Re Ives, Cowell, and Varese, were you reading the "American Pioneers" book by Alan Rich? It's been a while since I picked it up, probably a bit after you gave me a copy back in '98. Man, I really like Charles Ives - that idea of taking stuff you've heard so much it's practically part of your marrow & blasting it with with his own eccentricities, like the lifleong fascination with the cacophonous marching-band duels he'd heard as a kid. I've long speculated my own facination w/ noise has something to do with hearing a tornado up close when I was 11.
Anyway, in the cases of all three of these guys there was some violent form-stretching. Funny, I'm so conditioned by years of freedom=free jazz/free improv that it's almost a physical strain to think of composed work as freedom. I know better, really.
In non-music news, I watched Jodorowsky's "Fando and Lis" last weekend and heartily recommend it to the whole planet. The protagonists go through enough semblance of a journey to maybe trick you into rooting for 'em or something, but overall the film nails dream-logic like nothing else, certainly nothing else of feature length that I can name. I've arranged play dates with bootleg copies of "El Topo" and "Holy Mountain" to see if they maybe top "Fando." I dug out an old "Forced Exposure" w/ a Jodorowsky interview & noted that "Fando and Lis" was thought at the time ('89?) to be a lost film. Glad it turned up. The DVD includes a documentary about Jodorowsky that's quite good, despite some now-pathetic "high-tech" scenes w/ house-music backgrounds. Speaking of music and Jodorowsky, the documentary included footage from some really unhinged happenings he was doing in Paris in the mid-60s. I'd kill to see more - lots of nude dancers, wild rock music in sort of a Velvets vein, fluids poured all over everyone, etc., sort of like a less violent Actionist event.
- posted by Chris @ 10:48 PM

 
Was reading some of the old posts below. I mainly posted my Pioneers thing to have a new post go up so this thing wouldn't be dead.

I've been reading about Ives, Varese and Cowell in 20th C. Classical music and think there's something going on here concerning Selvig's initial post about freedom vis a vis this music. I guess leaving Wagner out of the equation for now, and even Bruckner, Mahler and Debussy, we can look at Ives, Varese and Cowell as the start of people wanting sounds that transcend the sonic palette of the orchestra. Not in the service of God or Nature (Bruckner or Debussy) and not a pure sound like Mahler, though he is closest in spirit, but something new and unheard of. In the case of Ives and Cowell the noises they created were eclectic mixes of hymns, folk songs and tropical music but not appropriated in the European sense of adding tonal color to the extent tradition (Bartok though he was heading down the path) but blasted out with a new energy and a love for noise. With Varese he wanted something even purer than that, his love for percussion and sirens, looking for a pure tone, seemed to be someone ready for the electronic music revolution that he predated. All three expressed the hectic noise of the urban environment and you could say that the roots of Industrial music are here.

What does this have to do about freedom?
More later.....hopefully not a year later........
- posted by letch @ 9:58 PM

 
Since this conversation has been so dead for so long, I'd thought that I'd start another one. I'm putting up the first chapter of my primer just for fun. It was supposed to be a top ten greatest records list and has been continually expanding:

From An Abbreviated Sketch of the Alternative Sounds of Rock History

The Pioneers

Throughout history there have always been those who blaze the trails, head out into parts unknown, whether these be far off lands or far out ideas. In America, our pioneering spirit is much more recent than for the rest of the world. The European cast-off of prisoners, religious cultists, opportunists and others who found the order of the old world too confining (or had no choice in many cases) created a veritable cross-cultural, cross-ethnic stew of rebellious spirits that took this land by force. Its own internal intensity led to a division that was not really settled by the Civil War, a division between the various religious ideals for a specific kind of existence and those who desired an unfettered freedom. The Constitution itself is a mish-mash of these ideas, where freedom is guaranteed but it’s always for one nation under God. The separation between church and state suited many whose own religious practices had been suppressed in various countries until a dominant Christian force arose in this country and that separation is now eroding quickly.
This division is mirrored and supported by the forces of industrialism and then capitalism that shaped the economic structure of our society. As companies gave way to corporations and the singular economic giants of visionary men gave way to boards of faceless executives the originality of an individual culture gave way to the “culture industry” which became the integrated “Entertainment Industry” that we know today. The uneasy unacknowledged alliance of the twin forces of the mass culture and the desire for mass control of the corporate and the program of the religious worlds has produced the schism of our culture today. The Entertainment Industry has produced a cross-boundary tool that indulges our whims for sex and violence yet reifies family values through this same media. The totalizing effect of corporate entertainment culture has subsumed and re-packaged every relevant avant-garde movement and their art and spewed it back out as product for the mainstream masses. This is because wherever Pioneers go, others will follow though rarely in the same spirit of adventure. A certain type of individual is necessary to face the challenges of creating anew. The history of sonic exploration that I outline below is a fragmented story of the artistic production of those people who engage in the Pioneer spirit in a world of corporate products. These people chose art over entertainment and chose to engage in a dialogue with their audience as opposed to the lecture that mainstream culture provided. The key is in the challenge to an audience that has gotten used to having it easy, to try to reach the intellect of people that have gotten used to the emotional reinforcement that TV provides. The avant-garde always exists at the fringes to point the way that lesser artists will go and the mainstream culture will subsume the advances and reconfigure it as mass product to sell which they have to homogenize to appeal to the largest customer base. In essence the people I want to mention here are those who want to be free. Their story is one of resistance as well as compromise. The real world force of economics contains moments of real need as well as the seduction of excess and no one ever remains innocent.
- posted by letch @ 5:45 PM

