December 1999 Articles

A Century of Innovation -- 9 Northwest musicians reflect on a century of innovation

Catch and Release: New Art Quartet at the Earshot Jazz Festival 1999 by Jeff Ferguson

Davey Jones' Locker: Lester Bowie and Paul Bowles

Noise Lovin' Ned by Ffej

The year 2000: the end of an epoch, or just another arbitrary dividing line? Whether you view Y2K as the dawn of the Aquarian Age, the downstroke of Armageddon, or an ordinary day like any other, it's natural to reflect on the passing era. So, like every other publication on the planet, the Tentacle takes this opportunity to cast a backward glance at a century characterized by boundary-breaking experimentation in music and the arts - a century that has seen the advent of electronic music, the tape recorder, atonality, jazz, non-idiomatic improvisation, "world music," the electric guitar . . . the list goes on and on.

We've invited 9 Northwest musicians and composers to join us in looking back at a century of musical innovation through the filter of their expertise and experience. Our respondents graciously discussed musicians, composers, concepts, or events that they find significant in the evolution of music in this century, or relevant to their own development as musicians. A hearty tip o' the tentacle to Gavin Borchert, Christopher DeLaurenti, Joel-François Durand, Paul Hoskin, Mike Marlin, Michael Monhart, Davey Schmitt, Wally Shoup, and Lynette Westendorf for taking the time to share their reflections with our readers. We hope you'll enjoy and take inspiration from their observations on the music of the passing century.

Wally Shoup
Wally Shoup is a saxophone improviser, painter, and co-organizer of the Seattle Festival of Free Improvisation and the Other Sounds new music concert series. He performs in hard-hitting improvising trio Project W.

I can't think of a more visionary 20th century musician than British guitarist Derek Bailey. He basically reinvented music, developing a radical language of spontaneity and improvisation that is complete and coherent. Stubbornness and imagination combine to remove the restraints of conventional structure, placing instead a reliance on intuition and reflexes, keeping everything unresolved, in flux, and un-predetermined. Derek turned improvisation into a universe all its own. Though hermetically personal, his innovations have paradoxically led to an expansion of collective possibilities for all musicians. My sense is that his methods will eventually become commonplace. The music is too real to remain "inaccessible" forever.

Some important 20th century recordings:
Transmuseq: Folk Music (LP, 1978)
Groundbreaking "take" on European Free Improvisation by Alabamians Davey Williams, LaDonna Smith, and Ted Bowen. Flyin' fur, mating insects, automatic telepathies, and sonic scribbles set high standards and myriad inspirations for like-minded folks.

John Coltrane: Meditations (LP, 1966)
Free jazz landmark, fusing the primal and the mysterious with such intensity that no one listening closely could ever be the same again.

Captain Beefheart: Trout Mask Replica (double LP, 1969)
This utterly audacious document made it OK to feel "weird" in the 60s. You knew this guy was further out than anyone - yet you couldn't help but feel better after listening a couple hundred times. Plus, it still sounds like no other.

Albert Ayler: Spiritual Unity (LP, 1964)
When Albert said "it's not about notes anymore, it's about feelings," he made sure you understood what he meant. The ground shifted so far with this release that it's never been "properly" realigned. All praise to Al.

Lynette Westendorf
Lynette Westendorf, M.M., D.M.A., is a composer, pianist, and teacher of piano, theory, and composition. She participates in the Composers and Improvisers Workshop, and has one CD to her credit, Surrounded by Green with the ensemble Animal Dreams.

Significant 20th century classical/experimental music compositions, with an emphasis on piano music
Various ragtime music (ca. 1900-15) by Scott Joplin
Joplin was born in the first post-Civil War generation and became America's first black composer of note. College-educated, he considered the style, form, and language of his ragtime music to be concert-hall music. In addition to his piano works, he composed two operas.

Sonatine (1903) by Maurice Ravel
Early-century piano work demonstrating the expansion of 7th and 9th chords into an ambiguous role; that is, some resolve functionally, while others remain unresolved. This work, and others in the early century, is indicative of the early breakdown of diatonicism as a strictly functional system.

Saudades do Brasil (1920-22) by Darius Milhaud
Twelve pieces for piano composed in polytonality, that is, two different keys simultaneously. Thematically borrowing from Brazilian ethnic tunes and rhythms, the pieces are all in short form, usually A-B-A.

