texts

Old school/new school in experimental music and Sound Art
(sub-reductionism and inbred schisms)

Jim Denley, 2004




      There is a notion current in contemporary improvised and experimental music that you can define a musician as "new" or "old" school. If this was just imposed by journalists I wouldn't take it very seriously, but it is common parlance amongst musicians. So is this division real and helpful? Is there a paradigm shift? Or is the division a construct of a cocoon like scene, inbred and too preoccupied with its own little twists and turns.

      We also have labels ascribed to the so-called "new" schools: "minimal", "reductionist", or "New London Silence" and "New Berlin Silence". Mark Wastell has described his music in these terms, "Wastell's current instrumental material primarily focuses on using abstract principles of space, time and texture - encompassing elements of new London silence, pro-acoustic minimalism, new complexity and pan-global reductionism." Is he 'taking the piss', or are these useful terms; do they describe the interests of the musicians, or help our listening? Wittgenstein has said, "Either a thing has properties which no other thing has, and then one has to distinguish it straight away from the others by a description and refer to it; or, on the other hand, there are several things which have the totality of their properties in common, and then it is not possible to point to any one of them. For if a thing is not distinguished by anything, I cannot distinguish it-for otherwise it would be distinguished."

      You can imagine the affront to experimentalists, devoting their lives to the "cutting edge", to be distinguished as "old school". You can also imagine, beyond the wounded egos, the shock of discovering that what had previously been an international family of artists has divided. (Was this the first collaborative performing art form with a truly internationalist agenda?)

      So are there distinguishing features to the "new" school? People seem to be instinctively saying yes, by assigning labels, they are differentiating themselves, but we should be a little distrustful of this for three reasons. Both sides of the perceived gap may have an interest in creating divisions for status gains. Musicians in these genres are constantly on the move and perhaps it's unhealthy to pin them down to labels; as soon as you define them you can be sure they will start gnawing at the ropes. And, if one looks back, the fuss about distinctions can now look a little ridiculous. (Think for instance of the great impact said to be the 12 tone revolution in the early C20th. Schoenberg now looks to be very much in the tradition of Germanic expressionists, in a clear line from Beethoven and, I would suggest, more a protector of tradition than a revolutionary. The use of microphones and recording technology in the early C20th was a far more revolutionary and far reaching step. {But less heroic.})

      Still, what Wittgenstein has to say lends some weight to the idea that some real schism is in process, because words are already being bandied about. And when some of the older musicians don't want to play with the "new" and are disturbed by the perceived spread of its influence, and visa versa, then there is an indication that we are seeing something real. There is more than a hint that this supposed split would mean the forming of separate scenes. So let's go further than simple labels to ask whether there are there defining features to music of the early C21st? Should we be making distinctions and if so are the labels good?


Missing Links and Dam Negative Labels.

      "Reductionism" suggests, in a very simple sense, limiting the music to fewer events per minute; it is then akin to "minimalism". It has negative connotations, for in economics and to some extent in science, the term is associated with neo-conservative thinking, and improvised and experimental music has always situated it's ethical and philosophical soul to the left. Some of the music that this term has been applied to, the so-called "New London Silence", for instance, on the surface adheres to a diminishing of events compared to the music of earlier generations. But this begs the question, "What is an event?" It's quite easy to call Steve Reich minimal and Brian Ferneyhough complex, because they already count out the events per minute in their scores for us, but in improvisation there is no notated tally, and no easy definitions of what an event is.

