Eight Lectures on Experimental Music

by Alvin Lucier

  The one thing about his style, the Kirana style, also known as the style of Krishna, was based on the concept of devotion, and devotion to the teacher was the main thing. No matter what the teacher said, you had to do it. Even if he, like, for instance, one Muslim singer once said to me, Salamat Ali Khan said, “You know, we Muslims, we don’t drink, but if the teacher tells you to pour alcohol on the shrine, we have to do it.” And so, literally, my studies with Pran Nath completely changed my life in that they introduced an entire new world of music—for instance, you have two different ragas that use the same mode. Yet the way you go from sa to re, let’s say C to D, in these two ragas is completely different—something that was literally unheard of in Western classical music. And additionally, he taught me an entire lifestyle about performing, how to prepare for a performance. On the day of a performance, he would not speak to anybody; he was just totally—his mouth was closed. He didn’t want you talking to him, and right up to the performance, this bomb would happen at the concert. Then afterward he’d drink wine. It was just like a revelation to me to live with him, to observe him, to watch him, what made a master Indian vocalist a master. It was literally probably the highest experience of our lives.

  When he passed away in California, we were able to spend time with his body in the room. They let us take the body home to his house and let us keep it there for thirty-six hours. It was an incredible spiritual experience that I had not anticipated. We thought we would be very sad, because we had literally studied with him for twenty-six years, and maybe 50 percent of that time we lived with him. This amazing spiritual presentation of him became manifest, and it was literally unbelievable, so I can only thank him for what he gave us, and I thank you for having us here. It’s been exciting to be able to talk to you, and I hope I can come again some time. Thank you very much, Alvin.

  ALVIN LUCIER

  You’re welcome. Thank you.

  6

  STEVE REICH

  December 9, 1997

  ALVIN LUCIER

  Steve Reich is no stranger to Wesleyan; he has been here several times. Years ago, he came up for the summer and took Abraham Adzenyah’s African drumming classes. His Steve Reich Ensemble performed a concert in 1974 on the Crowell series. In 1988, the New World Consort performed a concert of his works, including his Octet. Several of our graduate students have been members of the Steve Reich Ensemble and have been an integral part of the whole panorama of his music. The hundreds of students who have taken Music 109 know a good deal about his music. I started teaching Steve’s work as far back as 1968, when I first came to Wesleyan.

  In the late ’60s, I was in Antioch, Ohio, performing with the Sonic Arts Union. At that time, David Behrman was producing records for CBS Records. He came into our rehearsal and said, “I’d like to play you something of Steve Reich’s that I’m putting on Odyssey [record label]. It’s called Come Out.” We stopped rehearsing, and he played the piece. We were stunned. It was one of those times when you see or hear something and you know something very new has just occurred, something new and good and important. It was that simple piece that we all know, so I don’t have to describe it, in which a speaker’s recorded voice moves out of phase with itself, creating a canon. We all know that a canon is an essential form in music, but, in this case, you could hear it being made in real time before your very ears. What a simple and fruitful idea that was. Until the early ’70s, Steve made pieces during which identical sound material moves out of phase with itself. Since then, he has expanded that idea, invented many others, and has made a wonderful body of work. Steve Reich is one of the few composers that I know that has been able to maintain the integrity of his ideas and yet make a music that appeals to a lot of people.

  STEVE REICH

  A couple of weeks ago, I was out in Utah, of all places, and the sponsor said, “I hear you’re working on some book of collected writings.” And I said, “I am,” and he said, “Well, why don’t you bring something out here and read it?” And I thought, “Ah, that’s a bad idea,” but I did it. And it went over pretty well, I think, so I hope I won’t bore you. What I’m going to do is read a bunch of really short one- or two-page pieces on different composers probably most of you have heard of. And then you will have heard me lecture. And then with that out of the way, I’m going to play … how many people here have heard the piece Proverb before? Well, OK. For those of you who’ve heard it, I’ve got two scores, because I know you haven’t seen the score. The rest of you will hear the piece. It’s fourteen minutes. I’m going to talk for about fifteen minutes, fourteen minutes of music, and then I’m just going to answer any questions you’ve got about anything that I can answer. So here we go.

