Eight Lectures on Experimental Music

by Alvin Lucier

  Well, about one hundred years ago, the microphone was invented, and it then became possible to sing in a more intimate way with a small, more natural voice and still be heard over very large ensembles, very loud ensembles, woodwinds, brass, percussion, and what have you. This is, in fact, the kind of voice that I grew up hearing in popular music, jazz, and later rock. The acoustical realities changed with the microphone, and the vocal style changed with it.

  K. ROBERT SCHWARTZ

  Are you saying that composers should avoid using the orchestra and bel canto voices if they write an opera?

  STEVE REICH

  Certainly not, if they have a reason to use them. For instance, Stravinsky, in The Rake’s Progress, is making his comment on Mozart opera, and even Auden’s libretto, based on Hogarth, is eighteenth century in subject and tone. Stravinsky needed a classical orchestra, and he specifies only double winds and brass, no trombones or tuba, with a cembalo part to be played by the piano. This was the necessary orchestra for him to recreate his eighteenth-century opera. Similarly, the vocal style in The Rake’s Progress is usually sung by the kinds of singers who sing in Mozart opera. A totally different example would be John Cage’s Europera. Here Cage was manipulating, through chance, procedures material drawn directly from the standard operatic literature. He obviously needed the orchestra and vocal style of the standard repertoire to achieve this. What I’m objecting to is a more or less unconscious or knee-jerk assumption on the part of composers today that opera equals bel canto voices on stage and orchestra in the pit. If it makes sense for what you’re trying to achieve, fine, but if your opera is about characters who lived anywhere from the 1930s to the present and then you unquestioningly have your singers sing as if they stepped out of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Germany or Italy, you create a superficial and inadvertently foolish and amusing situation. If you are writing an opera about, say, General Eisenhower and he appeared singing as if he stepped out of The Marriage of Figaro, that could well be seen as a joke. It would be altogether more serious and genuinely more engaging to have him sing like Frank Sinatra, and instead of an orchestra in the pit, why not a complete Glenn Miller band on stage?

  K. ROBERT SCHWARTZ

  So you see Kurt Weill as pointing the way to the future?

  STEVE REICH

  Definitely. Look at his musical context. Berg composed Wozzeck in 1921 with a huge orchestra and large vocal style, and one can certainly see his work as done under the shadow of the death of German romanticism. Weill was aware of that death, but his reaction in 1928 is The Threepenny Opera. While Berg is looking backward, Weill instead does an about-face and looks to contemporary popular forms as material for his musical theater.

  K. ROBERT SCHWARTZ

  One of Weill’s concerns throughout his life was in combining materials from popular culture with those of European high culture. In effect, he blurred the supposed divide between the two. Does that have special meaning for you?

  STEVE REICH

  We are living in a time now when the worlds of concert music and popular music have resumed their dialogue. Perhaps I’ve had a hand in this restoration myself, but certainly Kurt Weill began it long before I was born. This dialogue, of course, is the normal way of the musical world. The French popular song of the fifteenth century, “Missa L’homme armé,” served as the cantus firmus of more than thirty masses composed by the likes of Du Fay, Ockeghem, Josquin des Prez, and Palestrina. Later, from about 1600 to the death of J. S. Bach, the instrumental suite is based on stylizations of actual dances of a somewhat earlier period, often including allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue, amongst others. The use of folk song by later composers includes, amongst others, Beethoven in the Sixth Symphony, Bartók and Kodaly in many of their compositions, and Stravinsky in The Rite of Spring, The Firebird, and Les Noces. It seems that the wall between serious and popular music was erected primarily by Schoenberg and his followers. Since the late 1960s, this wall has gradually crumbled, and we are back, more or less, to the normal situation where concert musicians and popular musicians take a healthy interest in what their counterparts have done and are doing. Kurt Weill pointed the way back in the 1920s.

  ALVIN LUCIER

  Before we move on to questions, let’s listen to a surprise performance of Steve’s recent Vermont Counterpoint, played by visiting flute teacher Peter Standaart.

  STEVE REICH

  I didn’t even know this performance was going to happen until Alvin told me about it yesterday. But I’m glad because it’s always much better to hear something that we all can share.

