New World Records and the American Experimental Tradition: Part III

​What is the place of the serious musician in today’s society? What is the point of creating music, art and writing that has no commercial potential? Why am I even continuing this series of posts exploring the catalog of New World Records to uncover fifty gems?

These are all questions I continue to ask myself. When only 65 percent of American’s even bother to read, it’s going to be a lot, lot, less of those readers who have a specific interest in experimental music. Of those who both read and have an interest in experimental music, even less will care about these particular records or composers.

Yet the work must go on. I continue to write about this stuff because there is value to what lies on the fringe. The experimental tradition is marginalized, despite the ways that the explorations of those who do experiment continue to provide resource benefits for the culture at large when their innovations move from the edges and into the mainstream.

Rarely performed, seldom heard, these pieces are nonetheless an important part of our sonic ecology. There are plenty of things we never see, never hear, never know about, that would make life difficult if they did not exist. It’s neat to know about things like gut bacteria and life at the bottom of the ocean, and little bugs who play important roles in the life of the forest.

Yet the heads who appreciate this kind of thing are out there, and I will continue to do my part to bring this material to new listeners. Keep on experimenting, even and especially when you have no idea where it will lead.

First up we have one for the synthesizer and Science Fiction fans, and at the end we have a once popular American operetta from the 1800s… just to show that the things people care so much about now, will in time themselves be forgotten.

DAVID ROSENBOOM - FUTURE TRAVEL

David Rosenboom’s epic journey into the solar system while dancing along lines of sequenced synthesis was first released on the short lived Detrot label Street Records. New World Records released it on CD in 2007. It has since been reissued again by Black Truffle in 2024 with another vinyl pressing and digital release.
At the time this piece was being composed he was busy thinking deeply about a kind of “propositional music” that he defined as “complete cognitive models of music.” From this vantage point music emerges from the process of making propositions. In this respect it might have more to do with the Miles Davis album On the Corner, than at first thought. From these propositions musical models are built and works can be created.
As part of his musical training Rosenboom studied with Lejaren Hiller. He even ended up playing violin on one of the renditions of Hiller’s Iliac Suite on a vinyl of Computer Music from the University of Illinois released in 1967.

Learning from Hiller gave Rosenboom an appreciation for what could be done with technology.

He wrote about how “Hiller’s work was more about algorithmic compositions and compositional concepts applied in technological modeling, and what was possible at the time. So yes, it was technology, but it was also new notions about the brain and how we hear and how we think and how we make models. Something that has stuck with me ever since, that I really developed there, was -and a lot of people were exploring this- was the idea of compositional modeling; that is, that model building and then setting the model into some form of animation can fuel a compositional idea, and produce all sorts of new ideas for musical language and pieces and so on.” (2006 Interview of Rosneboom by E. Soltes in Oral History of American Music.)
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Rosenboom is also a violin player in addition to being a master of the Buchla (and the brainwave encephalaphone). Violins merge with treated female narration in this science fiction and space music odyssey. This is essential listening for anyone wishing to expand consciousness beyond the borders of earth.

His music is certainly fertile with ideas. The accompanying piece “And Out Come the Night Ears” from 1978 is another masterpiece. It’s a 28 minute piano and Buchla duet that makes my head spin as it oscillates into a cyclonic centrifuge. This is maximalist music of a wild and adventurous variety.

​RICHARD MAXFIELD AND HAROLD BUDD – THE OAK OF GOLDEN DREAMS
Many music aficionados will recognize the name of Harold Budd, especially if ambient and electronic music are part of their interests. Richard Maxfield gets talked about much less. This album contains four Maxfield pieces, and two by Budd. That is a good thing because it helps us to get to know Maxfield, and rewards the person interested in Budd with a new musician to think and learn about. David Tudor also plays piano on this album on a piece that Maxfield wrote for him, so it turns out to be brilliant trifecta.
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As I have come to learn, All Roads Lead to Fluxus, and Maxfield is one of those roads that can lead us back to the influence of the art movement. He put on a concert in the loft of Yoko Ono alongside his buddy La Monte Young. He taught at The New School where John Cage was also teaching. He was interested in all kinds of sound sources, processes, and practices. The selections here showcase some of the range of his interests.