Mikrokosmos in six volumes (1926-39) by Béla Bartok
A progressive study in the composer's 20th century piano works, from beginner pieces to concert works, in the composer's creative style, influenced by Hungarian folk music, modality, asymmetrical rhythms, chromatic construction, and various other early 20th century techniques.

Prepared piano works (ca. 1940), in which objects such as cardboard, nails, coins, etc. are installed within the instrument in order to alter the acoustic sound without the use of electronic manipulation. John Cage is considered to have written the first composed works calling for piano preparation ("Second Construction," 1940), but Henry Cowell used the technique in earlier pieces such as "Aeolian Harp" and "The Banshee."

4'33" (1952) by John Cage
A blank score "performance" in which the extraneous sounds of the environment become the work itself. Cage's intent was for the audience and performer to turn attention to those unintended sounds that exist everywhere, thereby enabling one to see that humanity and nature are not separate. First performed at Woodstock, New York, by pianist David Tudor.

Important Developments:
Olivier Messiaen's Modes of Limited Transposition
Messiaen coined the term for modes (or scales) which, because of their intervallic patterns, can be transposed only a limited number of times within the octave, thereby creating harmonic stasis rather than tonal tendency. Examples are the whole-tone and octatonic scales.

Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone system of composition
In an effort to depart radically from tonal harmony, Schoenberg devised a system in which every tone of the scale is used only once the 12-tone row. The row's original order was called prime; in reverse order it is called retrograde; the rows can also appear in inversion and retrograde-inversion. The resultant compositions were thereafter said to be atonal.

Paul Hoskin
Paul Hoskin improvises on contrabass clarinet and other reed instruments with BOLT, GLEET, Tactile, and numerous collaborative projects. He is founder of the Seattle Improvised Music Festival.

The noteworthy and the 20th century

"Will you allow as a certainty that we are at a turning point? If it is a certainty it is not a turning. The fact of our belonging to this moment at which a change of epoch, if there is one, is being accomplished also takes hold of the certain knowledge that would want to determine it, making both certainty and uncertainty inappropriate. Never are we less able to get around ourselves than at such a moment, and the discrete force of the turning point lies first in this."
Maurice Blanchot
On a Change of Epoch: The Exigency of Return

Is there anything really notable about 20th century music? Are there any characterizations of it other than the strictly (and mundanely) chronological? (Citing two sources which I am loath to do . . .) Is the only innovation the introduction of electronics into the instrument world - John Corigliano's assertion in a recent Sunday New York Times?

The crack cocaine of culture may be the quest for the new. The next new thing can still be found in headlines as if the phrase could still possibly have meaning. Though the original - the first - is equally narcotic. The invention, or discovery, of something may or may not be a fact, its interest should reside in what it sounds like, or what it explains, not in how close it comes to reminding us of misguided hope for the first. The true one. The masterwork, or the genius, is the third element of this unholy trinity. An idealization that should have died with the classical era . . . the notion that all can be excused because of one's genius, or that creative works are defined by whether they are "great" or not serves to mystify the creative process, as well as ignoring the social environment (read: context or milieu) where work lives.

The above is why I argue that 10-best lists (and other cultural artifacts) serve to reinforce misguided and illusory notions about the making of work, if not its importance in the social world. What is being emphasized is in fact the least interesting element of the work. Be that as it may, I'm including three things for the Tentacle survey. I find them noteworthy because, in part, they speak to the critique that I have suggested.

James Tenney's Meta + Hodos
An underappreciated work of theory that employs the term "clang" to speak of blocks of sounds. Other than its onomatopoetic value, clang as employed by Tenney deals with the theoretical problems raised by much 20th century music. What happens if one's theoretical language can no longer describe the music? Beginning with Webern, Tenney devises a language equal to the task.

Christian Wolff's Edges
Composed in 1968 for musicians as well as non-musicians, the piece came out of Wolff's working with [British improvising group] AMM. An example of the composer working with improvisers on their own terms. Why worry about a dichotomy (composer/performer) that is itself outmoded?