  RE: SCHOENBERG

  Arnold Schoenberg’s influence in America was quite pronounced during the 1950s and ’60s. It was, of course, due to the activities of Stockhausen, Boulez, and Berio at this time that brought renewed interest in Schoenberg’s music. Even John Cage was, in many ways, a follower of his teacher Schoenberg, with whom he studied at UCLA, most especially in Cage’s rejection of any sort of harmonic organization of musical form. This brought about the situation in the late ’50s and early ’60s, during which time I was a music student at Juilliard and then at Mills College with Berio, that anyone writing music that was not either serial or aleatoric was simply not worthy of the slightest consideration. Now, about thirty-five years later, what remains musically? Well, of serial music, some works of Boulez, Stockhausen, and Berio, and a few others. Their imitators, particularly in America, appear more or less exactly as what they always were, Americans once again aping their European betters. Even in terms of John Cage, it seems that while his books and essays of the ’60s and beyond remained of theoretical interest, his music that is played and admired most, it seems to me, is the percussion and prepared piano works of the ’30s and ’40s.

  There are, it seems, some fundamental problems in Schoenberg’s musical thinking. The main problem is this: the reality of cadence to a key or modal center is basic in all the music of the world, Western and non-Western. This reality is also related to the primacy of the intervals of the fifth, the fourth, the octave in all the world’s music, as well as the physical acoustics of sound. Similarly for regular rhythmic pulse. Any theory of music that eliminates these realities is relegated to a marginal role in the music of the world. The postman will never whistle Schoenberg. It’s been almost a hundred years, but even two hundred years or more will bring no improvement in this respect. This doesn’t mean that Schoenberg was not a great composer. Clearly, he was. It does mean that his music, and all the music like his, will always inhabit a sort of dark corner, off by itself in the history of the world’s music. It is thus no accident that his quite understandably most popular works all predate his invention of the twelve-tone system. The piano pieces Op. 11 and 19, the Five Pieces for Orchestra Op. 16 (particularly the third movement, “Farben,” or “Changing Colors on a Lake”), as well as Verklärte Nacht, Pierrot Lunaire, etc., will, it seems, remain as his most performed and listened to works. This is not due to a limitation in the intelligence of listeners. It is due to a limitation of Schoenberg’s later music.

  After Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern came a pause followed by Stockhausen, Boulez, and Berio, and then after them came myself, Riley, Glass, Young, and later many others. This most recent group of composers, of which I am a part, has been involved in something, on the one hand, quite new in terms of musical structure of repetition and slow harmonic change, and, on the other hand, in a process of restoration. That is, the restoring of melody, counterpoint, and harmony in a recognizable but completely new context. That this music should be listened to with interest worldwide, particularly amongst the young, should come as no surprise. That this music arose in part as a complete turning away from Schoenberg and his ideas comes as no surprise either.

  RE: JOHN CAGE

  In the early 1960s, when I was a young composer working in a new way, my reaction to John Cage was that hi
s direction was clearly not my own. Nevertheless, Cage’s ideas about chance procedures were very much in the air, and it seemed necessary to deal with them one way or the other. In 1968, after I had composed It’s Gonna Rain, Come Out, Piano Phase (which Cage included in his anthology, Notations), Violin Phase, and other pieces, I wrote in an essay called “Music Is a Gradual Process”—and now I’m quoting myself from this earlier piece: “John Cage has used processes and has certainly accepted their results, but the processes that he used were compositional ones that could not be heard when the piece was performed. The process of using the I Ching or imperfections in a sheet of paper to determine musical parameters can’t be heard when [a person is] listening to music composed that way. The compositional process and the sounding music have no audible connection. Similarly, in serial music, the series itself is seldom audible. What I’m interested in”—in those days—“is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing.”