A lot of this stuff sounds kind of old hat to those of us who have embraced noise and texture as prime musical units. We forget exactly how radical these gestures in sound were when they first exploded from the loudspeaker. But Maxfield was an innovator, baby. A lot of his works prefigured more well known applications of the same approach or technique by other composers.

For instance, Piano Concert for David Tudor involves the use of a microphone on prepared piano strings mixed into a three channel montage that Tudor played additional piano alongside in accompaniment. John Cage had already done the prepared piano, but Karlheinz Stockhausen had not yet done his more famous mikrophonie which achieves similar sounds.

​His Amazing Grace from 1960 uses tape loops played at various speeds that produce complex phasing and overlaps. This work came before the now-taken-as-gospel minimalist tape loop pieces of Riley and Steve Reich.

I was lucky to recently read an excerpt from my friend Martin Patrick’s forthcoming book on Fluxus, the chapter on sound. He really does an excellent job of putting Maxfield in context and showing the influence of Fluxus across unpopular and popular music. I will be looking forward to reading the finished version and the rest of the book. Patrick had previously contributed essays to the Sub Rosa release of The Stolen Symphony albums Fluxus and Neo-Fluxus vol. 1 and 2.

His was a sad story, as his life was cut short by suicide when he jumped out the window of the Figueroa Hotel at age 42 on June 27, 1969.

La Monte Young’s MELA Foundation has his archives.

Budd sure knew how to write a song title “The Oak of the Golden Dreams” was probably the first piece of music I listened to by him when I saw this CD at the library in my early twenties, and I picked it up based on the title. With drifting dronalities, and measured Buchla improvisations, it reminds me at times of the all night music of Terry Riley or the raga inspired improvisations of La Monte Young.
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I guess that brings us to why these two artists were put together on this CD. Richard Maxfield was said to inhabit the pre-minimalist spirit, while Budd’s 1970 composition for a droning Buchla box in E-flat shows the way other musicians were picking up on that minimalist thing.

This sonic document shows a slice of composition spanning ten years and how one person can become a mostly unknown pioneer, and others became well known followers of burgeoning musical trends.

CHARLEMAGNE PALESTINE – SCHLINGEN-BLANGEN

As far as minimalists go, Charlemagne Palestine doesn’t get the love he deserves. He prefers to call himself a maximalist.

Palestine’s music is not very well known today, partly because there are few recordings available, but also because he moved on to working in other forms of media as the massive commercialism of minimalist music developed in the late seventies and early eighties. His seemingly narrow escape from the title of “minimalist composer” was fortuitous since what that has come to imply in musical terms today does no justice to his work. His music is distinct from what became mainstream minimalism by its focus on sound rather than process and its deep emotional expressionism. Thus, Morton Feldman is a much closer neighbor in this work than it to Riley, Young, Reich and Glass.

​“Schlingen-Blängen” is a drone organ piece which demonstrates Palestine’s genius for pulling unbelievable sounds, colors and effects out of a familiar instrument. It is basically one chord sustained for seventy minutes with infrequent additions and removals of tones and changes of registration. This approach to making music, of using stasis to force the listener into concentration on the sound itself, is very difficult to do well and this album is one of the few successful examples of this approach. First, there is the choice of the initial chord and its registration. Already it is clear that the musician has exquisite taste and expressive powers, not unlike Messiaen in those aspects. Then begins the impressionism. The old Dutch organ in the church of the small Friesland village of Farmsum Delftzijl starts magically to sing its own melodies and rhythms without the player needing to move any controls. The illusion of rapid activity is the result of interferences among the components of the chord within the organ and the church. Such effects are not unfamiliar but their depth and extent here are staggering. These rapid cycles are staggering in their intensity, melody and colors, as though Palestine was playing some non-existent process-music score. But he is not, and it is as painfully beautiful as the original chord. Palestine’s comment, “I’m the living hybrid in my own work of the physical gesturality of Jackson Pollock and thes piritual color chemistry of Mark Rothko,” hits the nail on the head.

