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Northwest Music: An Endangered Species? by Dennis Rea

Littoral Zone: The Glenn Gould Reader reviewed by Gavin Borchert

The Dumpster Concerto by Ron Drummond

Dear Lucy

Sturgeon's Log: CDs Reviewed

Up Periscope: The Tentacle Internet Page by Roger Hayes

Northwest Music: An Endangered Species?

by Dennis Rea

At a time when our regional identity is under siege from the forces of globalization and corporate-defined cultural uniformity, it's more important than ever to ask what, if anything, is unique about the music produced here, and whether it can be sustained. I've pondered this question repeatedly over the years, and have come to believe that much Northwest music shares similar traits, shaped primarily by the area's long isolation from established music centers and by the overarching influence of the natural environment itself. Yet as the twin tsunamis of population growth and reckless commercial development threaten to engulf our patch of paradise, I worry that our regional musical idiosyncrasies may soon become a thing of the past.

The first factor to consider when attempting to identify a distinct Northwest musical tradition is the area's history of isolation from prevailing cultural trends. Until the last two decades, Seattle was regarded as a remote and unimportant backwater by the East Coast and European cultural elite. (Indeed, when English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham led the Seattle Symphony Orchestra briefly in the early 1940s, he dismissed the city as a "cultural dustbin.") Nearly a thousand miles distant from any other city of comparable size except Vancouver, Seattle was routinely bypassed by all but the most successful touring artists. Consequently, local musicians had little direct exposure to vanguard performers.

The downside of Seattle's peripheral status was a deep-seated cultural inferiority complex. To this day, it remains standard practice for exceptionally promising local musicians to "graduate" to the big leagues of New York or California in search of validation and never look back -- witness the crop of recent Cornish grads who now populate New York's downtown jazz scene. Meanwhile, local music critics have long reinforced our region's "bush league" stigma by denying homegrown musicians (rock stars of the 90s excepted) any serious exposure or analysis in the Northwest press, implying by their omissions that if it's from here, it can't be any good. Likewise certain members of the local new-music scene, who hector us backwoods types to look to the Europeans as role models.

But cultural isolation can also be an advantage. Seattle's remoteness forced many local musicians who remained behind to cultivate a do-it-yourself aesthetic more conducive to originality than the intense peer pressure they would have endured in an arts citadel like New York. Removed from the hurly-burly of fast-lane cultural achievement, many Northwest musicians were less concerned about adhering to current musical trends than their big-league counterparts. A good example of this independent-mindedness (or provincialism?) is longtime Northwest resident Alan Hovhaness, a composer who has stubbornly followed his own muse for years, oblivious to musical fashion.

By now, however, any benign or malignant effects of Seattle's isolation are largely a matter of historical interest. Seattle's long decades in the cultural shadows came to an abrupt end in the 1990s when the city was thrust into the global media spotlight thanks to grunge rock, Microsoft, Starbucks, and a string of feature films and TV series that presented Seattle to the world as a stylish and eminently "livable" city -- a far cry from the dingy wharves and moss-eaten timbers of popular imagination. The media-fuelled makeover of sleepy Seattle was so total that many local artists began to believe their own hype, exhibiting a puffed-up bravado typical of the cultural nouveau riche. Meanwhile, the number of visiting "name" musicians leapt exponentially, bringing a corresponding increase in audience sophistication and more pressure on local musicians to conform to global trends. And in the greatest irony of all, Seattle's newfound cachet precipitated a huge influx of ambitious young musical émigrés who hoped to cash in on the media bonanza, reversing a century-long brain drain to more urbane pastures (and intensifying competition for limited performance opportunities).

The ascendance of Microsoft and its high-tech spawn transformed Seattle almost overnight from a culturally insecure frontier town into a major nexus in the new Internet-based global economy and an increasingly important node in the emerging Pacific Rim power sphere. No longer a city on the periphery, Seattle now ranks among the wealthiest and most plugged-in cities in the world. But as the Puget Sound area becomes ever more integrated into the U.S. cultural mainstream, can we retain the unique regional characteristics of our music?

