Tragoedia In and Out of Style: Andrew Rudin at 80

by Michael Schell

In the fledgling years of electronic music—the 1950s and 60s—European composers benefitted from the massive support offered by government-owned broadcast studios. Varèse, Stockhausen and Berio created their midcentury masterworks at radio stations equipped with multiple tape recorders and vintage oscillators and filters. American pioneers like John Cage and Pauline Oliveros had to scrape by with homemade instruments and the more modest furnishings of university studios and artist collectives. And their recordings were often drowned out in LP catalogs by their state-sponsored European counterparts.

It was in this environment that Nonesuch Records stepped up, offering the label as a platform for electroacoustic compositions by Cage, Dodge, Wuorinen and Gaburo, as well as Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon (1967), the first tape piece ever commissioned by a record company. Another work commissioned by Nonesuch was an album-length epic called Tragoedia, released in 1969 and created by Andrew Rudin, a Texan who taught for several decades at University of the Arts in Philadelphia and who today is celebrating his 80th birthday.

Switched-On Mahler

Tragoedia was made with an early Moog synthesizer of the sort popularized by Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach. It had a grittier sound then the Buchla synthesizers heard in Subotnick’s music, and its controls made it more suitable for complex, gradually-changing sonorities than the beat-driven patterns facilitated by the Buchla’s sequencer-centric design. Tragoedia‘s sound palette is purely electronic—there are no concrète (prerecorded) sound sources in the piece.

1960s and 21st century Rudin

Rudin (who pronounces his name roo-DEEN) conceived Tragoedia as an exploration of Greek tragedy. But with its familiar four-movement structure, I hear it as more of a synthesized symphony, a modern microtonal organism built from rhythm and timbre but supported by a traditional skeleton.

Viewed this way, the first movement, Kouros, stands in for a sonata-allegro. It begins with a three-chime “alarm clock” that launches a long sinuous paragraph filled with sliding sawtooth waves that culminate abruptly at 1:29 with four “bass drum” stokes. This passage is repeated with some variations, whereupon at 3:29 we hear a new idea, comparable to a sonata form’s second theme, based on short notes that sound like dripping water. At 4:16 an oscillator plays the first real melody of the piece before it too is cut off by bass drum strokes:

The foregoing ideas are now combined and recombined in the manner of a classic development section. The alarm clock gets its solo moment starting at 7:00, and at 8:10 the quoted melody returns a half-step higher. The bass drum tries repeatedly to shut it down, finally succeeding after one last loud stroke.

The second movement, Hybris (“hubris” in modern English), functions as a scherzo. In place of the opening movement’s long contrapuntal lines, Hybris is mainly a succession of brief motives spliced together in a kind of monophony. Headphones will help you hear the fancy stereo effects (e.g. at 1:25). The coda is remarkable: a rising accelerando (created by tape playback with increasing speed) that ends with a dramatic tocsin.

Peitho features fast flurries of randomly-generated tones in counterpoint with slowly shifting sustained sounds. It’s a kind of intermezzo setting up the long final movement, Até, which resembles one of those resigned adagios that often come at the end of Mahler symphonies. A high gated sound that resembles an impulse sprinkler recurs throughout Até as a refrain, usually panning from one ear to the other. The melody from Kouros returns, along with other ideas from the previous movements. The coda features an extended two-voice canon that eventually subsides, leaving the last fleeting words to the impulse sprinkler.

Though Tragoedia’s neoclassicism is not as groundbreaking as the montage structure of Varèse’s Poème électronique or the process-driven form of a minimalist landmark like Come Out, its sound world—still fresh and novel in 1969—impressed Federico Fellini enough to incorporate excerpts from it (without the composer’s permission) in the soundtrack to his Satyricon.

In and out of style

To each era belongs its instruments…and hairstyles (Rudin and a Moog synthesizer in 1972)

As the 1980s ushered in the age of CDs, major disruptions came to the recording industry. Nonesuch was brought under tighter control by its corporate masters at Warner, and the venerable electronic music titles started to drop out of its catalog. Simultaneously, modular synthesizers gave way to digital instruments, and as Gen Xers fawned over the new MIDI synths with their unprecedented portability and programmability, they gradually lost interest in the monuments and artifacts of the old ways.