The quality of the recording conveys enough of the massive physicality of the experience to be satisfying while still conveying the sadness that one couldn’t have been there. The acoustic space of the old church is precisely rendered. Anyone that enjoys drone music and static sound painting in any genre should have a listen. Charlemagne Palestine’s music here is a true rendition of the archetype.
Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca can be thought of as some of the spiritual inheritors of Palestine’s musical approach, as can David Tibet’s work in Current 93, but the latter in a different register, that has more to do with the way Palestine uses stuffed animals amassed on his piano as vessels for the spirits he meets in his strange communion and personal mysticism.

HENRY BRANT – MUSIC FOR MASSED FLUTES

When was the last time you listened to a bunch of flute players have it and throw down on some music? Probably not too recently, which is why you should listen to the work of Henry Brant. Not just one flute, not just two flute, but some massed flutes up in this contemporary music situation.
Brant believed music could be complex. He believed it could be contradictory and paradoxical, just like everyday life is complex, contradictory and full of shit that doesn’t make any sense. As David Lynch once quipped, “I don’t know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.”

This music does have its own sense, and it can be quite striking, just like the hidden logic of the everyday world with all its beauty and pain, war and peace, love making and violence, random luck and disaster.
Brant was born in Montreal to American parents in 1913, and started composing at age eight. His instruments of choice were the violin, flute, tin whistle, piano, organ, and percussion. He could play all these at a professional level and was very familiar with all the instruments in the orchestra even if he didn’t play them as such.

His childhood prodigy was further shown when he was included in the 1933 book by Henry Cowell, American Composers on American Music. Brant was only 19 when it came out. His essay was on oblique harmony. This seems like it should also be an oblique strategy. The ideas he presented were precursors to his later interest in musical spatialization.

Brant worked his ass off teaching at several colleges, conducting for radio, film, ballet, and jazz, composing, orchestrating. By the 1950s he started working on his ideas of spatialization. This would have been the same decade Stockhausen’s early efforts at symphonic spatialized music. Basically the idea is the placement of performers around the hall as well as on the stage. Electronic music later took the idea into multi-speaker set ups that sound could be moved around through. This is the “fourth dimension” of musical composition, and became increasingly important over the twentieth century and can be seen as an aspect of space music.
Included on this album is his piece Angels and Devils from 1931. This is considered the first flute orchestra of the twentieth century and was inspired after he heard the five flutes being played in Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms.
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Also included is 1984’s Mass in Gregorian Chant for Multiple Flutes (subtitled Mass for June 16). This is my favorite piece on the CD. The spatial component of antiphonal singing inside the acoustically tuned spaces of the great Gothic cathedrals was part of his interest in this music. The source material he was the Graduale Romanum, the official book of liturgies for the Roman Catholic Church, with masses sung on June 16 being the focus.

​Ghosts and Gargoyles from 2001 rounds out this flute-centric invitation into the world of Henry Brant.

GEORGE F. ROOT – THE HAYMAKERS

Now we go back to the root of American music. One of them anyway, that root being George F. Root. Root was a Massachusetts farm boy who left for Boston at age 18 with a flute in his hand to try and get into the orchestra. That would have been around 1838. He got jobs as church organist and music teacher, the did a tour of the European continent, came home and started trying his hand at writing popular sentimental songs.
One of these was his song “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!” from 1864 became a Civil War classic of sheet music, setting the song of war to the tune of “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”

Seven years before that, though, he had written The Haymakers, an operatic cantata, one of the first large scale works of American music. The Chicago Tribune wrote on Januar 9, 1860, reviewed the work, praising “... the freshness of its music, which, combined with the naturalness of the plot, depicts with great truthfulness, while it slightly idealizes, the labors of the American hayfield.... The Italian opera walks on stilts, deals in exaggeration, and treats largely of kings, queens, dukes, and nobles. This is purely democratic, exalts labor, ridicules the useless city dandy, and holds up for your admiration the sturdy Farmer and his household, who learn from nature, the pure, the true, the beautiful....”

It seems fitting that this country, founded to have no kings, should use as its subject matter the working people keep us fed and connected to the very land itself.

​The New World Records version marks this important piece of histories first appearance on CD.

Read Part I and II in the series.

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