  Before I take your questions, I’d like to thank Alvin Lucier for inviting me but more importantly for his enormous contribution to contemporary music. I’m sure you’ve all heard his I Am Sitting in a Room, and I imagine you all appreciated the depth of honesty and musical invention in that piece. When I first heard it in 1970 at the Guggenheim Museum, my first thought was “Incredible! Why didn’t I think of that?” Well, I didn’t think of that because I’m not Alvin. He was able to turn speech into music by re-recording his own voice until his vowels combined with, as he says, the “resonant frequencies of the room,” to turn his words into a kind of ghostly sitar. For me, the key sentence is: “I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech may have.” Alvin shows that whatever the brilliance of your musical ideas, they will most likely reach others if they carry your personal conviction with them. Now, any questions?

  QUESTION

  What are your opinions about contemporary electronic dance music?

  STEVE REICH

  Thank you, and I hope you’ll bear with a long answer. When I was a kid, I took piano lessons, and on recordings I listened to Beethoven’s Fifth, Schubert’s Unfinished, the overture to Der Meistersinger, Broadway shows, pop music of the day, and so on. In other words, no classical music before Haydn or after Wagner, and no real jazz. It wasn’t until the age of fourteen that I heard The Rite of Spring, the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, and bebop—Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and drummer Kenny Clarke. These three musics changed my life. I’m still under their influence. At that time, I had a friend who was a better pianist than I was, and we wanted to start a band. I said, “I’m the drummer,” and started taking snare drum lessons from Roland Kohloff, the best local drummer who ended up being timpanist with the New York Philharmonic. I also began going down to Birdland on 52nd Street to hear Miles Davis and Kenny Clarke—Charlie Parker died before I could hear him—and it made an enormous impression on me. Later on, when I was studying composition at Juilliard and then Mills, roughly between 1960 and 1964, I must have heard John Coltrane play forty or fifty times live in New York and in San Francisco. He was playing what was called “modal jazz,” which, in a nutshell, was based on very few chords. In Africa/Brass, for example, he stays on E, from the low E string on the bass, for over sixteen minutes. All that in 1961, before Riley, me, or Glass.

  That was a huge influence musically, and, if you like, morally. I was going to school at that time at Mills College and studying with Luciano Berio. Most of the student composers were writing incredibly complex pieces, and they weren’t playing them on any instrument. I had serious doubts whether they heard those pieces in their heads. So that was my daytime activity; at night I would go hear Coltrane. He would pick up his soprano or tenor sax, and the music would just come out. Facing that dichotomy, I decided that with whatever limitations I have, I have to play in my own pieces. So, I would say that jazz influenced the rhythmic feel of what I do, and it also made me a player in my own ensemble.