Roland Kirk's Rip, Rig and Panic
Recorded in 1965. The jazz idiom is introduced to the world of musique concrète. Kirk's use of tape is often forgotten when jazz and electronics are discussed. A fine example of how genre serves only to define itself and ignores developments in other locales.

Gavin Borchert
Born and raised in Grand Forks, North Dakota, Gavin Borchert studied composition at Michigan State University and at the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati with Darrell Handel and Allen Sapp. A lamentable but not entirely unexpected failure to secure an academic post after graduation led him to Seattle, where he writes for the Seattle Weekly, plays cello in the OK Quartet, serves the Washington Composers Forum as recording secretary, and composes. He has won no major grants or awards.

Ten 20th Century Big Ideas
Pitches used harmonically in new ways
That is, organized in ways other than traditional triad-based, key-centered, cadence-driven usage. Schoenberg's Three Piano Pieces (1909). Non- third-based simultaneities: Scriabin's quartal chords. Extended third-based simultaneities: Ravel, jazz. Use of scales other than major or minor: Debussy, Busoni. Reliance on intuition and personal taste frightened Schoenberg in particular, so he invented:

Twelve-tone organization
Reviving the medieval concept of color (linear pitch pattern) found in the isorhythmic motet and applying chromaticism (all 12 well-tempered tones used once each), along with the idea that the row might not necessarily be stated as thematic material. Other composers later serialized other parameters (Messiaen, Boulez) as in the medieval talea (rhythmic pattern).

Pitches used non-harmonically
Abandoning the concept of pitches being part of larger simultaneities - chords (stated or implied) - and those chords in turn being part of a forward-motion progression. Pitches could be chosen for tone color alone, which led to the "Polish School" works of Penderecki and Ligeti: tone bands, clusters - arranging pitches in larger textural aggregates. Use of color (the 3rd of Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces) or rhythm (The Rite of Spring) or gesture (Varèse) as a work's driving force.

Indeterminacy/process pieces
Two methods of expanding composerly decision-making. Open forms, in which the ordering of given material is left to the performer: Earle Brown, Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI. Process pieces, which give instructions for the setting in motion of a concept, with overall length determined by the performer: Riley's In C, Rzewski's Moutons de Panurge.

New theatrical possibilities
"Abstract," non-narrative opera: Thomson's Four Saints, Glass/Wilson's Einstein on the Beach. Incorporation of video: Laurie Anderson, Lulu. Also Glenn Gould's radio-documentaries-as-sound-art.

Recording and other technologies
"Composition" now can entail the making of a recording, not just of a performance or a score, a development embraced by Columbia-Princeton heads and art-rockers alike. The use of electronic equipment and computers to generate sounds and organize them.

Non-well-tempered tunings, new instruments
Splitting the octave into more or less than 12 tones: Partch. Use of tones in between the traditional 12 equal chromatic steps: Ives, Haba. (A curious use of quarter-tones in a "mainstream" work: Ernest Bloch's Piano Quintet from 1923.) Partch was forced to build his own instruments to accommodate his tuning experiments (so, for a different reason, was Nancarrow).

Art as act of pure will
Cage's 4'33" is less innovative because of its elevation of silence than because of its attitude toward sounds outside the composer's own range of control. "Composition" is further broadened to include the act of contextualizing or "framing" such sounds. If you call it art, it is: The "calling" is itself an act of creation. In contrast to this idea, which lays all responsibility on the individual listener's decision, Cage also used chance operations to remove the decision-making self from the process.

Quotation, collage
Not just writing music based on previous music, which is as old as the parody Mass, but the use of previous music so that it still to some extent retains its identity (as a "found object") and thus bears some programmatic meaning. Ives's use of folksong: innocent Americana. Stravinsky's Pulcinella: camp elegance. Berio's Sinfonia and Rendering use music from the European mainstream tradition (Mahler and Schubert) to evoke the fragility and loss of that tradition.

Possibly the most radical idea of all
Rethinking the notion of "progress", which used to mean that each piece was supposed to be slightly more complex rhythmically and harmonically than the ones before. A lot of composers in the last 30-odd years just haven't felt like playing that game anymore. In the 20th century, our concept of music history, of historical style, became an a priori notion to which composers were expected to conform ("Wagner begat Schoenberg begat Webern begat Boulez," a notion which allowed artists about as much freedom and creativity as a railroad track), rather than an a posteriori summing up and generalizing about what composers actually wrote. (Of course, the downside is that some composers, under the guise of resistance to the "atonal Nazis," have made lucrative careers out of ardently sucking up to the status quo.)