 
Letch's mentions of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy (versus?) Henry Flynt bring to mind the question of intent. Flynt came from a direction informed by the Minimalist/Fluxus avant-garde, so dragging hillbilly sonics into a High Art context was probably Fluxal eye-poking, but was the Ledge looking to explode a form, or just so eccentric in his vision he couldn't help but demolish it? I'm not elevating one approach or the other here, but does an avant garde move have to be a planned leap forward?
I think Sonic Youth are a third case, sort of an inversion of what Flynt was doing - they're operating in rock territory but in a manner openly feeding off avant energies, both directly (the Branca influence; use of tonal centers; 20th-c classical covers) and indirectly (rabid enthusiasm for avant sound and visual art). I can't decide where to place the Butthole Surfers - Sarah Vowell argued for their place among the avant garde based on live insanity, but sonically I'd lean more in the direction of brilliant pastiche. And what about someone like Sun Ra, who went from R&B to skin-peeling synth blasts to jazz standards?
This's tangential, but I've been thinking a lot about the Rev. Al Green's sermons, which bleed in and out of song without a clear demarcation between the two, in a way that's always struck me as powerful and extremely sophisticated free improvisation. I don't know gospel well enough to qualify it as avant gospel, nor am I certain to what extent it's improvised, but on a good Sunday morning he nails the sublime.
- posted by Chris @ 8:24 PM

 
Though it's late and I'm bleary I thought that I would take a stab at our form thoughts again. I guess when Leydon was mentioning an appreciation of formal limitations and what can be infused therein, it ocurred to me that this space encompasses some of Selvig's examples as well re: Cash, pedal steel and Merle. I think that if I were looking for a real avant country or sumpin' that I would offer up something more along the lines of Henry Flynt (listening to his "Hillbilly Tape Music" this evening propelling these thoughts) where he sorta restructures the country twang and fiddlin' into a minimalist drone context. Definitely not alt.country whatever or anything working within those same formal spaces but to my mind the real avant garde is when someone gets real real gone for a change and that means more that speeding up Blue Moon of Kentucky but say gets at least as far out as The Legendary Stardust Cowboy got on his Mercury single "Paralyzed". I guess where things get sticky for me is whether the Ledge just pushed those formal limitations out into orbit but still manages to retain the sense of that form, meaning that he doesn't make "avant" grade, or whether that barrier shattering drum and trumpet duet means that he has crossed the avant sound barrier. Flynt is an easier example since dovetailing his Fluxus drone concerns with country or "traditional" music was a conscious act of shredding and merging those boundaries.

Another example is that when I think historically, I have always thought that The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" musta sounded as earth shattering then as say The Butthole Surfers "Sweatloaf" did to me in 1987. Now I used to think that "TNK" was pretty fucking avant but anymore it seems the real avant in the Beatles case was the Stockhausen rips they sampled in the background and that their pastiche was brilliant, but it is basically a catchy pop-song drenched in avant-psych noise appropriated from McCartney's trawls through the local art scene. (And yes, it was Paul who twigged to this stuff before John stumbled into his own fluxus scenario).

Now I want to make it clear that in no way does this lessen the importance or the impact of say Cash's Sun recordings or the haunting caterwaul of some of the Carter Family's recordings. Like Leydon I think that that there are supremely sublime moments to be had under the formal limitations of an artists chosen genre. Those forms become a backdrop within which to imbue genuine emotion and history and as Selvig as pointed out there is a lot of flexibility within those forms. But I think that when I listen to Henry Flynt or Branca I am listening to avant-garde music, when listening to The Ledge or Sonic Youth I feel that I am listening to a form being stretched.

Whether or not this is a right distinction, or useful or whatever, well I look forward to yr comments.

As an aside I wanted to point out for Leydon that the pure music concept is something borrowed from Peter Kivy's book "Music Alone" and it's use by Roger Shattuck as well(I think) to, as I understand it, talk about (usually) symphonic music as being without words and therefore something "pure" and therefore interpretively "open". Don't want to get too deep into that one just pointing out the reference.

