New World Records and the American Experimental Tradition: Part 2

This post continues my exploration of fifty favorite albums from the non-profit music label New World Records who celebrated their fiftieth anniversary last year. New World Records was established to put the work of non-commercial American music front-and-center. They formed at the bicentennial of the nation, and now as we enter the sesquicentennial, I’d like to draw attention to the exceptional releases in their extensive catalog. Hopefully I’ll be able to turn you on to some new composers and their music along the way.
I have another purpose in this endeavor as well. That is to celebrate the American experimental tradition as exemplified in these works. I will also be celebrating some of our popular and folk traditions as well, because these circles do intersect.

American culture, specifically our music culture, has succeeded more than any of our other exports. It also remains essential to our own identity. In this time of extreme polarization and divisiveness, it seems to me that it would be helpful to step out of the box all together and focus on those aspects of our heritage that showcase our inventiveness and ability to break new ground through resourcefulness and the skillful recombination of available resources into new forms.

This is the new world and it requires a new philosophy. Listening to experimental music is sometimes like reading philosphy. Lets dig into the philosophical sounds of the new world.
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As always, we will start with a record that was included in the original set of fifty albums that inaugurated the work of the label.

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME? AMERICAN SONG DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION

rom the original set of fifty albums first released by New World Records comes this compilation of songs from the Great Depression. You can listen to it in a way similar to how you might listen to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. But this is an anthology of American popular song from the thirties, stuff that was pressed into shellac, and played on the victrola. It’s a window into the soul of the nation during the years of steep economic hardship.

But that hardship didn’t play out for everyone in the same way, and that is reflected by these songs. For a time there seemed to be a lot of homogeneity to American popular culture. In the years following WWII radio, television and newspapers congealed to create a somewhat uniform front and this had a gluing effect on the collective mind. Now the internet and social media have atomized that collective mind, parking people into silos of thought, and media spaces like substack or youtube, that they don’t like to stray from very often.

But during the Great Depression (1929-1941) people were also a lot less homogenous. Regional cultures still prevailed across the landscape. Corporate products hadn’t yet replaced our homespun folk traditions to the degree they now. Classes were more sharply defined, and people could even talk about class differences. Now those in the professional managerial class like to pretend these don’t really exist all that much. You can see why, considering this class gets a lot of the benefits of the way our society is currently set up. But if you go an listen to the music made in the Great Depression you can get a taste of how varied and different the aspects of America were back then. These popular tunes are a good reminder that we can have great diversity within the country and still be a unified country.
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The title track was popularized by Bing Crosby, but other songs were just as big like Gene Autry’s tune “The Death of Mother Jones.” Bill Cox sang to the laborers in the sweat shops with his song “N.R.A. Blues.” It’s not a song about gun control, but about the National Recovery Association, an agency put together by FDR to help set minimum wages and maximum hours, and get the companies to stop being so ruthless in how they used and treated their workers.

On the African American side of things Big Bill Broonzy sings the “Unemployment Blues” about a law abiding citizen who just wants to find some honest work.

Writing this a time when speculative bubbles around big tech and real estate look liable to put sending their damage into the rest of the economy, this compilation is a stark reminder that there is no guarantee on the value of our dollar bills and that an economic crash can take out the elites. When the supplies to their underground bunkers run out, they’ll have to brave the streets just like the rest of us.
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History repeats itself, but differently. Time is more like a spiral than either a straight line or a circle, and when it comes down to it, we all have to change with the times.

GEORGE LEWIS - CHANGING WITH THE TIMES

George E. Lewis, trombonist, composer, musicologist, computer music pioneer and software developer, member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and for a time, musical director of The Kitchen. George Lewis, American. His music sits deeply inside the collective musical cathedral of American experimentation.

Founded by a group of jazz musicians in 1965 in the hotbed of Chicago’s South Side, the AACM has given voice to those experimentalists to often ignored by the shallow trench of the dirtbag music industry. Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Threadgill, Muhal Richard Abrams and Joseph Jarman were among its early members. Alex Ross notes that, “The A.A.C.M. tended to be categorized as avant-garde jazz, although, as Lewis’s scholarship has shown, it should have been incorporated into a canon of experimental composition that has a long history of shutting out Black artists.” It remains an integral part of the tradition that straddles improvisation and composition using new techniques. This experimental tendency also went to their scores, “that blended music, geometry, painting, and ciphers to be interpreted by the performers live.”