  Now, you asked about contemporary electronic dance music. Maybe I can at least get close to answering. Let’s go back to 1974, London, Queen Elizabeth Hall, and my ensemble’s giving a concert. Concert’s over, a guy comes up with lipstick, long hair, and says, “How do you do? I’m Brian Eno.” Then, in 1976, my ensemble gave the German premiere of Music for 18 Musicians at the Nati
onal Gallery in Berlin, and David Bowie was there. In 1978, the piece was released on the ECM jazz label, even though it was recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, because Manfred Eicher, founder of ECM Records, wanted to release it. In New York, ECM was run by Bob Hurwitz, who now runs Nonesuch, and he said, “Look, we’d like you to play this piece at The Bottom Line cabaret club in New York.” I said, “Great.” David Bowie came again. Then cut to about four or five years ago, again in London, and someone’s interviewing me for a pop electronic keyboard magazine, and he asks, “Have you heard The Orb’s Little Fluffy Clouds?” I said no, and he gave me the CD. I listened and heard that it had fifteen or twenty seconds of Electric Counterpoint, the piece I wrote for Pat Metheny. I thought, “Hmmm, these people don’t just like what I do, they sample it and put it in their music.” I didn’t take any legal action, which was a wise decision. Recently, someone gave me some Aphex Twin to listen to. My eighteen-year-old cousin is plying me with techno stuff. It’s not Donna Summer, I know. There’s discussion now of the possibility of some of these guys doing a remix album of some of my things, and I think it would be great if that happened. There has been a dialogue, back and forth, for a very long time. Composers from Du Fay to Palestrina wrote “Missa L’homme armé” on the French folk song. Haydn’s 104th symphony uses an Austrian drinking song. The first movement of Beethoven’s fourth uses a folk song. Bartók was so immersed in Serbo Croatian folk music that he collected and analyzed that, even in his string quartets; it’s sometimes impossible to single out what is or is not folk material. Stravinsky denied it at times, but Richard Taruskin has shown exactly how The Rite of Spring uses Russian folk material. Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera is more Weimar Republic cabaret than traditional opera. Is Gershwin a songwriter or concert composer? Clearly, he’s both. Ives constantly uses the Hymn tunes he played as a church organist in Three Places in New England and many other works. That’s the way it’s always been, and unfortunately it was just in this odd little period, when I was a music student the way you are now, when there was the idea that you may enjoy jazz or rock, but it has nothing to do with what you’re doing. What you compose must come out of Boulez, Stockhausen, or Cage, or you will definitely not be taken seriously. No harmony, no melody, and certainly no periodic rhythm. That’s not in line with the history of Western music, where so much comes out of folk roots. And folk roots in our day … You go to a music store, what do you see in the window? You see samplers, digital delays, et cetera. That’s our urban folk music. You can hate it, you can love it, you can do what you like, but it’s a fact. It would be odd if it didn’t have some effect on “serious” or classical composers. In America, that’s our tradition. Charles Ives, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and so much since. It’s our heritage, our stomping ground, and you can do what you want about it, but you must be aware of it.

  QUESTION

  What are you listening to?

  STEVE REICH

  I have a tremendous admiration for Arvo Pärt. Also, I’m very interested in the music of Michael Gordon, who is a member of the Bang on a Can group. His Yo Shakespeare and Trance are available on recording. A brand new one called Love Bead sounds like Michael Gordon meets Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, particularly. I’m interested in Cheating, Lying, Stealing by David Lang. I strongly recommend that to you. I’m also interested in Louis Andriessen’s de Staat and Hoketus.

  QUESTION

  Both pieces that we’ve heard today remind me strongly of the composer David Bordon, and I wondered if you’ve had any interaction with him or know his work at all?

  STEVE REICH

  Yes, David’s at Cornell. He was in the dance department, but now he’s in the music department. He formed Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Group years ago. Nurit Tilles from my ensemble was drafted to be one of his keyboard players. I met David about the time when the It’s Gonna Rain album was being recorded at Columbia, in the late 1960s. It made an impression on him, and later Philip Glass made an impression on him. David is one of a number of younger people for whom my generation—the Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Phil Glass generation—has had an effect.

  QUESTION

  How would you capsulize your experience as an American composer connecting with the rest of the world? Over the time that you’ve come up, from the ’60s on, how has your relationship with what’s happening in Europe, Eastern Europe, and non-Western countries developed?

  STEVE REICH

  Well, as far as the European side of it goes, it’s an interesting question. Twenty years ago, to get a good performance of my music in Europe would have been virtually impossible. When The Desert Music was played in 1984 by the Cologne Radio Orchestra, it was a disaster. There was no way of informing them of the style of the music. But now—I just literally came back yesterday from Dijon, a small town where the mustard comes from—they got me there for performances of my music by percussion students from Strasbourg—eighteen, nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one years old. And, man, they just tore through my Sextet, Music for Pieces of Wood, and Six Marimbas—first-rate, intense, serious. It was gorgeous. It’s another generation. I also just came back from presenting the second collaboration Beryl Korot and I are making together of a piece called Hindenburg, which is being premiered by the Ensemble Modern, a German ensemble. They’re similar to the Ensemble InterContemporain in Paris, the London Sinfonietta, the Klangforum Wien, the Avanti Ensemble in Scandinavia, and the Asko Schoenberg Ensemble in Holland. Ensembles like these are growing like mushrooms all over Europe. They consist of from fifteen to forty musicians, well funded, full-time gigs, recording contracts, tours. They decide what they want to play, who their conductor’s going to be, what their repertoire is going to be, and they have their own audio engineer as part of the group. They are conservatory-trained musicians but know rock and roll, jazz, some gamelan, and African drumming. It’s a new breed of European musicians; they play my music and that of my contemporaries completely idiomatically.

