NEW WORLD RECORDS AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL TRADITION: Part 1

As 2026 gets underway, I want to celebrate American culture. Because of the very nature of America, “celebrating American culture” can mean a lot of quite different things to a lot of different people. At the present time of writing there are a lot of mixed feelings and hard feelings about culture in this country. America is still engaged in what journalists have called “forever wars” abroad and we are also just as engaged at home in what I call the seemingly interminable “forever culture wars.” I hope we can put an end to the forever wars and unwind our empire, and that these forever culture wars don’t erupt into a hot civil war serving none of us here at home. Democracy, is, among other things, a system that can help assuage such an atrocity from erupting, though as we know from the past, it isn't an absolute protection. I admit it seems pretty touch and go at times.

Yet I think the experiment of democracy and of America is worth continuing, and it is in divisive times such as these when experimental music can come to the rescue. How so? I think one of the core guiding lights in America is a willingness to experiment.  American culture is very experimental. Focusing on experimental culture can help us live the other parts of our life, personally and collectively, in a more experimental vein.

When Ben Metcalf, author of the novel Against the Country, was interviewed for the newspaper County Highway, he put his feelings about the nation in a way that I think many of us can understand. “People who just love this country or who just hate this country make no sense to me,” he said. “Loving it and hating it at the same time -that makes sense to me.”

It makes sense to me as well. There are so many things that I do love about America, but they are leavened by all the bitter feelings and animosity I feel for the very harsh aspects of the American experience. In place of the love and the hate, though, I’d like to focus on Americas experimental nature, the fact that we have barely even begun, that we are searching blindly in the dark for our own national identity and what it might become. Even as we search, there has been major foreshadowing, presentiments of destiny,  glimmers and waypoints to those things we might collectively sense as being part of our character. The music released on the label New World Records can be listened to as a guide to some of those possible directions. Along with listening to the music, you'll be sure to meet many national characters. 

The label is dedicated to American music and is representative of many styles. It has also focused on a huge swathe of experimental recordings. Listening to these records is a way to tap into the experimental side of the American character.  It is with this spirit in mind that I wish to showcase my favorite 50 albums from the record label New World Records. The label was started just over fifty years ago in 1975 in preparation of celebrating the bicentennial of the USA. Their aim then, and their continuing aim, has been to preserve the music of Americas composers and musicians.

A lot of the music they put out on the label has “no commercial potential” to use Frank Zappa’s helpful phrase. To my mind, that is one reason it needs to be preserved. Not all things that are good for the culture are predicated on the bottom line of corporate capitalism. In fact, it could be argued that corporate capitalism isn’t good for the culture. Its outsized influence pushes authentic voices to the margins, while the plastic pop rock creations of the record industry take up increasingly bought up space on the algorhythmed streaming platforms and what is left of the radio spectrum. 

The mission statement of New World Records is as follows: “We are dedicated to the documentation of American music that is largely ignored by the commercial recording companies. In an industry obsessed with million-unit sales and immediate profits, New World chooses artistic merit as its indicator of success.”

What a concept.

Now at age 51, New World Records is the oldest non-profit in the music business. It was founded by the company Anthology of Recorded Music Inc. with the help of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

The label has fulfilled on its continuing mission to seek out American music and preserve it for dedicated listeners and historians. They play a vital role in documenting the stunning diversity of American music, encompassing everything from folk, to blues, gospel, and jazz to contemporary classical, and art music in the electronic and avant-garde worlds. It is the latter three categories I have listened to the most of, from their catalog. These will find the highest representation in my list because I think by highlighting experimental music, we can show how there may be other possibilities for America that haven’t yet been fully explored by politicians. Poets, and by extension, musicians, are the real legislators of the world.

The labels first year of operation came with a mandate to produce “a 100-disc anthology of American music encompassing the broadest possible spectrum of musical genres. This set of recordings, together with their extensive liner notes, provides a core curriculum in American music and American studies. In 1978 the Anthology was completed and distributed free of charge to almost 7,000 educational and cultural institutions throughout the world. An additional 2,000 Anthologies were sold at cost to other similar institutions. Through these recordings two hundred years of music and American cultural history are brought to life.”

