly.  I can understand the sonic process (minus the scientific details), and a composer's will is not getting in the way.  I think that too often, when music lacks such things as meter and any form of standardized pitch collection, the composer's will can easily get in the way of this music.

Lucier's words back this up consistently.  He doesn't want music to be about "Look what I can do;" he wants it to be about what can naturally occur when some parameters have been set up.  I connect with this easily.  It's the concert music equivalent of going outside, listening to birdsongs, and enjoying them as they are instead of wishing to write them into pieces for a purpose (sort of Cage vs. Messiaen there -- neither one right, but serving opposite goals).  As he says, "It's nothing to do with performers being virtuosi, or audiences having a good time by participation.  Rather, you're quiet and you pay attention." As for composers getting in the way of music, he says "Hammering and shaping materials never feels right to me….I'm concerned in music with exploration and discovery, rather than manipulation and control."  His pieces are built toward this, and they work incredibly well through that lens.  Maybe others will find this boring, and it's not like I want to listen to Lucier's music for 10 hours nonstop, but I really do find his works interesting to experience.  I also think that they can only truly work live, because a recording just doesn't convey what's physically going on, and doesn't carry the incredible timbal detail that is necessary in listening to his works.

Even Lucier's works that require a performer in the more traditional sense of the word follow his musical ideals.  For example, "Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra" for amplified triangle is a study in the sounds of the triangle.  It asks the performer to beat the triangle repeatedly and evenly, while VERY gradually changing the beating spot, rate of striking, and use of muffling.  While the performer does change what they are doing over the course of the piece (via these parameters), it is gradual and allows for a sense of non-intention--simply gradually changing in a linear fashion to allow the triangle to do what it will.

Here's one great performance by an Ithacan, Nick Hennies: "Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra" (1988) (the YouTube embed wasn't working).

Lucier's stress on disciplined attentiveness to gradually shifting sound patterns is a fascinating standpoint to pursue when listening to such music, and I really enjoy the music that arises from it.  That said, Oliveros et al's pursuit of ostensible randomness soaking in compositional intent does not interest me (though I'm glad it exists and some continue to pursue that avenue).