But things can change over the course of a generation. The emergence of streaming and downloadable media in the 21st century made it easy to reclaim old recordings for digital distribution. And millennials grew tired of the canned timbres produced by their parents’ Korgs and Yamahas. Eager to reintroduce some irregularity into their sound world, they returned to analog technology, now much improved over its first generation, and this in turn rekindled interest in early synthesizer music. Now Tragoedia and its breathren are back, readily accessible online through Spotify, Amazon and YouTube. So grab your headphones, dim your room lights, and (re)connect with this nugget from the golden era of electronic music.

ALBUM REVIEW: Stuart McLeod’s ‘Tetraktys – All Is Number’

by Michael Schell

Back in 1996 Seattle composer/percussionist Stuart McLeod initiated a project called Tetraktys, pronounced “teh-TRAK-tis” and named after a Pythagorean shape with ten points arranged in a pyramid. Considered by some to hold mystic significance, this shape is also a font of mathematical relationships, which in McLeod’s hands evoke musical structures that are varied but unified. Logic dictates having ten Tetraktys pieces in all, one for each point, and having produced a recording of four of them in 2015, McLeod chose this past December 19 (his 53rd birthday) to release the remaining six.

<a href=”http://stuartmcleod.bandcamp.com/album/tetraktys-all-is-number”>Tetraktys – All Is Number by Stuart McLeod</a>

What makes this new album successful isn’t so much the individual tracks as the unexpected relations created through their juxtaposition and summation. Tetraktys 1 (“the origin of the universe”) uses layers of single-note electric guitar chimes, while Tetraktys 2 is appropriately obsessed with major seconds. Much of McLeod’s music is influenced by minimalism—in particular the kind of process-oriented 1960s minimalism epitomized by Terry Riley’s In C, in which multiple musicians gradually play their way through 53 repeating beat-driven patterns. Tetraktys 2, with its emphasis on vibes and single-reed woodwinds, seems to hearken back to the sound world of In C’s first recording.

Tetraktys 3 is fixated on augmented triads: two stacked major thirds that comprise a symmetrical, tonally ambiguous chord any of whose three pitches can function as the root. McLeod amplifies the vagueness by using a detuned piano and adding a generous dose of reverb and simulated tape hiss that suggests the sound of a 1960s era field recording.

Later pieces are less direct in their numerical correspondences. The gamelan-like Tetraktys 8 isn’t a study in octaves as you might expect, but more of a monophonic version of In C where the melodic snippets subtly transform themselves sequentially rather than overlapping by chance. Tetraktys 9 features synthesized clangs and “MIDI orchestra” sounds that remind me of the late Hardy Fox’s “contraptions” released under his Residents nom de plume Charles Bobuck.

For McLeod, whose other musical interests include brainwaves and loud, aleatoric rock, Tetraktys now stands whole, the fulfillment of countless explorations concluded then reopened, “writing and rewriting these 10 pieces over a period of 22 years.” The drawn-out, revolving birthing process has its analog in the final piece, Tetraktys 10, which is designed as a summary of the previous nine followed by a coda that’s a summary of the summary. This is music that, like its gestation, seems to perpetuate itself in cycles.

Elliott Carter (1908–2012): Legacy of a Centenarian

by Michael Schell

Photo by Philippe Gontier.

Today marks Elliott Carter’s 110th birthday, an anniversary that he came remarkably close to celebrating in person. The most long-lived of any major composer, Carter was also the one American most consistently deemed to exemplify the “monumental” aspirations of post-WW2 musical modernism associated with the likes of Boulez, Nono, Lutosławski, and Carter’s contemporary Messiaen.

In its craft—its dissonant harmonies, its constant probing of new musical horizons, and in the disconnect between the praise it received from professional musicians and the ambivalence it often faced from concert audiences—Carter’s music indeed seemed to epitomize contemporary music in the late 20th century. To be sure, its detractors included some informed voices such as critic John Rockwell and musicologist Richard Taruskin, and even a sympathetic writer like Wilfrid Mellers called it “difficult music for ideal listeners,” acknowledging its perhaps unwarranted reputation for dryness. Contributing to this perception is the kind of analysis that Carter’s highly abstract music tends to attract—either very subjective or very technical, in both cases offering little in the way of a guide to how one might actually listen to it. I’ll attempt to at least lower this last hurdle.