  As to European composers, I mentioned that I am very interested in Arvo Pärt and also Louis Andriessen. I also have a high regard, as so many others do, for Ligeti, including Atmosphères, Clocks and Clouds, and his piece for one hundred metronomes. Finally, I was a student of Luciano Berio, from whom I learned that human speech, rather than electronically generated sound, was the great source for tape music. As for non-Western music, you may know that I was a student of both Ghanaian drumming and Balinese Gamelan back in the 1970s. I learned a great deal from both that definitely encouraged me to continue composing, as I began to in 1965.

  There’s a new recording of Music for 18 Musicians on BMG by the Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt, with guest artists Russell Hartenberger and Bob Becker, who got their doctorates here at Wesleyan. It was like passing the torch, in a sense, to another ensemble. They had the written materials, and we gave them the oral tradition.

  QUESTION

  Can you explain what was happening in the first piece?

  STEVE REICH

  Vermont Counterpoint? It consists basically of canons. It is written for garden-variety instruments; in other words, flute, alto flute, and piccolo. I didn’t want to write for bass flute because I tend to shy away from instruments that almost nobody has. It began when flutist Ransom Wilson asked me to write him a concerto. I told him I didn’t write concertos; I’m not interested in the idea of a solo line against an orchestra or a chamber orchestra. Then I thought to myself, “This guy’s a great player, there ought to be something I can do.” So I called him back and said, “Would you be interested in performing a piece that would be like those earlier pieces I did back in the ’60s in which you play against pre-recordings of yourself?” To my surprise, he said yes, and I wrote Vermont Counterpoint for him. There’s also a piece called New York Counterpoint for clarinets, which has recently been recorded by Evan Ziporyn, a member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars. It was written for clarinets and bass clarinet; it’s got a bigger sound. Then there’s Electric Counterpoint with Pat Metheny pla
ying guitars and electric basses. If you orchestrated Vermont Counterpoint for flute, clarinet, and oboe, for example, you wouldn’t get that web of sound. This is true for all these counterpoint pieces: I’m playing a line, you’re playing a line, she’s playing a line, and we want to play them in different rhythmic positions and get this web of sound, where you’re not sure if it is me or the other player. You get that in Piano Phase, too. To achieve this you’ve got to have identical timbres so that the individual voices blend and form one web of interlocking melodic patterns. If you had flute, clarinet, and oboe, you would have a totally different and—in this kind of music—unsuccessful result. The basic thing is that they must be consorts of identical instruments playing unison canons.

  QUESTION

  Could you comment on the influences of Arvo Pärt on the piece Proverb?

  STEVE REICH

  It’s a fair question, but the answer is none. When I was a music student at Cornell and William Austin was teaching music history, he played one of the first pieces of four-part counterpoint that we have in Western music. That is a four-part organum by Pérotin, Viderunt Omnes, from the eleventh century. It made a strong impression on me and made me think seriously about augmentation as a powerful musical technique. My piece Four Organs from back in 1970 would have been impossible without Pérotin. You ask about Proverb, and the answer is I wrote it with the score of Pérotin’s Viderunt Omnes on my piano. The piece is an homage to Pérotin and was written for Paul Hillier and his early music group, Theater of Voices. Arvo Pärt is another composer, amongst several others nowadays, who is more interested in the period of music, let’s say from 1100 to 1750, than they are in the period between 1750 to 1900. So in that sense, Pärt and I share that. Have any of you heard Tehillim, a piece of mine, a setting of the Psalms, sung by early music singers? I’ve been working with early music singers since Music for 18 Musicians. They just blend into the fabric of my music; Proverb really wears it on its sleeve. It conjures up the same associations as Pärt’s music does, because he also deals with the vocabulary of church chant of which Pérotin is one of first great innovators. It’s a fair question.