Before this question can be answered, let's consider whether there is really such a thing as a "Northwest sound." I'd argue that there is, though I believe its nature is twofold, and there are certainly plenty of exceptions. I posit that much of our music is an aural reflection of our physical environment, in particular the infamous rain, seasonal absence of light, and claustrophobic rain forest, all underlain by a tectonic jigsaw of potentially frightful destructive power. In short, a decidedly minor-key ambiance prevails in our neck of the world. I see these influences manifested in two parallel yet contrasting streams of Northwest music: on the one hand, an aesthetic tendency toward melancholia and introspection, on the other, an expression of ennui and bottled-up rage.

First, the ethereal strain. It's a well-worn cliché that rain-sodden Northwest residents are an introspective, emotionally guarded lot, and I'll venture that much local music is similar in temperament, characterized by a certain murkiness or soft focus reminiscent of our lowering skies and moss-draped cedars. To these ears, even grunge rock sounds blurry, the soundtrack to an adolescence spent smoking weed in the dripping forest. Just as the monochrome Northwest skies level our emotional peaks and valleys, so too is much local music short on provocative statements, bold colors, and the sort of musical chutzpah that typifies, say, the Knitting Factory, Chicago, or Bay Area scenes. In much Northwest music, darker shades and ambiguous tonalities predominate; this is music that ends in an ellipsis rather than an exclamation mark.

At its worst, the tendency toward placid quasi-orientalism helps explain the area's role as a crucible for New Age music. (Yanni and Kenny G and David Lanz have all lived here.) Likewise the bland, inoffensive 'new music' repertoire of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and the lukewarm parlor jazz heard in many local clubs. At the other end of the spectrum, the Northwest predilection for Zen quietude has produced innovative music of great beauty, subtlety, and intelligence, notably the Eastern-tinged world-jazz pioneered by the group Oregon and the microsonic meditations of Stuart Dempster and his "deep listening" cabal. Other specimens of the languid strain of Northwest music abound, from the lugubrious chamber stylings of the Black Cat Orchestra to the polite experimentalism of David Mahler, from the muted weatherscapes of Jeff Greinke to the limpid electronica of Radio Chongching, from the moody poetics of Aiko Shimada to the elegant chamber jazz of Lynette Westendorf, to name a few of the more admirable examples.

Another illustration of our habitual reserve is last year's series of performances of John Zorn's game piece Cobra by Seattle musicians. Audience members who'd heard East Coast versions of the piece commented that the Seattle renditions were "too polite" and "not aggressive enough," echoing the customary dismissal of Northwest jazz as too "soft" (flaccid jazz?) by hard-line jazz critics. It's often been said that Northwesterners are uncomfortable with in-your-face discourse, a behavioral profile that would seem to apply to most local jazz and to the more hesitant variety of free improvisation. Our emotionally blanched microclimate seems to rob much indigenous jazz of its luster, and to dull the edges of transplanted jazz bigwigs like Julian Priester, whose most forceful playing is invariably on out-of-town sessions, and Bill Frisell, whose porch-swing Americana has grown increasingly soporific since his relocation to Seattle. Even John Coltrane made arguably his most spaced-out record, Om, in the Seattle suburb of Lynnwood.

Yet just as our misty postcard landscapes thinly conceal the violent subterranean gnashing of tectonic plates, our fabled civility also masks a more sinister undercurrent. As film director David Lynch so astutely observed in Twin Peaks, the Northwest has always had its violent, seamy underbelly, ever since Seattle's heyday as the Sin City of the West in the late nineteenth century -- we even gave the world the term "Skid Row." Among the less savory aspects of god's country are a disproportionate number of serial killers, a higher-than-average incidence of suicide, claustrophobic timber camps filled with abusive alcoholics, an infamous massacre of labor unionists, persecution of Chinese and other immigrant groups, rampant Seasonal Affective Disorder, a thriving heroin trade, and a ghostly army of social castoffs living on Seattle's streets, as captured in the sobering 1984 documentary Streetwise.