Carter began his career in the 1930s amid a political environment that encouraged composers to write accessible, neoclassical music. His earliest works were in the Americana style invented by Virgil Thomson and perfected by Aaron Copland (Holiday Overture from 1944 is a good example). But Carter never had more than modest success with these rather straightforward and nondescript pieces. So after the War, with political imperatives removed, domestic life secure (he married sculptor Helen Frost-Jones in 1939), family money providing financial independence, and with his stagnating career causing personal dissatisfaction, Carter began to experiment with a different, individualistic style of such complexity that he often doubted whether his new compositions would ever be performed, much less listened to approvingly.

Carter with Stravinsky in New York 1962.

The starting points for Carter’s new style were the chromaticism of Schoenberg and the irregular rhythms of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (whose New York premiere in 1924 had first inspired Carter to become a composer). The atonal counterpoint that had been developed in America by Ives, Ruggles, Crawford, and Copland (in his pre-populist years) demonstrated how these new techniques could be cultivated without relying on European models, suggesting a forward path that was free of neoclassical predictability and serialist dogma.

Carter’s big breakthrough was the formidable String Quartet No. 1 (1951), a massive exploration of rhythmic layering and transformation. At 40 minutes, it retains the grand multi-movement form and broad gestures of Romantic quartets. And being still made up (mostly) of melodies and chords, albeit astringent ones, it has become one of Carter’s most popular works and a manageable entry point for those that find his later music tough going.

That the Quartet reflects a new language and confidence is evident from its opening cello cadenza, which seems intent on dragging the Elgar Cello Concerto into the midst of the 20th century:

The tempo here is ♩=72 in 4/4 time. In bar 12, the second violin enters with steady pizzicato chords—like a metronome—spaced a dotted eighth note apart. The cello responds with a stream of quintuplets which, through some changes in time signature, turn into straight sixteenth notes. Then comes a notated ritardando where the sixteenth notes lengthen into dotted sixteenth notes and then dotted eighth notes:

At bar 22, this latter, slower pace is resignatured as quarter notes in 4/4 time. The second violin reenters, and although its “metronome” is ticking at the same rate as before, the cello’s time signature maneuvers have caused the underlying tempo to increase from ♩=72 to ♩=120, so the pizzicato chords are now separated by five sixteenth notes instead of three. This technique of using a common pulse to shift from one tempo to another is called metric modulation by analogy with harmonic modulation where the music moves from one key to another via a common chord:

Soon the other two instruments enter, each with its own distinct rhythmic profile. The viola plays steady quarter-note triplets, while the first violin is in freer rhythm playing a soaring melody with mostly long notes (it’s this melody that approximates the role of a “first theme” in classical sonata form). Left alone, the three lower instruments’ note cycles would converge every 2½ bars, but at measure 27 the second violin starts to hiccup, while the cello drops out to quote Ives’ First Violin Sonata.

It’s an appropriate homage since Carter’s polymetric scheme here is almost an exact lift from the ending of Ives’ Second String Quartet, wherein the cello, viola and second violin each have the same rhythmic values as in Carter’s passage (aligning every 2½ bars in 4/4 time), with the first violin quoting Westminster Chimes in a freer rhythm.

These two techniques—metric modulation and rhythmic layering—became Carter’s signature traits for the rest of his career.

Besides Ives, two key influences on Carter’s Quartet are Ruth Crawford’s own String Quartet (1931) with its often highly independent lines, and Conlon Nancarrow’s polymetric player piano studies (familiar to Carter through their scores, which at that time was the only way to encounter them without travelling to Nancarrow’s Mexico City studio). Carter was one of the first to grasp the importance of Nancarrow’s work, decades before it become more widely known through recordings.

Much more can be, and has been, said about Carter’s First String Quartet, but not more concisely than the composer himself in his listener’s notes, which are characteristically cogent, articulate, and uninhibited in their use of literary analogies (in college Carter actually majored in literature before switching to music).