      Let's take "Trem", (Confront 11) Rodrhi Davie's solo harp Cd as an example. Ok, it's not one of the more extreme Cds in its use of silence and unusual durations, but it is a major statement from one of the supposed ringleaders, and should therefore reveal some of the "New London Silence's" defining features. The first track "cresis" is an engaging exploration of the extended harp, opening with crying, bowed sounds, balanced against low strings chords, and percussive harmonics. It has a wide dynamic range, but many of the sounds are quiet, and Davies is concerned with their decay. This focus on quiet sounds is not a focus on quietness for its own sake, but a side effect of the focus on ephemera. Preparations induce distortions and noises, and a bow explores harmonics and shifting chords. He spends much time using very low and very high frequencies on his instrument, and this creates a sound world unrelated to conventional notions of tonality or atonality. He avoids long silences, said to be a hallmark of the genre, but there are few solid "notes"; all sound is in a state of movement. There are few points where fundamental tones are clearly stated, and when they are, these notes function as just another noise, albeit a "pure" one; so all pitch material is embedded in noise and is ambiguous from a conventional analysis. He has abandoned systems related to the well-tempered scale. He is focussing on the cracks in between the "notes", on the ephemeral. These sounds are complex. If one were to compare this piece to a notated music style, one would say it was closer in spirit to new complexity than to minimalism. Its newness is not in any reductionism or minimalism but in a re-focussing.

      In no way do I find the direction neo-conservative; there are too many ideas and phenomena to define for that to be the case. I have to discover where and how he is being inventive; I have never heard harp music like this before. But I would also argue that this is no paradigm shift, but a natural addition to the sorts of developments that have been going on in London for some time. Is it so different to a Chris Burn solo? If not, then does this mean Chris is a precursor to a movement or that the "new" movement is falsely distinct? Or have the those who coined "reductionism" missed some of the links that make the tradition an evolutionary continuum Or, if you want to sell a few more Cds and create a profile is it advantageous to "hype-up" a new movement. Does it suit the members of the "New London Silence" to be seen as a revolutionary movement? Did it help Schoenberg and the serialists?

      If we take another solo CD by a London string player, Veryan Weston's "Tessellations" for Luthal Piano (Emanem 4095). He constructs his material out of solid discreet notes, chords and phrases and he uses these in what, to me, are recognisable systems, i.e. it is reminiscent at times of Nancarrow, Stravinsky and Jazz traditions. The dynamic is more compressed, medium to loud, and not much quiet, ie he isn't often looking at the decay of the string sounds and the ephemeral mixing of the harmonics within the instrument, despite the fact that this is presumably a unique instrument. He employs a stream of consciousness form, and the episodes roll out in durations that I expect. There is an on-going feel to these episodic changes and underlying the music there is a pulse or rhythmic energy that is faster and more insistent than "Trem". There are significant stylistic differences between these two Cds. It is worth making a distinction.

      I was talking recently to the Berlin percussionist Burkhard Beins, (one of the supposed practitioners of "New Berlin Silence"), and he suggested another reading of the term "Reductionism" could mean limiting certain parameters in the music to allow others to flourish, and in that sense it would not necessarily imply minimalism. But all music limits some parameters and concentrates on others. Western classical music simplified and limited melody, compared to the myriad scales and long extended lines of Indian classical music, and concentrated on harmonic development. You would never label western classical music "melodically reduced", or Indian Music, "harmonically challenged"; it's too darn negative.

      So in the "new school", as I perceive with "Trem", there are not necessarily less events per minute, (which is why minimalism is a poor description). Yes, some of the "new" protagonists would cite minimalists as important influences; Oren Ambarchi claims Alvin Lucier and Phil Niblock as major influences in his current work, but once again, his work doesn't sound minimal to me. Many musicians from previous generations acknowledge these same influences. I don't believe that a trend towards minimalism is the thing that is making the "new" new, (although there are scenes and individuals producing quite stark work).

      One such stark work was a concert I saw in February 2004 as part of the What is Music? Festival in Sydney, of Mattin, the Basque musician and Sydney based Matt Earle improvising together. Mattin employed computer feedback using an internal microphone and Earle was using no-input sampler, with lots of volume and a gate. They produced huge blocks of very loud sound and very abrupt long silences. It was impossible to distinguish Mattin from Earle sonically; they were not playing individual lines. Their content had been pre concieved in the writing of the systems, then they listened, as the audience did, to the resulting chaotic developments; preconcieved but not predetermined. They then intervened to switch these events off and to tweak the systems.