  In order to clarify in words what I had done musically before 1968, it was necessary to distinguish it from the dominant musical directions of that time: the European serialism of Stockhausen, Boulez, and Berio, with whom I had studied, and the chance procedures of John Cage. During the late 1960s and early ’70s, I had occasional contacts with Cage. We were both in a series of small classes on the computer language FORTRAN, taught by the composer, pianist, and conductor James Tenney. After one of these classes, Cage played a preview of his then new Cheap Imitation. Later he came to a private preview performance of my Drumming. During this time, I began to appreciate the tenacity and consistency of Cage as a person. My impression of his contribution is basically that his early percussion and prepared piano pieces will survive best. It is sometimes suggested that these early works had laid the groundwork for the kind of music I, and others, wrote in the 1960s and the early ’70s, in that Cage’s early works were structured rhythmically rather than harmonically. There was clearly some technical affinity between his early work and my own; however, since I never studied Cage’s early works at that time, they had no conscious influence on my music.

  Over the years, I have come to value those composers who have a distinct voice of their own. There’s one over there. [Points to Alvin Lucier]. Talent and technique alone without a distinct vision seem increasingly irrelevant. John Cage had a vision and followed it.

  RE: FELDMAN

  I didn’t hear any of Feldman’s music until 1962, when I heard a piece of Stockhausen’s called Refrain. I only realized later that this was Stockhausen’s Feldman piece, just as Stimmung was his La Monte Young piece. In 1963, I wrote a piece called For Three or More Pianos, or Piano and Tape, which was influenced by Refrain, which is to say that it was influenced by Feldman without me even knowing it at the time.

  When I moved back to New York from San Francisco in September 1965, I didn’t pay much attention to Morton Feldman. I knew he was there, that he was part of the group around John Cage, that his music was quiet, but at that time it was important for me to get away from all of it, from Feldman, Cage, just as from Stockhausen, Berio, and Boulez. In 1971, Feldman and Cage attended a private loft performance of Drumming. Later, at a party, Feldman and I had a chance to talk, and from 1971 on we met from time to time. He was, as everyone who knows him or who ever met him [knows], an absolutely unforgettable human being. During that time, he generously told me that my Four Organs had made a strong impression on him. Gradually, I became aware of his Piece for Four Pianos from 1957, eight years before my own It’s Going to Rain, which utilized a rhythmically free form of changing phase relations. All four players play from the same score but are free to pass through the chords at their own pace. By the ’80s, when Feldman started writing longer pieces, I foolishly didn’t take the time to listen to them, and Feldman drifted out of my musical consciousness. And then in 1987, Morty died.

  Within the next few years, I began to listen to some of his late works. Two of them, Piano and String Quartet, 1985, and The Turfan Fragments, particularly struck me. Piano and String Quartet is the most beautiful work of his that I know, and upon examining the score, I began to see that many of its quiet, mysterious chords were actually inversions of themselves, repetitions of material that were never exact repetitions. In The Turfan Fragments, there is again a play of rhythmic phase relationships within the music. Feldman was able to combine extremely chromatic harmony, soft dynamics, generally slow, flexible tempos with minimal phase and variation techniques. I felt like I was getting a composition lesson from the grave. I wanted to call him to tell him I had missed the boat with his late pieces, to ask him how he made them, but that was no longer possible. I miss Morton Feldman, and I love and admire his music.

  RE: BERIO

  Before I studied with Luciano Berio at Mills College in California, I heard his Circles, a setting of the American poet e. e. cummings, for voice, harp, and percussion. It was sung by Cathy Berberian and conducted by Berio at the New School in New York in about 1960. It was an ear- and mind-opener. I can remember what seemed like numberless sentimental settings of cummings in the 1950s by American composers whose names I can’t remember. In contrast, here was an Italian who clearly understood that cummings’s poetry was largely about the individual syllables of which it was made. The first syllable of the word “stinging,” which separated—this is in Berio’s setting—into a very long-held “ssss” followed by “ting” and finally “ing,” by the soprano, whose sibilance on the “ssss” was answered by two sandpaper blocks rubbed together by a percussionist. The marriage of instrumental timbre with syllabic timbre went exactly to the heart of cummings’s poetry. It was a lesson in setting a text without the need of a classroom.