Far from inspiring a rarefied Zen aesthetic, for the downtrodden of the Northwest the grey curtains of rain and brooding conifers form an oppressive, menacing backdrop to lives of desperation. Hence the darker strain of Northwest music, a legacy of morose chainsaw-and-flannel rock laced with suffocated rage. It should come as no surprise that our region produced arguably the first-ever punk-rock bands in the Sonics and Wailers, not to mention the bleak junkie ballads of Alice in Chains and their ilk, the rain-forest redneck incarnate Tad, and hate-rockers the Mentors, whose late leader El Duce was the musical equivalent of the character Bob on Twin Peaks.

Of course, these two contrasting "genres" of Northwest music do not constitute the entirety of the region's musical output; any metropolitan area of this size will inevitably boast the gamut of musical styles, from Afro-Cuban to speedcore to hip hop. But I'll posit that the ethereal and malevolent strains of Northwest music, opposite sides of the same coin, are as close as we get to indigenous musical traditions -- that is, beyond the music of the native Salish peoples who've been consigned to the gutters of Pioneer Square. Yet I wonder whether these traditions will continue to be relevant as Seattle rapidly metamorphoses into the antiseptic "world-class" city that the moneyed class wishes it to be.

It's been said that finding a Seattle native is like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack. This is nothing new; throughout its relatively brief history, most of Seattle's residents have been transplants from somewhere else. Until recently, most of these immigrants (myself included; I moved here in 1975) made the trek to this isolated corner of the country because they were attracted by its inspiring physical setting, abundant recreational opportunities, distance from the East Coast rat race, or relative paucity of urban ills. The difference today is that more and more people move to the Puget Sound area not for environmental and aesthetic considerations but for the almighty dollar.

The new breed of stock-option baron doesn't give a hoot for our area's history and idiosyncrasies. It is for these voracious e-consumers that the generic Pacific Places and Niketowns are built, and huge tracts of farmland bulldozed for Martha Stewart homes in Anytown USA subdivisions. These are the same folks who applauded police thuggery against nonviolent WTO protesters, who howled at the disruption of their ostentatious holiday shopping, and who booted dozens of artists out of the Washington Shoe Building to make room for a new McDonald's. If the ongoing civic obsession with proving our "world-class" status succeeds, Seattle will become as soulless and culturally barren as Phoenix or Houston. Our local peculiarities, now considered embarrassingly provincial, will vanish into memory -- no more declassé lutefisk jokes or "Uff Da" bumper stickers. Hell, even the Rainier Brewery has left town.

At this point, it looks like nothing short of a stock-market meltdown is likely to slow the transformation of once-funky Seattle into the poster city for shallow e-prosperity. One can only hope that the voice of the rain, in all its mystical, miserable, mildewed glory, will continue to sing through Northwest musicians and composers who feel a deep connection to the land and water, that the power of nature is indeed greater than the force of human greed. For now, savor the unique qualities of our region and its music while you can. Such is progress.

Dennis Rea is the Tentacle's Helmsman, guitarist with Axolotl, LAND, and Stackpole, and co-organizer of the Seattle Festival of Free Improvisation and the Other Sounds concert series.

The Dumpster Concerto

by Ron Drummond

Have I mentioned what I'm doing these days to earn bread? Property and transportation services at the local university -- a glorified name for trucking services. We pick up garbage, recyclables, surplus furniture, and equipment; we move stuff from point a to point b.

This morning six of us converged on the drama department to move the guts of an eviscerated piano down two flights and thence to a dumpster. These piano guts sang and rumbled and shouted down the stairs. I loved it. Amidst the sweat, as we banged down from step to step, I would reach round and pluck the strings -- endless resound. A concerto for shattered stand-up piano and stairwell. We hauled it onto the truck, and trucked it down to the shop, and dumped it in a 3-ton 8-by-12-by-40-foot dumpster. I climbed in. I took the pyramidal wooden leg and banged on the strings like the monkey from twenty-oh-one. It sang like stars gone down to dust.