Lewis later wrote a history of the AACM published in 2008, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.

Lewis himself grew up in Chicago, born to African-American Southerners who had come to the city as part of the Great Migration. He picked up the “big, shiny, and weird” trombone as a third grader at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, an institution started by John Dewey back in 1896 as a place to put new educational theories and philosophy to the test.

That education seems to have benefited Lewis who majored in philosophy at Yale, and joined the AACM while he was on a break. As an early adopter of computer music, Lewis made use of the KIM-1 computer, a favorite also of west coast music hackers such as David Behrman and the members of the League of Automatic Music Composers. He premiered his piece “The Kim and I” at the New Music New York festival in 1979. The following year he took up a position as director of The Kitchen, which he held until 1982, when he left for Paris where he would work at IRCAM.

He spent three years there working on a commission that resulted in the piece Rainbow Family for improvising musicians and programmed Apple computers that reacted to the live audio with its own responses. This work led to his later introduction of the music software he created called Voyager. Released on Carrier Records, its an essential document of machine and human interaction and should be listened to by anyone interested in “80s AI, 1950s cybernetics, and [the] sociomusical networks of free improvisation.” If you need a dose of heady philosophy regarding human creativity in the age of computer reproduction, read the liner notes Lewis wrote to Rainbow Family and you will be richly rewarded.

The work by Lewis I want to showcase here is Changing With the Times. It has just as much of a heady brew of high concept art music combined with poetry.
As the liner notes have it, “In the ontological systems of both Africa and Europe, creation begins with the word in its various oral and gestural manifestations. Music, as an expressive modality, is clearly an extension of word exemplified by ancient African griots, the communal historians whose rhythmic chants opened the path to jazz improvisation, where we witness the alchemical effect of speaking in tongues that leads to a process of creative invention.

Changing With the Times is a conversation piece, for which George Lewis has assembled a diverse collection of musicians, poets, and storytellers into an organic narrative mode to signify, in style and content, on his personal odyssey through the contradictions and ambiguities of being black in a noncontradictory social universe, America.”

Some of the voices are the musicians playing, and some are the poets reading: Quincy Troupe, Jerome Rothenberg and Bernard Mixon. The text was written by George T. Lewis, the father of George E. The music is there to give flavor and texture to words and riff off of them in its own improvisation.
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In the section Chicago Dadagram the poet recites the words “The bridges of Chicago / are not the bridges of Paris / or Amsterdam / except they are a definition almost no one bothers to define.” That’s how this Dadaist jazz chamber suite presented on this album sounds. Indefinable. Step into it and let it carry you across the bridges of sound into experimental Chicago.

LEJAREN HILLER - A TOTAL MATRIX OF POSSIBILITIES

Computer music is once again getting a bad rep. Blame it on the AI slop, I suppose. Yet there are deeper waters in the world of computer music than just punching a few buttons, giving a basic and instruction and seeing what plops out. Those roots go back to the intersection between mathematics and music that has been a part of the western tradition since the time of Pythagoras.

Algorithm’s have been given a bad name in the culture. I’m not going to deny why they’ve been given a bad name. But to place all music made with computers, all music made using algorithms, into the same category is also bad for the culture. Because there is some real beauty, genius, heart and intellect in music that is made by humans who get off on advanced mathematics. This stuff will perk your ears up and make you think. It is music that feeds the intellect.

This midcentury modern music is a music of algorithms, but it was made when programming a computer was something of an art and a folk art at that. Punching cards, writing code, rewriting code, repunching cards. This music is also systems music. The parameters of the program first had to be decided by the human before the computer could make the choices to determine the composition. In this way, the computer coding was as much a part of the score as what the score ended up being.

Even with its high concept modernism, controversy has followed computer music from the beginning. When Lejaren Hiller Jr. wrote about his Illiac Suite in article for Scientific American, bringing it to wider renown, it set off one of the first rounds of anti-computer composition bias.