      One could only describe the resulting sonic material as minimal or reduced if you heard the blocks as simple events, (then you would have been bored out of your brain). If you listened inside the blocks (as I believe the musicians wanted you to), you could only describe them as immensely complex; it was beyond my powers of analysis, and also beyond their desire to pre determine. It was a sound event across the frequencies all at once; there was no section where you felt, "oh they are playing high now, or this is a low bit." None of the fleeting particles of sound were long enough for me to define; they seemed to be weightless. But the resulting blocks of sound seemed too carefully listened to and too interested in frequency to be described simply as "noise".

      But perhaps another version of the event on another night could have turned out sonically simple. Surface simplicity or complexity isn't the point. They composed open ended, complex, chaotic systems, which ran, and interacted with each other in ways that they didn't want to predict. To ask if this is minimal or reduced then seems like a very silly question.
This "setting up a chaotic system and then standing aside and listening to it" method of composition is of course suited to computers and complex electronic devices like mixing desks. Many of our most adventurist composers employ a degree of this. I think here of the Brisbane based Joel Stern and Sydney's Brendan Walls and Peter Blamey. Ami Yoshida. who was in Sydney and Melbourne for i.audio in 2003 surprises everyone because she seems to employ a similar methodology when she "sings", (when singing seems to be the hardest medium to employ this process).

      In one view of Mattin and Earles's performance there were myriad uncountable events per minute and from the other perspective there were about 4 events over 40mins. It was not minimalism or reductionism that gave this piece it's novelty.


Subminimal minutiae

      A more complex scientific use of the term "reductionism" comes in two forms. In one sense it means trying to explain a phenomena in terms of its smallest or simplest constituents. (Obviously this approach has its limitations, eg the philosopher Hilary Putnam has pointed out that you can't describe why a square peg doesn't fit into a round hole by looking at the molecular properties of the objects). And in the other sense "hierarchical reductionism" means connecting and uniting different fields of knowledge to explain phenomena. So how useful is this use of the term in a musical sphere? It seems misguided, for the object of this tradition is not to explain anything. So it's meaningless to say musicians are breaking musical phenomena into its smallest constituents in order to explain, because I don't believe explanation is the function of this music. But just as physicists have been inspired to understand the nature of matter by colliding particles at faster and faster speeds, musicians are focussing in at sonic material. Was Mattin and Earle's search analogous to the search for the Higgs Particle? Whether reductionism is a good term for this is, in science or music, debatable.

      I'd like to think now about the Trumpet playing of Axel Dorner. I sent a CDR of a duo with Axel and myself to Martin Davidson, who runs the record label Emanem, because we had released a CD of the group "Lines" in 2000, which includes Axel and me, on his label. The new duo seemed to me a logical extension of the sort of playing we had been doing in Lines, he wrote back. "I am afraid it's too subminimal for me. 30 years ago, I used to like it when people used to go to that area during performances, but they came out of it when they had exhausted the possibilities. I don't find much of interest in extended performances which limit themselves to that area."

      I respect Martin's honesty, he instinctively made a distinction and named it, but what could he mean by subminimal? It suggests going below minimal, presumably he feels that we explore an area so lacking in input that minimal is too weak a word. So I listened as dispassionately as I could to the CD again and concentrated on Axel's contribution, and thought about this term. We hear flexibility with the duration of the units of his music. He has the potential for the next bit to be as long as it needs to be, not shaped by the limitations of phraseology based on breath. (In the past, even music not reliant on breath for its production, eg string music, improvised percussion, piano music, electronic works, [or even much wind music using cyclical breathing], constructed itself from a phraseology based on the potential of breath).
In Axel's work silences between the sounds are part of the shape of the music and can be as long as they need to be. This induces a feeling of unpredictable duration; it's hard to judge how long or short any block of material will be when it commences. (In this sense it is the opposite of techno, which constructs itself in blocks of 8 or 16 bars and aims to be predictable, or similarly Haydn or Mozart, {its good for dance music to be predictable}).
The frequencies employed are not just embedded in noises, they are the noises, are often at the extremes of what is possible on a trumpet. Many of these complex events are multi-frequency events; they are structurally polyphonic. I've heard these events described by people as drones, but a drone is a static bed for something to dance on top of, these events are dancing internally.