[Richard] Strauss kept to his own path during a time when every "serious" composer was expected to drop what he/she was doing and start cloning Webern or the Rite, and wrote the breathtaking Oboe Concerto, Metamorphosen, and Four Last Songs in the late 40s. Riley rehabilitated the triad in In C (a mere 16 years separates the end of Romanticism and the beginning of Minimalism), and Glass, Reich, and Adams did their part. George Rochberg (Ricordanza, Quartets nos. 3--6) and Easley Blackwood (Symphony no. 5, Cello Sonata) wrote pure tonality in a way that was neither pastiche nor meta-musical irony nor a repudiation of what other composers were up to. They merely restored common-practice tonality to the composer's palette of possibilities; this wasn't taking refuge in the past, but casting off shackles.

Christopher DeLaurenti
Christopher DeLaurenti, the Tentacle Ship's Sturgeon, is a composer, improvisor, and radio host.

Tallying trends is a fine way to anticipate the music of the future, so my list not only cites important 20th century developments, but speculates on music in the 21st century.

The movement of sound in space
A standard multispeaker environment such as Dolby Digital 5.1 may or may not come to pass, but most composers will find any industry-devised standard inadequate and continue inventing and cobbling together sound-spatializing systems to meet their needs. Regrettably, pioneering multispeaker environments such as the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair (designed by Le Corbusier with compositions by Iannis Xenakis and Edgard Varèse coursing through 350 speakers), San Francisco's Audium, and the Karlheinz Stockhausen sphere at the 1970 Osaka World's Fair have barely whetted the public's appetite for supra-stereo performances. We'll have to wait for the next generation of Hollywood motion pictures, recent installations such as the 800-speaker Sound Traffic Control, and supra-stereo performers to forge a musical grammar of kinetic spatialized sound integrated with melody, timbre (by now, a superset of harmony), and rhythm. Alas, we must wait a long time for the contragravity speakers needed to inject aerial audio into live performance.

The return of chamber music
Although families are unlikely to take up Haydn string quartets anytime soon, makers and mavens of difficult music are meeting over the Internet and congregating in private homes. A new breed of music patron will emerge to present difficult music in the homes of those who can afford audiophile playback systems and offer acoustically pleasing rooms. The ideal listener is sonically invisible: Small audiences tend to be quieter, which reduces the omnipresent cacophony of breathing, shuffling, and coughing (not to mention talking) at new music events.

The survival of symphony orchestras
Arts funding be damned. Musicians who insist on playing and performing will keep orchestral music from Franz Liszt to Fred Lerdahl alive. Composers without access to orchestras will continue forming ensembles or inventing their own orchestras stealing sonic slabs and snippets from their favorite music.

Orchestral discipline
To perform the music of tomorrow (not to mention the music of yesterday and today), orchestral players will need to augment their skills with microtonal playing, skilled improvisation, and, most importantly, bodily discipline. Many conservatory-trained acoustic instrumentalists in Seattle seem insensible to their own bodily rustling. Musicians, like listeners, must learn total submission to sound. Oil those creaking chairs and place pads on the floor for your mutes!

Polystylistic free improvisation
While many free improvisers and post-classical composers have investigated and collated extended techniques (cf. William O. Smith's catalog of clarinet multiphonics, Heinz Holliger's extended oboe techniques, Derek Bailey's forging an orchestra from the guitar, etc.), it is regrettable that few free improvisers deploy the tonal language and timbres of years, centuries, and aeons past. Someday, we will hear a free-improvising string ensemble that can effortlessly glide from sprightly Mozartean string figurations to the trenchant smears of Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima to sounds and textures as yet endreamed - while retaining the soul-enriching spontaneous coherence found only in free improvisation.