  When I studied with Berio from 1961–63 at Mills, he early on played a tape of his piece Omaggio a Joyce, which showed again how speech, often broken down into the syllables of Finnegans Wake, could be a riveting source for tape music as well. It was more interesting to me, by far, than the tape pieces made with electronically generated tones, and it encouraged me later on, in 1965 and ’66, with my own speech-tape pieces It’s Going to Rain, and Come Out.

  As a composition student with Berio, I continued to use the twelve-tone rows, as I had done since 1960, while still at Juilliard. My procedure was not to transpose, not to invert, not to retrograde the row, but to repeat it over and over again. Berio saw a three-minute string orchestra piece—a student piece of mine, which I had written at Juilliard—that used a repeated row throughout. He said, “If you want to write tonal music, why don’t you write tonal music?” I said, “That’s what I’m trying to do.” Berio’s straight-to-the-point response helped me on my way. I thank him for that, and for his music.

  RE: KURT WEILL, THE ORCHESTRA, AND VOCAL STYLE—AN INTERVIEW WITH K. ROBERT SCHWARTZ (1992)

  K. ROBERT SCHWARTZ

  Why didn’t you write a music theater piece before The Cave?

  STEVE REICH

  Actually, I was asked to write operas during the ’80s, first by the Holland Festival and then by the Frankfurt Opera. Both times I said no. At the time, I knew that I didn’t want to spend several years writing a conventional opera since I had some misgivings about the form itself. What really opened the door to opera for me was Different Trains. I began to realize that if you could see people speaking on videotape and at the same time see and hear live musicians literally playing their speech melodies, that would be a perfect place for me to begin a new kind of opera or music theater.

  K. ROBERT SCHWARTZ

  Did you have any models in the history of opera or music theater?

  STEVE REICH

  The most useful historical model for me turns out to be Kurt Weill. What I learned from him is that if you’re going to write a piece of music theater, there are two basic questions you’re obliged to ask yourself. What and where is the orchestra? And, two, what is the vocal style? Weill is a student of Busoni and as a working composer could have chosen the standard orchestra in the pit when he did The Threep
enny Opera, but no, he chose a banjo, saxophone, trap drums, the cabaret ensemble. As for the vocal style, again, given his background, it would have been natural to assume that he wanted a bel canto operatic voice. Again, he said no, and he chose a woman with a rough cabaret voice. The result is a masterpiece that completely captures its historical time; not the time of Mozart or Verdi or Wagner, it captures the Weimar Republic. And it does this precisely because of his choice of orchestra and vocal style.

  In my case, I have since 1987 felt that the standard symphony orchestra is not my orchestra. It’s the orchestra of Wagner and Mahler and the rest of the German Romantics. My own orchestra is usually less than twenty musicians, and I only need one player to a part, with amplification making possible balances between, say, solo strings and percussion. If you add more strings, they lose their rhythmic agility and develop a kind of overweight timbre that is inappropriate to what I’m trying to do. The amplification is not there as a kind of Band-Aid for poor orchestration; it’s there because that is the one and only way to get the sound that I need for the music that I write. Similarly with vocal style. Historically, the bel canto voice in a Mozart opera had to be heard over an orchestra of something like thirty to forty musicians, and we think of that now as a light operatic voice, even though it had to be heard over all those musicians and often in a large hall. By the time we get to Wagner, he has expanded the brass section enormously, and it is necessary to make a corresponding expansion in the number of strings to balance the brass. Hence, in Wagner opera the singer needs a huge voice just in order to be heard. In both cases, the vocal style is linked with the basic acoustical realities of sound volume coming from the orchestra.