Like Schoenberg, Carter sought to organize his new musical language in a more systematic way. And by the time of his String Quartet No. 2 (1959), he had developed a novel technique to differentiate the instruments in an ensemble texture while allowing his counterpoint and rhythms to flow organically without any literal repetition of material.

The opening of the piece demonstrates this “new way.” As in the First Quartet, each instrument has a distinct rhythmic profile, including a reprise of the second violin’s “pizzicato metronome.” But gone are the broad, expressive melodies, replaced by a more fragmentary texture. This music is pure movement, rhythm, and contour, built from contrasts between stasis and activity, or convergence and divergence. It’s a middle ground between traditional melody-and-chord music and the sonorism of Ligeti and Penderecki, where individual parts are completely submerged into a composite texture.

To further establish their individual character, each instrument is assigned its own repertory of intervals. All parts are allowed to use major and minor seconds, and octaves are avoided. But as shown in the score excerpt, the first violin’s material is otherwise dominated by minor thirds, the second violin major thirds, the viola tritones, and the cello perfect fourths. It’s like a play where one character speaks only nouns, another only verbs, and so forth.

Carter found that this approach allowed him to write complex contrapuntal music without the arbitrary requirements of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique or the notoriously foursquare rhythms of much mid-century serial music. It also helped formalize the distinct character of his lines and chords, which tend to give parity to all the intervals inside an octave (in the above example, any interval can be extracted from the basic repertory allotted to the four instruments, using transposition and inversion as required). This interval parity is a big reason why Carter’s atonal music sounds different than that of Berg (who often emphasizes stacks of consonant intervals) or Varèse and Ustvolskaya (who set up collisions between stacks of similar dissonant intervals).

In an extended allegro toward the end of the Quartet, the instruments start to merge their identities, leading to a polyrhythmic climax with rapid simultaneous notes sounding at a ratio of 3:4:5:7. After this, the proceedings disintegrate, the second violin returning to its characteristic steady pizzicatos, which get the last word.

Although the technique of assigned intervals is Carter’s innovation, the broader notion of personifying each instrument as an idealized character goes back to, again, Ives’ Second String Quartet, which Ives imagined as four friends who “converse, discuss, argue [over politics], fight, shake hands, shut up—then [in the final movement] walk up the mountain side to view the firmament.”

Carter went on to compose three more string quartets (1971, 1986, and 1995) spaced out as further landmarks to his compositional career. Together with the first two, they comprise the most important body of work in this medium since Bartók. The String Quartet No. 5, coming as it did from an 86-year-old, seemed valedictory upon its unveiling. But Carter then proceeded to write his only opera, What Next?, at age 90, and continued with an astonishing stream of productivity throughout his 90s and into his 100s.

Some of Carter’s most frequently-performed works come from this period: miniatures like Shard, so named because it is “broken off” from the guitar part of a longer piece, Caténaires, a moto perpetuo that channels Chopin by way of Crawford, and Tintinnabulation, where Carter, aged 99, writes for the first time for percussion ensemble. But while other composers that remained productive into their old age (e.g., Stravinsky) wrote music that was more compressed and severe than before (perhaps driven by declines in stamina, hearing, eyesight, or even pencil-grasping capabilities), Carter’s last compositions actually got lighter and more florid, but no less ambitious.

We know this in part thanks to a marvelous album from Ondine, Carter: Late Works, which was released last year and features pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Incredibly, one of the first impressions it makes is how youthful the music sounds. Dialogues II, a brief piece for piano and orchestra, seems the work of a composer aged 31, not 101. As a demonstration of geriatric dash and verve, it’s rivalled only by Verdi’s Falstaff, or perhaps by Eubie Blake.

The single-movement piano concerto Interventions dates from 2007. The multiple simultaneous tempos deployed over its final 1½ minutes (strings, winds and piano all distinct) demonstrate Carter’s retained fluency, and the work also shows how much his orchestration had improved over the years—compare its colorful clarity to the 1969 Concerto for Orchestra, which is beset by balance issues and congested, heterostatic textures.