Vintage media becomes a vintage instrument
Just as many dance music makers pine for the whiny whistle of an ARP 2600 or the MiniMoog's fat (randomly detuning) oscillators, composers of electro-acoustic music will rediscover the musical qualities of textured tape, vinyl, shortwave and transistor radios, and other hoary media. Vinyl, with its inevitable rumble, pops, and clicks, does not sound better than compact disc - except perhaps on a laser stylus turntable, but do you have $20,000 to spare? - nonetheless, compared to the cold, square numbers on a CD player's LCD display, vinyl offers an infinitely superior graphic interface for manipulating recorded music. Also, if the copyright mafia (the RIAA, BMI, ASCAP et al.) can actually enforce ironclad encryption, unprotected audio CDs as well as vintage uncrippled hardware such as pre-copy-crippled CD burners will be furtively coveted, acquired, and repaired.

Continuation of concurrent conservatism
Music history can be bracketed into convenient eras, e.g., the Classical and Romantic periods, or rendered mnemonically, e.g., the 3 Bs: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, but the concurrent conservatives of our time, including Wynton Marsalis, 1950s Dixieland revivalists, latter-day jazz and punk-rockers, and New Age Tchaikovsky wannabes will persist. We need antiquarians, true, but not that many.

Composers as computer-based biologists
While cutting-edge composers spent much of the late 1950s, 60s, and 70s programming computers and trawling higher mathematics, the future's adventurous composers will strive to augment the subsonic rearrangement of the internal organs at dance clubs by targeting neural, muscular, and vascular systems with specific frequency and timbral aggregates. Composers will become more conscious of the statistics of perception and use biometric devices to precisely tailor music to the frequency response curve of each listener. I hope someone builds the objectSynth(tm), a measuring device to translate the visible vibrational parameters of any object (color wavelength, physical dimensions such as volume, curvature, and density) into sound.

Dance music
Strauss waltzes are boring, and so is today's dance music. One of the great musical conundrums of our time is how to create communal dance music that satisfies the mind and the behind, but then, composers of all eras, ages, and genres struggled with polyphony. Bach, the Burundi drummers, and loop-based music are pointing the way to integrating complex rhythms into toe-tapping polyphony.

Timbre
Musical analysis follows musical innovation, and the 21st century will reward us with new ways of understanding music. Imagine the universe as the confluence of all possible frequencies at all possible amplitudes with all possible durations: Given the probable physiologies (and attendant aural capacities) of alien beings - not to mention human cross- and countercultural listening habits - timbre, not melody, dynamics, harmony, or rhythm, may be the best way to analyze music and its effects on listeners.

Mike Marlin
Mike Marlin is a writer, experimental multi-instrumentalist with strings attached, semiotician, and professional librarian working in Seattle. He studied jazz and electronic music at Brown University in the early 1980s and discovered that music was ultimately a subjective experience when his professor told him to ditch his record collection and go sit on top of a mountain for a few days.

Revolutionary 20th century instrumentalists

Buddy Bolden (1878-1931)
Although no recordings of Bolden exist, and though he began his career in 1895 and stopped playing in 1907 when he was committed to a mental institution, this New Orleans trumpeter is generally regarded as the first improviser on the horn and the first known player of the improvised music that later became known as "jazz." Legend has it that Bolden played so loud that people could hear him miles away. Someone had to come before Dizzy Gillespie and Roy Eldridge, who had to come before Leo Smith, Miles, Don Cherry, and now Dave Douglas, and to me that makes Bolden a revolutionary. (Note: Louis Armstrong should certainly be recognized for his fresh improvising in the 1920s and for being widely credited with inventing "scat" singing.)

Bill Monroe
In the domain of bluegrass, which is steeped in form and more often than not predictability, Monroe's virtuoso mandolin improvisations influenced generations of more experimental pickers of other genres, and paved the way for players like Les Paul, Chet Atkins, and more recently Eugene Chadbourne, whose uncanny ability to suggest notes he doesn't play is as much a tribute to Monroe as it is to Thelonious Monk.

India Cooke
A violinist who played in Sun Ra's Arkestra, Cooke's approach was anything but conventional, treating her instrument as a relentless sculptor of new and "uncomfortable" sounds. And though there have been other revolutionary string players (such as Leroy Jenkins and Peggy Lee), Cooke's contribution to experimentation should not be overlooked.

Ali Akbar Khan
The master (sarod) improviser of north Indian classical music, Khan paved the way for widespread acceptance of Eastern melody and musical thinking in Western music. Ravi Shankar called Khan "the world's greatest living musician."