      Axel's sound objects resemble the complex blocks used by Earle and Mattin. Frequencies shift and move but hardly ever in the conventionally defined notion of melody. He employs glissandi and microtonal movement when he plays a solid tone, so we hardly ever hear a note; frequency-packed noises yes, but discreet notes that are employed in a system and organized on a time line to produce a melodic unit or phrase, never. I would say his music is the opposite of submiminal (and I certainly don't remember hearing anyone 30years ago sound remotely like him), there is too much happening here. Because the phenomena are fleeting and ephemeral the number of events per minute is very hard to determine. Just like Matt Earle and Mattin and "Trem" he asks you to listen deeper than the surface texture. He wants you to hear and follow the high-pitched whistle tones at the edge of the noise; he wants you to juxtapose that with the growling low frequencies at the bottom of his range. If you are not prepared to listen inside the sound then you will go under it with boredom.

      When music is constructed from notes and phrases and when these are repeated, as in C18th and C19th European classical music, techno or much folkdance music, time is perceived in a clocklike manner. But listening to blocks of detailed sound and glissandi, where pitch never settles on the atomised "note" or molecular "phrase", it's hard to judge duration. This can put the listener into a zone where it is very hard to verify whether we have experienced 1 minute or 3. I could be deluded, and Martin Davidson may be just judging the Cd as a bad performance, but I think rather, he is listening in the wrong direction. More evidence of a schism, and hence a need for new terms? But how useful is a term like subminimalism?
If we look at both Mattin and Earle's performance and in Axel's trumpet, the blocks don't morph together, develop or transform in an episodic way into a musical journey. In the same evening that Earle and Mattin performed, Merzbow played a solo set, and in contrast to the duo his work was lush, symphonic, episodic and romantic. There was no silence, every event morphed into the next episode; it was music that was all about transition. It reminded me of Beethoven.

      Of course, the dichotomy between expressionism and classicism has always been present. Peter Brotzman and Roscoe Mitchell were both great contributors to the early work in improvised music, but they employed differing sensibilities. Brotzman's music tends to aim for a trance like expressionism, wildness and abandoning of control while Mitchell's work always seems to be controlled and carefully articulated. I don�t think a differing sensibility is enough of a distinction to talk about a "new" or "old".

      But the stylistic changes that we are seeing now are substantial. In much of the so called "new" the blocks exist, you are asked to go inside, to listen deeply to undefined sonic phenomena, and then suddenly they don't exist, to be replaced by silence or a new block of material. The duration of these "blocks" is erratic and often you cannot follow a "line". The composers have set a system off, and are listeneing like everybody else to the result, they are finding the music. This is different.


The Note Split.

      Is another definition of the "new" a complete rethink of the role of frequency, pitch, and the subsequent abandonment of conventional notions of melodic and harmonic systems?

      There are of course precedents all through the C20th for this move. Futurists, "Ionisation", Partch, the prepared piano, Scelsci, the music from the late C20th known as "Noise", (with practitioners like Merzbow), all these things have been influential. "Noise" was largely uninterested in organizing specific frequencies. It brutally and iconoclastically blew apart many assumptions and notions about pitch and allowed the musicians who have come after to discover how to look at pitch without referencing old systems. It was "serious" music's Punk. Despite the danger of damage, it's high decibels did a job of cleaning many ears.

      In recent years electronica in all its many guises has been a major influence, and of course has crossed over with the "new" improvisation scene. The loopy electronica of the late C20th, created songlike forms, with ambiguously conventional notions of melody and harmony, and gradual processes over long periods without reference to conventional phrasing. The Australian group "Minit" play their songs by manipulating the mixing desk; processing loops played from recording devices like mini disc. Each piece is usually one long unfolding sweep uninterrupted by internal phrasing. A lot of this music sounds ambiguously tonal because it seemingly references simple harmonic language. Cadences are smoke screened in surface noise; the cracks and clicks of the media partly masking repetitive riffs that slowly evolve. But we are wrong if we equate this harmonic language with a new age sensibility or a return to "tonality"; they use the harmonic language of feedback, not of the well-tempered scale.