After work, I stopped in for a beer. There were Wolfgang and Roderick -- Roderick of the long black braids and the one arm completely covered in the blue-black of rampant geometric tattoo. So I drank with them, and told them the story. Roderick was like, "It can't sleep. You can't let it sleep."

So we finished our brews, climbed into Wolfgang's pickup, went down to the yard, and -- with Wolfgang stripped to the waist, in his kilt -- together pulled 300 pounds of dead piano out of the dumpster. Not easy: trust. But when we got it to the truck, it was too wide for the bed. We're thinkin' angles, we're thinkin' scratch, when a couple o' lovely dykes pull up. Head girl climbs out (tall, dirt-blond, muscled, keys bouncing o'er the ass-crack of heaven), says, "I think you guys need my help." She climbs into the dumpster and pulls out a shattered chalkboard, lays it (lucky chalkboard) in the truckbed, says "Now it'll slide" -- and it did. We rode that new-lease piano-gut soundboard up to the café of Robynne, the place where all the guys are on mood-levelers and all the girls are foremen. Behind the stage, there's a giant window box, perfect size for the piano heart with its strings tight-wound and resonant. We threw in a couple of hammers. They're gonna mount this thing in the window, and any freaks who wanna can reach behind the amps and beat on it. The sound never dies, does it?

Ron Drummond is a Seattle-based writer, editor, and music excavator.

Sturgeon's Log

Occasionally, members of the Tentacle Collective will seek out CDs of interest to friends and fomenters of adventurous music. Unlike other publications, we will profile any release relevant to the Tentacle's purview, regardless of release date. You can obtain these releases from stores, specialty houses, or on the Web. Note that the Tentacle does not solicit review copies, so please do not send CDs to us purely for review.

Conlon Nancarrow: Studies for Player Piano (Wergo, five-CD set)

Wergo has reissued these breathtaking recordings of Conlon Nancarrow's studies for player piano -- and at mid-price. A veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Nancarrow escaped U.S. government harassment in the early 1940s and emigrated to Mexico, where he spent the remaining decades of his composing life painstakingly punching piano rolls of astounding polyphonic and polyrhythmic complexity for his Ampico player pianos. Unleashing an ear-blinding torrent of notes and complex rhythms, Nancarrow's studies are by turns thrilling, whimsical, angular, bluesy, and always propulsive. Just as Stravinsky's bold and brazen rhythms in the Rite of Spring revolutionized rhythm in the twentieth century, I suspect Nancarrow's innovative explorations of rhythmic and tempo-based polyphony will continue to inspire and astound composers and new-music lovers well into the twenty-first. Essential. -- Christopher DeLaurenti

Pioneers of Electronic Music (CRI, CD)

This CD is a superb introduction to the seminal works of electronic music in the United States. Along with classics such as Vladimir Ussachevsky's Sonic Contours and Otto Luening's Low Speed, this compilation offers a rich selection of music made at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center from 1952 to 1969. One highlight is Alice Shields's Transformation of Ani; derived from the composer's singing and recitation of texts from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Shields' transformed voice scrapes, roars, and screams to a searing conclusion. The liner notes, also by Shields, outline the history of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and profile some of the prominent composers who worked there. Those seeking more music from this fertile period should also investigate Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center 1961--1973 (New World Records 80521-2) and Milton Babbitt's Philomel on Electro Acoustic Music (Neuma 450-74). -- CD

Tom Johnson: The Chord Catalogue (XI Experimental Intermedia, CD)

Johnson, a Downtown NYC minimalist in the 1960s and early 1970s best known for his Four Note Opera and for Doodling, a text piece for piano, has finally recorded The Chord Catalogue, a literal and linear rendering of all 8,178 chords possible in the octave of a piano. Simultaneously enervating and mesmerizing, I found myself veering wildly between Apollonian listening (should I focus on the intervals and the deliberately awkward Chopsticks rhythms?) and Dionysian absorption (or should I drown in the aural mirages of nonpiano sounds?). This hour-long piece is difficult listening of the highest order, an unabashed piece of process music posing a delicious aural dilemma to the ears. -- CD