On this record we don’t hear his Illiac Suite, but his less talked about Computer Cantata from 1963 as well as various string quartets.

Like many other composers, working as a composer was a hard row to hoe, and his main job was as a chemist for DuPont where he developed a method for dying acrylic fibers. But he had been a multi-instrumentalist as a kid and the different disciplines of science and music never seemed all that different from one another different to him. While studying chemistry at Princeton he also studied music with both Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt. Babbitt was himself a mathematician as well as a musician. Making music from equations was not a foreign idea to Hiller.

In 1952 Hiller got a position at the University of Illinois teaching chemistry and in his spare time he obtained a masters degree in composition. He started working on the ILLIAC IV, an early computer. While working on the programming of the ILLIAC he saw that there was crossover between writing a program and composing a piece of music, just as Babbitt had seen the correlation between his complex math, and the complex twelve-tone music he would compose with math. In 1958 Hiller was able to transfer to the music department and he started working on building the schools Experimental Music Studio.

The Illiac Suite, a four movement string-quartet, is considered the first piece of music composed by a computer using an algorithm. He worked on this with Leonard Issacson who shared the calling card of being another chemist-composer. They wrought a strange alchemy.
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Next Hiller created a new programming language called MUSICOMP that he wrote with Robert Baker. Computer Cantata from 1963 is one of the results of that program and can be heard on this remarkable album.

ERIC RICHARDS - THE BELLS THEMSELVES

​Some of the most interesting works in music come from composers who are not widely known. I am not sure if there is an inverse rule, that the least interesting music comes from the most widely known musicians, but there might be. It’s at least worth thinking about. The most known music will be the least challenging aesthetically for the average listener. But without challenges, how can we grow into different areas of exploration?

I’ve heard it said that putting timbre ahead of tonality in terms of compositional focus is like putting a cart before a horse. But tone is only one area of sound. It’s certainly worthy of deep creative attention, but so is playing with the parameters of timbre. Eric Richards gave full reign to his exploration of timbre.

Perhaps part of the reason some of these figures are less known is because of their introspective dispositions. In looking inwards and focusing on their own imagination, they were not so much a part of the various “scenes” in music and the arts which can give people a boost in their popularity.

Eric Richards was such a one who wasn’t really a part of any scene, even as followed in the footsteps of Henry Cowell and John Cage and operated in a similar terrain as some of the minimalists who were part of a scene.
Richard’s noted in an interview this dichotomy between the kind of outer focus some artists have, and the inner focus of others. “It is curious, many of the people whose music I like best—particularly Harley Gaber, Charlemagne Palestine, and Michael Byron—kind of dropped out for different reasons. That's a whole area of American music that I think is important, but that no one has written about or gone into—it wasn't part of "the scene," partly because of the personalities of these different people. They were not what David Riesman [in The Lonely Crowd] would call "other-directed," they were all very inner-directed people who could not really be part of a scene.”

If we look into ourselves for our own justifications, for our own validations for creating the work we do, and less to the kudos and adulations received from the crowd or a scene a body of artistic work is likely to develop that is in stark contrast to what is accepted in the marketplace, and to what is accepted in any scene. Such iconoclasm is in itself a part of the American spirit. Following inner inclinations can lead to tremendous creative insight, if low commercial potential. That is part of the plight of experimental culture in a capitalist driven country.

There is a connection between tinkering on inventions and artistic tinkering. Both kinds of tinkerers want to see what possibilities they can come up with, what can be done. When tinkering leads to a car or a lightbulb that experimentation is celebrated. When it leads to a new artistic work or breakthrough in aesthetics, it might just be ignored. Better if it is decried because then you know it is touching a nerve and that there are some live wires at play.

Richard’s used magnetic tape as a tool in his composition, but not in the way it was used by many of his contemporaries. He would use it as a tool for analysis, recording something that he wanted to listen to, to change the speed of, and then transcribe the material into his notated work.

Another technique used by Richards was to take one instrument as a sound source and multiply it exponentially, for instance using 72 clarinets or 11 oboes. This required a studio to realize his work where a single musician could multitrack the material from the score. Richards described the way it sounded as a “a sort of composed-out web of different reverberations or echo of echoes.”