Instances for chamber orchestra was premiered in Seattle in February 2013 (just three months after Carter’s death) by its co-commissioner Seattle Symphony under its dedicatee Ludovic Morlot. Both Morlot’s Seattle recording and the Ondine recording with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the late Oliver Knussen reveal why Carter’s music benefits from modern multi-tracked digital recordings that eliminate extraneous noises, and separate and clarify the complex polyphony.

Soundings, written in 2005 for Daniel Barenboim to conduct from the piano, is another beneficiary of modern recording technology. It begins with a piano cadenza followed by several concertino sections culminating in a brittle passage for high strings and piccolos, a string chorale reminiscent of Ives’ Central Park in the Dark, and a long tuba solo (a rarity in Carter). The ensuing orchestral tutti is interrupted by a final piano cadenza centered on the notes B♭ and D (which spell out Barenboim’s initials in German). Two Controversies and a Conversation (2011) is yet another late work for piano and orchestra. Its prominent marimba tremolos almost make it sound, dare I say, postminimalist.

The album concludes with Epigrams, twelve pithy bagatelles for piano trio that date from Carter’s final year. As a composition teacher, he was known to advise students to write the loudest part of a piece first (“then you’ll know where you’re going”), and appropriately enough, the first of these Epigrams was composed after all the others, making it Carter’s absolute last completed work. Also fittingly, though the common definition of epigram is simply “a short satirical statement,” the word has its origins in the snarky epitaphs often inscribed on ancient Greek tombstones, something that the venerable composer—and bearer of a B.A. in Literature—would have undoubtedly known.

Carter with Cage, Frank Scheffers, and Jan Wolff in Amsterdam, 1988. Photo via Co Broerse.

Carter doesn’t particularly fit the American Maverick stereotype. He had a conventional music education, studying at Harvard with Walter Piston, then in Paris with Nadia Boulanger (whose other American pupils ranged from Copland to Philip Glass). He ended up as the superstar of the so-called Uptown composers (though he lived in Greenwich Village), and at various times held teaching positions at Columbia, Yale, and Juilliard. He wrote fully notated music for conventional acoustic instruments with no forays into microtonal, electronic, improvised, or aleatoric music. His mature compositions have nothing in them of Partch’s homemade instruments, Sun Ra’s pseudomythology, Ives’ quotations of “people’s music,” or Cage’s I Ching coins.

But if Carter wasn’t an American maverick, he was still an American original. Like Ives and Nancarrow, he developed a unique and highly influential musical language without relying on an existing system. And by focusing his innovations in the sphere of rhythm, he upheld that parameter’s tendency to be the 20th century’s most reliable indicator of musical Americanness.

Though Carter studied some West African music traditions, he exhibited little direct interest in the American vernacular musics that evolved from them. Nevertheless, it’s not a stretch to hear this lively passage in Carter’s transitional Piano Sonata (1945–6) and imagine a Bud Powell ballad shorn of its accompanying steady beat. It’s this way of thinking about microrhythm in terms of displacement—internalizing the African-American inventions that informed the flexible swing beat and rubato of jazz, the syncopations of ragtime and related dance musics, even the dropped beats of Ives’ small-town bands—that distinguishes much American composed music from its European counterparts (even those influenced by the rhythmic complexity of Eastern European folk music).

Carter with his student Frederic Rzewski in Berlin, 1965.

The stereotype of Carter’s music is that it matched his personality: technically fluent but emotionally guarded. And by most accounts, Carter was consistently lucid and forthcoming on musical (and literary) matters, but notoriously reticent on most other topics. One would-be biographer abandoned a book project when Carter, during interviews about his personal life, displayed all the misdirection of an old magician protecting his secrets. Even his authorized biographer, David Schiff, conceded that “Carter usually gave the impression of existing only from the neck up.”