      In much of the "new" there is an abandonment of the idea of short and medium length phrases being the building blocks for development. As we found in Axel's playing, duration is now erratic. We also find an interest in frequencies at the extremes of the listening spectrum, and there is no reference to a scalar notion of pitch; the well-tempered scale and all it's harmonic constructions are no longer employed.

      Interestingly, the very high and very low pitches don't function within conventional harmonic and melodic systems. In the mid-range, between these extremes, the smallest particle of sound is no longer the note, the note has been split, and we are now focussing our attention on all the phenomena that results from that split. Minutiae are of great interest; musicians are going deeper and focussing their listening on tiny cracks and amplifying these phenomena conceptually and physically. In that sense "reductionism" may be a useful term, but I would suggest "microscopic" is more appropriate. Improvisation seems to be is a good method for dealing with unstable, ephemeral sonic phenomena, because the practitioner is right there, ready to pounce on the phenomena when it occurs and elicit all the music from it. But we need a different notion of improvisation to the notion of the heroic, spontaneous creator.

      And while the focus goes micro at the same time it goes macro, as we have seen with Axel's durations and Mattin and Earl's blocks. What we are losing is middle size chunks, or phrases. And in this re-focussing there is not much room for a concentration on the individual line. In collective playing the aim now is to create a complex, composite sound event, rather than to juxtapose solo lines into polyphony. Many listeners who have come from a Jazz tradition may find this the hardest conceptual bridge to cross. It becomes almost impossible to know who is doing what, and one has to abandon the heroic individualism inherent in the Jazz ethic.

      But it is not only the note that has been split. If we look at the music of the 1980's and 90's then the use of samples, concrete recordings within a piece, was an important feature. This transparent sampling culture has all but disappeared from the "new". Not that samplers, hard disks or recording devices disappeared, as we saw from the performance of Mattin and Earle these instruments stayed and proliferated. But what we have seen is a re-focussing to go inside the sample, or inside the sampler. Discreet samples are rarely used in a concrete way; the sample has been split in the same way as acoustic instrumentalists split their notes.

      If we think too of the sound poetry of Amanda Stewart, in many of her multi track pieces ("IT", (I/T) Selected Poems, Here and There Books + Split CD), the word is no longer the smallest constituent of the sound, she has dived inside and focuses on the minutiae of speech.

      With Will Guthrie's "Building Blocks", (Antboy 4) we hear three works on the CD that cannot be broken down into units; the music is not constructed using a conventional phraseology, or any episodic form, here the influence of Niblock or Lucier seems clear. You would be wrong to call these "blocks" drones, there is too much movement within them, but each piece is a discreet and holistic sound world. He employs battery-operated vibrators, and mechanical devices, as well as haphazard sounding and promiscuous attacks with his hands to play an eccentric array of percussion. By deploying his mechanical and electric devices Guthrie has multiplied the attacks to uncountable events per minute; this is not reductionism or minimalism. The effect is an escape from a personal touch or expressionism; it allows him to set up long sounds and to sculpt the music out of its one moment of attack and eventual decay or stop.

      Of course, dispensing with conventional phraseology and the discreet note has been going on for decades. The Austrian trombinist, Radu Malfatti's work has been an example of this focus. But Radu set his fleeting sonic quarks in a pool of silence. Axel confidently asserts that you can create big phenomena from this approach to sound, and Guthrie, Mattin and Earle make their blocks gigantic. These are significant stylistic and conceptual changes that leave listeners from the "old" school scratching their heads to find anything interesting, hence the negative terms "reductionist" and "subminimal". In my opinion these terms are inappropriate and suggest a listening in a wrong direction. They ask questions of the "new", which they won't get an answer to, because largely, it is not minimal or reduced.

      There is a "new". Whether it has arrived in a revolutionary or evolutionary way probably depends on the local scene and your familiarity with it's precursors or missing links. Globally, there are now too many practitioners for anyone to have an authoritative overview. But the "new" has been named, because it can be distinguished, whether the labels are good enough to stick remains to be seen.