In my own selection of 50 favorite records from the label my plan is to explore five albums per post, across ten different posts. A strong case can be made for dedicated listening to the original 100 albums and reading the liner notes to get that core education, but here I will be picking just one of each per post so I can focus on my longtime obsession with the American tradition of experimental.

Now on to the music!
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SONGS OF LOVE, LUCK, ANIMALS AND MAGIC - MUSIC OF THE YUROK AND TOLOWA INDIANS

It seems only fitting to me that this series began with a record collecting some songs of the Native Tribes that were here before the age of exploration brought wave after wave of Europen immigrants, religious refugees, colonialist settlers and those who were forced to come here enslaved. 
 
It also seems fitting to start with “Songs of Love, Luck, Animals, & Magic” because who doesn’t need a little bit of each of these in their life to make their life full? The high keening voices singing in a language I don’t understand, and the rhythmic pulse of the drums, rattles, clinking of shells, takes me back to a time on this continent when an entirely different worldview held sway. It’s not my own native world view, but I can’t say I am not enthralled by the everyday sense of enchantment woven into these songs. I also hear community, living close to aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, cousins, and the laughter shared in between the songs. Listening, it’s like I’ve been privileged to sit along the sidelines and witness this interconnection and exchange between the people.

​I am grateful for documents like this, because it allows me to hear a world that has disappeared, while at the same time imagining a different kind of world for our shared American futures. 

As it says in the liner notes, “The Tolowa and Yurok had little contact with non-Indians until the 1850's, when miners and settlers came in great numbers to Crescent City and Humboldt Bay. These white people found the Indians living in plank houses on the coast or inland along the rivers.The Tolowa, including the Chetco, lived on Crescent Bay, Lake Earl, and the Smith River in northwestern California, and on the Chetco River in southwestern Oregon" (Murdock; see Bibliography). The Yurok territory stretched from Trinidad, California, on the coast northeast to the junction of the Trinity and Klamath rivers. The Tolowa had no political entity greater than the village, but inhabitants of adjacent areas shared linguistic and cultural traits (Drucker; see Bibliography). The political history after white contact is one of massacres and retaliations resulting in an estimated population of 121 Tolowas in 1910.

The Yurok, according to A. L. Kroeber, were also organized into villages, which were not political units but aggregates of individuals sharing cultural affinities. Historically the Yurok fared a little better than the Tolowa, but population figures show a rapid decline after white settlement, although they recovered by 1970: in 1870 the estimated population of the Yurok was 2,700, in 1910 688, and in 1970 3,000.”

It’s these liner notes that I also love about all the New Worlds Records releases. They are often extensive and give a lot of detail about the artists, concepts and ideas behind the albums. The liner notes for this one go into more specific details about all of the songs presented here. New World Records has also helpfully made many of their liner notes available online. 

JOAN LA BARBARA - SHAMANSONG

For those of you who haven’t (yet) spent a big chunk of your allotted time in this incarnation sitting around listening to avantgarde records and the weirdest stuff you could find, let me introduce you to Joan La Barbara. Her primary instrument is her voice, which is the primal instrument itself. Voice is the breath of the wind, the word on the breath, the word that makes light. La Barbara is also a composer herself, but as virtuoso of what is termed “extended” technique in any instrument, bending that instrument to make it go further and do things differently than in normal musical training, she has become a sought after interpreter of those challenging pieces written by the American experimentalists of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

The extended technique for voice includes her bringing into art music singing inhaled tones (it’s all about the breath), sighs (it’s all about the breath), trills, whispers, cries, and as is often the case in instruments where the breath is the primary driver, multiphonics. Here we can read that as the ability to sing two or more pitches at the same time. Traditional overtone singing is in fact a form of multiphonics, but in the west overtone singing isn’t taught as such. This makes them extended techniques for those who have gone out to explore the limits of their art. As part of her exploration she developed her own “circular singing” techniques, similar to the circular breathing techniques used by people who play digeridoo, horns and other wind instruments.

​The title track, "ShamanSong", was recorded on location at Diablo Canyon in New Mexico. Filled with natural reverberating acoustics and the sounds of birds and lightning, it sets the scene for the in flow of electronics and voice that open up a shamanic portal to inner worlds. Then the percussion comes in which makes this a very driving piece, conjuring up the world of the southwest and its desert spirits. 