Those that met Carter as an older man—an established composer confident and articulate in his public engagements, usually with Helen (long his de facto manager) nearby—are often surprised to learn that he had been a chain-smoking stutterer well into his 40s. Neither Piston nor Boulanger seemed to regard this son of an affluent lace importer as any kind of star student, and as noted previously his early music was less popular with the public and less admired by colleagues than that of friends like Aaron Copland. Throughout this time, Carter left little indication of strong political, religious or ethical convictions. One is tempted to contemplate the apparent years of self-doubt, the coupling of trust fund privilege with career and personal insecurities, as a backdrop to his decision to forgo writing intentionally communicative music in favor of music that held personal meaning but little apparent audience appeal.

Carter with Copland and Bernstein.

Then came the surprising results of this inward turn—the gradual but sharp rise in prestige, performances, recordings, and commissions from the 1950s onward. After years of trying to fit in personally and professionally, Carter ultimately attained approbation and self-fulfillment through his most challenging and honest works. It’s in this light that his commitment to absolute artistic integrity—to writing “difficult music for ideal listeners”—ought to be judged.

Paul Griffiths, who wrote the libretto to What Next?, compares Carter’s historical position to Bach’s, the culmination and apogee of an era that cherished craft and complexity. Taruskin, more cynically, positions Carter atop a prestige machine driven by academics, patrons and professional musicians, a model of artistic autonomy whose death throes are already upon us. Both metaphors imply the supplanting of the old paradigm by a younger and more popular simplicity (that of Haydn and Mozart in Bach’s case, that of postminimalism and various hybrids of art and commercial music in Carter’s).

But the judgment of “technically fluent but emotionally guarded” music was also levelled at Bach shortly after his death, only to be overruled by the improved familiarity and understanding of passing time and repeated hearings. And whether Carter turns out to be the end of a particular line of compositional high-mindedness or a waypoint in a still-thriving artistic tradition will not change his music’s essential truthfulness, or its ability to communicate deeply with those listeners patient enough to master it.

Theory of Mashup: Remembering The Residents’ Hardy Fox (1945–2018)

by Michael Schell

The Residents in 1979.

Aim the searchlight of American Maverickism at the regions where prog rock, synthesizer music and multimedia intersect, and you’ll soon discover The Residents, the quirky San Francisco band known for eyeball masks, offbeat albums like Eskimo and The Third Reich ‘n Roll, and audio-visual projects such as the touring Mole Show and the interactive CD-ROM Freak Show. Active since 1971, the group labors anonymously, shrouding its members’ identities in layers of obfuscation and misdirection erected as a safeguard against vanity and commercialism—a concept they call theory of obscurity.

Hardy Fox in 2015 film Theory of Obscurity.

Anonymity can be hard to maintain in an era of Internet searches, fan forums and digital voice/image analysis. And for several years the suspicions of Residents fans have been focused on two former Louisiana Tech roommates listed as employees of the band’s management company. One is Homer Flynn, ostensibly the group’s art director, but despite repeated repudiations widely considered to also be its vocalist and lyricist. The other is Hardy Fox, who died of brain cancer on October 30, not long after admitting that despite his own decades of denial, he was indeed The Residents’ longtime keyboard player and principal composer.

Tributes to Fox have been flowing in print publications, social media and the web, most of them concentrating on The Residents’ most popular works—impious songs such as “Santa Dog” and “Hello Skinny”, or the more poignant recessional from the Mole Show. But in deference to the spirit behind theory of obscurity, now seems a good time to single out a lesser-known item lurking in the periphery of The Residents’ canon that might better represent pure, undiluted Fox.

The Thumb of Christ

Pollex Christi, supposedly written by a German composer named N. Senada (one of The Residents’ many sarcastic pseudonyms, this one punning a city in Baja California), appeared in 1997 on a limited edition CD. It’s a 20-minute synthesizer piece with occasional bits of drums and other conventional instruments mixed in—essentially a solo studio composition by Fox. It’s uncharacteristic of most Residents projects in being entirely instrumental and untexted, but it is characteristic in a different respect: it’s made up entirely of quoted material, mostly works by famous dead Germans.

The piece begins with the iconic four-note motto that launches Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Ives used the same motif throughout his Concord Sonata, calling it “an oracle—the Soul of humanity knocking at the door of the Divine mysteries.” But Fox’s hipster oracle would rather hit the weed than a hymnal, and Ives’ prudish transcendentalism has been exchanged for a more materialist kind of channel surfing. We quickly slide into a paraphrase of the opening of Orff’s Carmina Burana, followed by a short Valkyrie ride on synth and baritone sax. After a whiff of Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto, we return to Carmina Burana, which goes on to contribute several extended passages to the proceedings.