I also wanted to point out that Mauricio Kagel's "Acustica" was touted to me by Rick Carlisle of Orpheus as being the "Acoustic Metal Machine Music" back in the late 80's.

- posted by letch @ 12:50 AM

 
Leydon, I'm afraid a group called Zeitkratzer beat you to the punch on the acoustic MMM (Brother Lou even played guitar on some live performances), and you might think of Bruce Russell's Maximalist Mantra Music CD as a rock-instrumented interpretation. Johnny Cash would have been avant-garde country if Rubin had contact-miked the bedpan. Seriously, I think Cash's Sun stuff was avant in its day, and still sounds great. Pedal steel players were onto seriously screwy tunings way ahead of Glenn Branca.

So yeah, form is the meat of the matter here, and the tension of working within a form and expanding it is what keeps things interesting. If you work too slavishly within the form, the music has the 1-2 of a pacemaker - see the blues band at a bar near you, or the laptopper in the art space next door. Someone playing Bach's solo cello suites is playing something that demands slavish adherence to the form, yet they can still be played sublimely.

Speaking of form, do you mean country is mannerist as in a sonic equivalent of the Renaissance Mannerist painters? That's interesting - certainly some parallels in terms of them being decadent forms. When I think of Mannerist art, I'm thinking more of the really odd stuff, like Archimboldo , though some painting with a broad brush (har har) lump Michelangelo, El Greco, all kinds of people in there. With Archimboldo in mind, I've thought of musique concrete and other such post-Cage repurposing of sound as mannerist music, but not C&W. I haven't gone as far down the White Americana route as Leydon (yet), but I've been enjoying the heck out of Merle Haggard - I love it when he'll have some delicate Spanish Classical guitar filigree and then blasts it out of the way with a big old Telecaster beer belch, the Country version of cinematic mise en scene, or the Art Ensemble if you want to keep it strictly musical. Avant country yet again.

Agreed that the true test of music is to engage the listener/participant, though I think due to constraints on the amount of time we can spend listening to music, the good stuff holds up under repeated listening, and the best has something new to offer whenever you return to it.
- posted by Chris @ 11:23 AM

 
Whew, that's a long and wind-ey road to Wagner, pal.

The thing about Wagner is that his use of music and words is constructed in such a way that you could say that things are determined by composition but this fact doesn't constitute a closed system. I guess what I find "open" about Wagner is that within the story you have a system where things are at odds with themselves. I don't think the Ring Cycle is simply a story but plays out a larger metaphorical narrative within which you can find a lot of symbolism and a fair amount of ambiguity about the human condition. The music is very dramatic and I think one of the things interesting about Wagner is that he is using symphonic music underneath his opera, which to my mind is different from a lot of other opera composers prior to and contemporary with Wagner where music exists to support the dialogue (the recitative), or as dramatic or mood prop for specific, story-driven situations. While I think that Mozart made some insanely creative use of music I don't think that even he used the music the same way. I do find moments like the end of Don Giovanni where after our good Don has been sucked into hell and the casts sings, they are singing his music. This opens up a broad spectrum of interpretation, possibilities for what it could all mean. The ending of that opera has many oddities concerning character involvement that make the idea of simple morality play moronic. Mozart's world is far more complex than that. With Wagner I'm not trying to make the case that he breaks from all use of music as dramatic prop but that within that schema he recreates something that to my ears sounds new. These huge pulsing waves of pure music have their own elemental force and yet are more than mere nature, an audiophonic stand-in as it were. I feel that with the best classical music that the more and deeper you listen, the more the pieces open up and while I understand that they are those that hear the fields, the folk dances etc, from the composers I listen to most, I hear far, far more. So Beethoven, Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler for the heavy weights and Debussy, Chopin for the atmospherics. I am thinking here of pre 20C. and I am not saying that these are the only ones just a few examples to ponder. That there are rules for composition and that the composers art is to reinvent the world by breaking as many or few as possible to make their soundscapes is where these composers in particular open up and provide open-ended and sometimes jarringly disruptive sound experiences.

I am not going to make the case that all classical music is great or that it's goals are those things that I find interesting in it, though I would say the goals of those composers I mention do dovetail with my auditory interests. Much of classical is pedantic and closed, some guy composing a paen to a paying Prince trying to get the Benjamins and work the chicks much as any other musicians of any other age.

But the best didn't care, died broke or in debt if need be though that has never been a prerequisite. The best though, they create those listening moments when your mind lets itself go to the music and the emotional space breaks open and thought has to take a back seat, if only for a second, to the sublime.
- posted by letch @ 4:21 PM