My favorite piece on this CD is "Rothko", from 1986. Like all of these compositions, it features La Barbara’s captivating voice and powerful singing. This one also features bowed piano, which adds to the resonant and harmonically rich material that was created for the Rothko Chapel. The interplay of these minimalist drones in a long form piece of close to 25 minutes serves the purpose of centering the mind in a channel of quietude, as one would hope to due in a chapel. This piece would certainly be in the hymnal of my own “Ambient Church.” This is a drumless slab between the two other pieces that feature percussion.

Calligraphy/Shadows is the final piece, another long one, with Chinese instruments commissioned for the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company. The relationship between experimental music and contemporary dance is strong going back to the work of Merce Cunningham, with many companies commissioning composers to create music for new choreography. 

CHRISTIAN WOLFF - TEN EXERCISES

Christian Wolff comes from a storied line of German intellectuals. His parents where Helen and Kurt Wolff who published the works of people like Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka. They got out of Germany in 1941 and set to work with other’s who had fled Europe to start Pantheon Books.

Christian Wolff’s role in American music is not to be understated. He became an American citizen at age twelve, and by age sixteen, his piano teacher sent him to study composition with John Cage. It was a fortuitous meeting, and Wolff would go on to be a close part of the New York School, and the circle around Cage that included David Tudor, Morton Feldman, and Cage’s partner Merce Cunningham.

His parents Helen and Kurt played a large role in the subsequent development of the experimental music scene in the United States, even if that hadn’t been their intention, through one of their major publications. They had published a lot of translations, including Richard Wilhelm’s seminal translation of the I Ching into English. Christian Wolff gave a copy of the I Ching to John Cage. John Cage developed a life-long fascination with the text and used it as a way to proceed in his compositional career as a facilitator of chance operations.

​Wolff, like so many other American experimentalists of the era, would go on to tour and work with Cunningham. Later he palled around with Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew, who shared his interest in non-hierarchical relationships and possibilities. Many composers of the time were exploring the idea of writing pieces of music that did not dictate everything the player must do, but allowed room for their own improvisation and interpretation, for the musician to become a co-composer. Wolff’s Exercises, started in 1973, offer such freedom. After one performance of them John Cage quipped that they were like “the classical music of an unknown civilization” -which is exactly why they continue to be relevant and worth listening. 

Tom, Johnson speaks to the technical aspect of the music. "The ‘Exercises,’ like most of Wolff’s scores, must be done without conductor, and may be played by any combination of instruments. The scores are basically just melodies, usually divided into phrases of about three to 10 notes. All the musicians follow the same score, but since the melodies may be read in either treble or bass clef, the music usually comes out in parallel sixths. Generally the musicians begin the phrases more or less together, but they proceed in their own ways."

This is chamber music to a surreal dream. The world of our everyday familiar music is there, but has shifted into something topsy turvy and can now be heard in a new way.

JAMES TENNEY - POSTAL PIECES

​You might have heard of James Tenney if you happen to be interested in the history of plunderphonics. One of the first pieces of plunderphonics ever made used Elvis as source material. Collage # 1 (“Blue Suede”) by James Tenney from 1961. In the following years he would work extensively at Bell Labs with computer music pioneer Max Matthews. His interests encompassed noise, collage, microtonal tuning, and algorithmic composition. He studied with a number of avantgarde luminaries. It was with Lejaren Hiller whom he studied information theory, acoustics, and tape music composition. He also spent time hanging out with Harry Partch, John Cage, and Edgad Varese among other crazy cats. He was a huge booster of the works of Charles Ives, and as an accomplished pianist and interpreter, he was especially fond of Ives’ Concord Sonata. Tenney also played Cage’s music and his rendition of  sonatas and interludes are not to be missed.

Tenney was also a cracker jack theoretical writer, the kind of brainiac who liked to combine different fields of interest, looking for their commonalities and ways they could be synthesized together. His master thesis may not be on the book shelf of every musician, or even composer, but Meta (+) Hodos did the trick of applying gestalt theory, which emphasizes the wholeness of the mind or system, and cognitive science to music. One of his main interests was harmonic perception. He wrote numerous articles on music including “Temporal Gestalt Perception in Music” and “John Cage and the Theory of Harmony.” He also wrote the book The History of Consonance and Dissonance.