Like many other American composers he looked to Charles Ives as the granddaddy and took Ives use of collage to heart. On The Bells Themselves: Jonathan Edwards and the American Songbook he uses a plethora of material collaged out of the songs from American show tunes. The piece on the recording is of a pianist playing three overdubbed piano parts. The overlapping partials from the piano chords create an effect of church bell ringing. His interest in the voice of the bell is also present on some of the either pieces on this album.

His interest in the sonority of bells is also heard on other songs from the record, such as the opening Finalbells. As it says in the liner notes, “Playing a conventional percussion instrument in a nontraditional manner—that is, by rubbing a cowbell with a rubber Super Ball—is the means by which the sound material of this piece was generated. When Richards first heard these sounds, with their unique combination of overtones, he was immediately moved by the way in which they seemed to evoke some form of ghostly cry from the underworld. He was also struck by the way in which the overtones, produced by the Super Ball rubbing the cowbell, seemed to have little or no relation to the cowbell’s original fundamental pitch.

​Limiting himself to a small number of cowbells, Richards composed short melodic fragments whose fundamental pitches produced the sounds that most interested him. Having noticed that the pitches to these melodic fragments echoed, in some mysterious way, the pitches of Schubert’s song Der Doppelgänger (The Double), he selected three additional songs from Schubert’s posthumous collection of songs, Schwanengesang (Swan Song): Liebesbotschaft (Message of Love), Der Atlas (The Atlas), and Schubert’s last composition Die Taubenpost (Pigeon Post).” The notes go on, but it is an interesting example of generating compositional material from examining the recorded sound of an instrument, and then using collage to add in material from past repertoires to create something new.

The pieces on IKON touch on the power of the poet in a similar way to that of George Lewis and his Changing with the Times. Instead of a work for instrumentalists and recitative poets, Marshall digs into the rich terrain of text-composition pieces and sound poetry.

Marshall has was born in Mount Vernon, New York into a musical family, and he sang soprano in the Boy’s Choir at the in the Boy's Choir at the Mt. Vernon Community Church. He went on to study music at Columbia University just in time to check out all the cutting edge work being done at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Then he went over to the other coast and was an assistant to Morton Subotnick at Cal Arts.

A lot of his really interesting pieces involve electroacoustics or electronics in some way. In keeping with the American experimental tradition, he was also captivated by the sound world coming out of Bali and gamelan music in general. The influence can be heard in various parts of his body of work.

Marshall notes the text-sound approach on a few of the works here: "Cortez, Weather Report, and The Emperor's BirthThe pieces on IKON touch on the power of the poet in a similar way to that of George Lewis and his Changing with the Times. Instead of a work for instrumentalists and recitative poets, Marshall digs into the rich terrain of text-composition pieces and sound poetry.

Marshall has was born in Mount Vernon, New York into a musical family, and he sang soprano in the Boy’s Choir at the in the Boy's Choir at the Mt. Vernon Community Church. He went on to study music at Columbia University just in time to check out all the cutting edge work being done at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Then he went over to the other coast and was an assistant to Morton Subotnick at Cal Arts.

A lot of his really interesting pieces involve electroacoustics or electronics in some way. In keeping with the American experimental tradition, he was also captivated by the sound world coming out of Bali and gamelan music in general. The influence can be heard in various parts of his body of work.day form a kind of trilogy representing my work with "text-sound" in the early seventies. The techniques used to generate musical fabrics and structures out of spoken text are similar in all three works, but the source materials are all quite different. I used tape loops to create repetitive patterns from words or phrases; musical structures were developed out of the resulting fabric. It is not the original utterance or sound bit that is the building block, but the whole cloth created from it."

My favorite piece on this album is a kind of kurzwellen, or shortwave work, called Sibelius in His Radio Corner. This was “inspired by a photograph of the Finnish composer during his forty years of silence, sitting in an armchair and listening to his own work being performed on the radio. In his old age Sibelius enjoyed pulling in distant broadcasts of his music off the short-wave. I imagined that with all the static and signal drift, some of these listening experiences might have been proleptically like a modern-day electronically processed kurzwellen piece.”

It’s a perfect piece of music to drift off into the aether listening to late at night.

.:. .:. .:.
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