Since this is The Residents, and not Switched-On Bach, high German is obliged to share the stage with low American. Three times the masters’ descended wisdom pauses to allow the theme songs from Peter Gunn, Star Trek and Popeye the Sailor to pass. Wagner returns in the form of a passage from the Tristan prelude that’s presented basically intact, but his overture to Tannhäuser is bowdlerized into a four-beat disco groove. When Orff has the floor, the music is often shifted to the minor mode, giving it an oddly dark tone (the normally celebratory Meadow Dance, for example, assumes a particularly sinister character in Pollex Christi). And throughout the piece, the selection of intentionally cheesy synthesizer patches, often with exaggerated vibrato, keeps the tribute an impertinent one. Fox said “I love all the music I mess up. It is my amusement park.”

The Residents on Night Music (NBC, 1989).

Onward and Outward

Fox’s style of synth mashup reached its apogee in an even more obscure album called Codgers on the Moon (2012), where, using a new alias (“Charles Bobuck”), he appropriates Stravinsky as source material in an especially arcane way that owes something to Igor’s own appropriation of Tchaikovsky in The Fairy’s Kiss. Along with Pollex Christi, Codgers offers an insight back into the more familiar world of the Residents’ famous American Composers Series albums of the mid-1980s, which featured covers of Gershwin, Sousa, James Brown and Hank Williams. The latter’s “Kaw-Liga”, reinterpreted with a pop beat and a bass line cribbed from Michael Jacksons’s “Billie Jean”, is a particular favorite of Residents cognoscenti. The band’s newest release, I Am a Resident! (2018), may be the ultimate mashup, wherein the band remixes covers of its songs submitted by its own fans.

Homer Flynn and Hardy Fox at Johansson Projects, Oakland, in 2011. Behind them is Flynn’s artwork for The Third Reich ‘n Roll.

With Fox’s passing, The Ghost of Hope (2017) now enters the books as his final Residents album. It’s a collection of songs about train wrecks whose closing number, “Killed at a Crossing”, describes the death of a woman who had worked as an able typist, realtor and detective while living under several false identities. Committing suicide on the tracks, her body and effects are scattered by the impact of a locomotive, dispersing the artifacts of a life marked by an odd mix of integrity and duplicity:

Leaving random relics
Like leaves after the wind
She called herself Mrs. Orwell
And Mrs. Burton Bain
And Arabella Campbell
And Mrs. Arthur Payne

It seems an apt epitaph for Fox and the band he co-founded half a century ago, whose diffuse influence can be found among ambient musicians like Brian Eno, New Wave groups like Devo and Talking Heads, video artists like John Sanborn, and even celebrity acts like Penn & Teller. The surviving members of The Residents continue to record and perform, attuned like Fox to the fulfillment of their own expectancies. It’s a loop that never quite closes, unsure whether it is on familiar ground or venturing somewhere quite new.

Eye Music Revives a Memento of 1960s Openness

by Michael Schell

Sapporo, excerpt from score page 1.

Seattle’s Eye Music ensemble is a collection of ten-odd musicians specializing in the performance of graphic scores. Their new album on Edition Wandelweiser is a 50-minute traversal of Toshi Ichiyanagi’s Sapporo, a 1963 composition that hails from a unique crossroads in music history where East Asian aesthetics were being combined with Western avant-gardism by artists from both traditions eager for a fresh start.

Excerpt from Ichiyanagi’s Sapporo, performed by Eye Music.