Thomas Adès: Asyla (EMI, CD)

Major labels tend to take the safe route with contemporary living composers and either hype an eminently forgettable mainstream mediocrity such as Richard Danielpour, co-opt a long-slaving cult composer such as John Adams or Steve Reich, or worse, issue Hollywood film scores or covers of folk tunes by conservatory-trained musicians (now touted as 'heritage music') under the anesthetizing rubric of a 'Classical' imprint. Happily, EMI has treated Thomas Adès as an adventurous composer should be treated by releasing quality recordings of his compositions. Touted in England as the next Great Hope of Classical Music, Thomas Adès is the latest and worthy successor in a long line of "Great Hopes" from Benjamin Britten to Harrison Birtwistle to George Benjamin. Adès's music is dissonant yet lyrically and transparently fleet-footed. Asyla for full orchestra seethes with alluring textures from the serpentine quasi-gamelan in the opening bars to the sly anthemic allusions to techno in the third movement. Other orchestral and chamber pieces on the CD, such as These Premises Are Alarmed and the spiky Concerto Conciso, remind me that major labels do indeed release recordings of daring, worthwhile orchestral music. -- CD

Karlheinz Stockhausen: Helicopter String Quartet (Montaigne, CD)

The chief pioneer of elektronische musik in the 1950s, Stockhausen is more often cited than heard these days -- at least in the U.S., where many DJs and contemporary composers still revere him as a seminal twentieth century composer. Yet aside from his own mail order label (write for a free catalog: Stockhausen Verlag, Kettenberg 15, 51515 Kürten Germany) and jealously guarded used LPs, Stockhausen-supervised recordings remain difficult to find, which makes the Helicopter String Quartet an event. Since 1977, Stockhausen has been composing Light, a magnum opus comprised of seven operas, each named for a day of the week. Slated as the third scene in Wednesday, the Helicopter String Quartet is performed by the Arditti Quartet, new-music stalwarts who specialize in performing contemporary string quartets. Stockhausen conceived the piece in a dream: each musician, aloft in a helicopter, plays in tandem with the chopping helicopter blades while in the concert hall below, the audience listens through loudspeakers and watches the airborne performers on video screens. Despite many logistical obstacles, the Ardittis premiered the Helicopter String Quartet at the Holland Festival in 1995 -- with helicopters. This studio recording includes an additional three minutes of music composed after the premiere. Like Stravinsky, Stockhausen remains too multifarious to pigeonhole with one piece, but the Helicopter String Quartet does capture the bold, damn-the-torpedoes approach found throughout Stockhausen's music. At mid-price, this release is a good place to begin investigating a major innovator in twentieth century music. -- CD

Krzysztof Penderecki: Passio Secundam Lucam (MDG Gold, dist. by Koch CD)

What lurks behind the frenzied feeding on twentieth century sacred music? While every religion has been quite derelict in commissioning composers for the last several centuries (and church attendance is down too!), music lovers have flocked to Pärt, Tavener, Rubbra, and other composers of sacred choral music, some of it quite dissonant. Well-regarded for his sacred music, Penderecki, along with Stravinsky (Canticum Sacrum, Requiem Canticles) and Ligeti (Lux Aeterna) was a pioneer in the sacred music of the 1950s and 60s. Composed in 1965-66, his Passio et mors Domini nostri Jesu Christi secundam Lucam (aka St. Luke's Passion) juxtaposes extended vocal and instrumental techniques (hissing, shouting, grunting, glissandi, etc.) next to the majestic Baroque timbres heard in the Passions of J.S. Bach. Unlike the reverb-shrouded dissonance lurking in many choral releases, the Passio Secundam Lucam is direct and riveting. -- CD