In the world of experimental music, Tenney was like a Merlin figure or wizard. He whispered things that not many others heard directly, but having the ear of other musicians, his ideas went on to shape the thought and practice of many others working in the experimental tradition. Later partisan of plunderphonia John Oswald studied under Tenney. During the 1960s Tenney was living in or close to New York City, and was active in the Fluxus scene there.
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On the Postal Pieces we get little snap shots, short post card length compositions that arrive as if in the mailroom of the mind. Tenney called them “scorecards” and in a way they can be thought of as similar to John Zorn’s index card pieces such as “Spillane.” As it says in the notes, “Each card contains a complete if minimally stated work to be performed by instrumentalists. These pieces elucidate to a large degree some of Tenney's bedrock compositional ideas. Each is a kind of meditation on acoustics, form, or hyper-attention to a single performance gesture.”

​Not all music is written for the heart. Some of it is written for the head. Tenney’s music is essential brain stimulation, aesthetic sounds that challenge and open up the intellect to new possibilities and permutations. These scorecards are like little seeds posted out to small groups of dedicated listeners, but whose roots, sprouts, and rhizomes extend now much further after successional plantings.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS - EARTH AND THE GREAT WEATHER

John Luther Adams was born in 1953, in Meridian, Mississippi he played as a drummer in rock bands. Like many in his generation, Adams was a Zappahead. When he read about Frank Zappa’s admiration for Edgard Varèse he was intrigued and got sucked into that world and the adjacent streams flowing from the work of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

, and went on to study at the California Institute of the Arts where encountered the elder wizard of American experimentalism John Tenney. Adams was always deeply connected to the landscapes he found himself in and was drawn to environmental work, which he pursued as soon as he graduated. It wasn’t long before he was living in the boreal forests of Alaska. The land would go on to have enormous effects on his compositions, even as he moved away from environmental work as such to be a full-time composer.

Tom Service, writing in the Guardian noted that, “his music becomes more than a metaphor for natural forces: it is an elemental experience in its own right.”

​ The elemental nature of the work seems to me to be a gift of the land itself. Living so close to the land in deep nature, has allowed him to be a bridge for this music of the earth and its elemental forces. Through his interest in the environment, in the landscape, in the spirit of a place, he has pursued the idea of sonic geography, a kind of psychogeography of sound.

In his own words he as said that, “Through sustained listening to the subtle resonances of the northern soundscape, I hope to explore the territory of sonic geography—that region between place and culture...between environment and imagination. I hope to move beyond landscape painting in sound toward a music which, in its own way, is landscape—a music which creates its own inherently sonic presence and sense of place.”

Earth and the Great Weather started off as a commission for New American Radio, a program that was a space for artists to “pioneer new dimensions in acoustic space” through forms such as drama, documentary, the exploration of language, sonic and environmental meditation. For his piece he recorded natural arctic sounds and the music of the wind as played the stretched strings of an Aeolian harp, recorded natural sounds as well as the music of the wind on the strings of a small Aeolian harp. He also mixed in drum rhythms and the language of the Inupiat Eskimo people from the arctic coast of Alaska. He ended up with a half hour long piece for the radio program.

Yet the ideas that began with this wouldn’t settle down and he expanded on the work, and crossed “the arctic divide to encompass the boreal forest of the northern interior—the physical, cultural, and spiritual geography of the Gwich’in Athabascan people. Expanding on my work with the wind harp, the musical ground of Earth and the Great Weather is a cycle of pieces for strings and digital delay, collectively titled Aeolian Dreams. Aeolian Dreams is my most extended work to date in just intonation. Rising like the mountain ranges above the Aeolian plains of Earth and the Great Weather are three large pieces for four drummers. These quartets are constructed of asymmetrical rhythmic cells abstracted from traditional Inupiat and Gwich’in dance music, which I have admired for many years. … Indigenous peoples have long understood the extraordinary powers of certain landscapes. For those of us who have lost or forgotten our intimate connections with such places, the Arctic is a vast and enduring geography of hope. Somewhere out in that far country of imagination and desire lie the foundations of my own faith.”

People often think you need to go to some big city to make a life in the arts. John Luther Adams has shown us in this recording, and his many other works, that you also can do the opposite, and go out into the vastness of nature to hear its song and do your best to transcribe it. I am grateful to composers such as these who listen with their ears to the world, and bring back these works which we can link up to in a form of musical communion. 

.:. .:. .:.
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