Ichiyanagi, born in Kobe in 1933, belongs to the breakout generation of Japanese composers that includes Tōru Takemitsu, Toshiro Mayuzumi and many others. Like his peers, Ichiyanagi saw parallels between the music of Webern (whose emphasis on sparse, isolated sound events was the springboard for the post-WW2 European avant-garde) and traditional Japanese music and painting (which likewise emphasized empty space and time). Eager to exploit this insight, Ichiyanagi came to New York in 1952, studying at Juilliard and later attending John Cage’s lectures at The New School in the company of his bohemian wife, a budding vocalist and conceptual artist named Yoko Ono. The couple returned to Japan in 1961, brought Cage over for his first Japanese tour, then divorced. Shortly thereafter, Ichiyanagi, deeply influenced by the graphic scores of Cage and his associate Earle Brown, composed Sapporo for “any number of performers up to fifteen.”

Ichiyanagi (left) with Mayuzumi and Ono in 1961.

Sapporo’s score consists of several loose-leaf sheets, assigned one per performer. Each sheet contains symbols denoting sustained sounds (horizontal lines), glissandos (angled lines) and short, accented sounds (dots), to be played over the course of the performance, whose duration and instrumentation (conventional or otherwise) are left to the discretion of the interpreters. Additional symbols mandate occasional points of interaction between the performers, but the majority of their actions are uncoordinated, lining up by chance.

The score excerpt above shows how the aesthetic of sparseness is implicit in the notation itself, guaranteeing that regardless of the musicians’ specific choices, the end result will be a slow-moving landscape marked by long tones (often sliding up or down) sprinkled with short sounds. Since the number of symbols on each page is fixed, the density and pacing of the music depends on the chosen length and ensemble size. A brief performance, such as the 14-minute 1972 recording by Ensemble Musica Negativa, will be dense and compact. A more discursive one, like Eye Music’s 50-minute rendering, will be drony and marked by numerous silences. The prevalence of glissandi is part of the work’s distinct sound environment, affirming a characteristic of the most enduring open-form works: that their core identity comes through in any good performance.

An illustrative passage begins at 2:15 of the Eye Music recording (see the linked audio sample above). A long silence is broken by a multiphonic from trombonist Stuart Dempster who plays a D♭ while singing the A♭ below it. This leads into a complex of sustained bowed string and percussion tones accompanied by a deep synth glissando and anchored by a low F♮ from Jay Hamilton’s cello. Dempster reenters with another multiphonic, this one sliding downward. When it concludes, it leaves behind a strange tremulous electric drone on A♮. More long tones from Dempster and flutist Esther Sugai appear before they’re cut off by a sharp pluck on a prepared electric guitar followed by a soft drum stroke. Another silence ensues before the next complex begins at 4:00.

The juxtaposition of silent sections with passages built on continuously-sounding drones and tremolos helps to avoid the sense of rhythmic regularity that often plagues performances of chance music. It also helps to fulfill the essential timelessness implicit in Ichiyanagi’s instructions. A proper performance of Sapporo has no real beginning or ending—it just starts and stops, emerging gently from its surroundings like a Japanese garden.

Eye Music (photo: Rachael Lanzillotta).

As the 1960s faded out, interest in open-form composition began to wane. Most musicians, it turned out, either wanted to be told exactly what to play, or else felt that through improvisation they could produce comparable results without having to share credit or control with a composer. Ichiyanagi returned to conventional notation, eventually packing an impressive work list with symphonies, operas and concertos for both Western and Japanese instruments. Among the highlights of his later career are Time Sequence (an unusual marriage of minimalist rhythm and atonal harmony reminiscent of Ligeti’s Continuum) and Paganini Personal (one of the more offbeat entries in the seemingly endless line of variations on Paganini’s last violin caprice). Today at 85, this old avant-gardist is regarded as the senior statesman of his craft in Japan.

Ichiyanagi in 2015 (photo: Koh Okabe via Japan Times).

Nevertheless, Sapporo continues to stand as one of the few classics of its genre. And Eye Music’s recording demonstrates why this Pacific Rim-based ensemble is particularly well-suited to its advocacy. With a diverse group of musicians drawn from the local drone, improv and electronic music communities, performing on a combination of conventional and homemade instruments of both acoustic and amplified means, Eye Music delivers an optimal mix of rigor and abandon to Ichiyanagi’s aleatory landmark. In this recording, their first for a major contemporary music label, they offer a snapshot of a zeitgeist best defined by its eager exploration of new freedoms: social, sexual, economic, political…and artistic.