Sun Ra
For his experimentation with volume, tone, and dissonance on electronic keyboards beginning in the 1950s, not to mention his role as a shaper of ensemble sound, I rate the great Saturnian as an important instrumental innovator of this century.

Anthony Braxton
Taking the idea of abstraction in sound to an even more abstract level, Braxton's saxophone compositions challenge me as much as any pure noise band. There are probably more phenomenal innovators utilizing extended techniques (e.g., John Butcher, Evan Parker), but Braxton laid a foundation for cerebralism on reed instruments.

Sonny Sharrock
The late guitarist toiled in obscurity for many years before his rise to out-jazz fame in the late 1970s and his membership in the mid-80s in hard-edged free improv quartet Last Exit. Sharrock's attack and use of melody as well as his volume, dissonance, and skill as an improviser put him on par with other revolutionaries such as John McLaughlin, Elliott Sharp, and Davey Williams.

Cecil Taylor
Taylor's approach to the piano as a microcosm of the musical universe has always impressed and challenged my ears and assumptions about what could possibly ever be done on piano that hadn't already been done by Sun Ra or Monk.

Lee "Scratch" Perry
Often considered the grandfather of Dub in Jamaica and the U.K., predating Bill Laswell and Adrian Sherwood's Dub experimentalism by 25 years or so, Perry focused on the implementation of electronics in a genre (reggae/ska) that previously emphasized stylized R&B horn riffs, guitar solos, and vocals. Although known more for his production skills, Perry crafted many early Dub keyboard patterns and drum tracks by himself.

Ken Nordine
Invoking pataphysics - the science of exceptions to the rules - I include wordsmith Nordine (Mr. "Word Jazz") for his consistently fresh utilization of the human voice as a sound vehicle, transforming words into notes.

Davey Schmitt
Davey Schmitt has been an itinerant worker among NW musical circles since his arrival here in the early '90s, alternately performing duties as a magazine editor, record producer, and booking agent/promoter. He currently hosts Le Vide a weekly streaming Internet program dedicated to experimental, avant-garde, and other assorted "noise" musics.

An attempt, by invitation, at categorizing and likewise itemizing a century's duration of musical osmosis

Given the frenetic pace of discovery, abandon, and general headiness particular to the century in question, especially its later half, isolating a fixed number of ostensibly definitive works, composers, or theoretical musings - while certainly a worthwhile exercise for armchair historians and/or obsessives - admittedly seems, at least in regards to practical application, perhaps as productive as yelling "fire" in a crowded wading-pool. Additionally, isolating a fixed number of defining works, et al., from an entirely personal perspective is a task so initially daunting as to wind up equally - not to mention ethically - problematic; these have been fertile times, indeed, and taken as a whole are obviously far more significant than the opinions of one mere enthusiast. In any case, and in the spirit of investigation (as well as that of the aforementioned "armchair obsessive"), there are certain 20th century "moments" that deserve recognition and, perhaps, reevaluation.

One could easily consider Alphonse Allais' 1897 Funeral March (a score consisting of completely empty staffs) one of the earliest known examples of Antimusic, for lack of a better term. (A more widely known, and thusly more often misinterpreted example would, of course, be Cage's 4'33"). Though Allais' intent was less experimental than directly farcical, his ghosts and progeny dominate the landscape of post 1950s music.

Conceptualist collectives such as the Italian Zaj group, the American Fluxus, the musical tendrils of the Japanese Hi Red Center, and the somewhat more humanist Scratch Orchestra seem like the most obvious descendents, blending extramusical activity with equal parts absurdism and sincerity.

These musical groups were often associated with the visual arts, a field which, ironically enough, has allowed musical experimentation to flourish. The application of music to more optical mediums such as theatre, dance, film, and gallery installations is by no means exclusive to the 20th century, but this century's finest practitioners have managed to create some unbelievably resonant aural metaphors.

Along similar lines, by way of the famous artist "Happenings" of the 1960s, theatrical music (distinct from musical theatre) as exemplified by the previously cited conceptualists and a few key figures of the avant-garde (Kagel, Cage, Ligeti) brought elements of populist inclusiveness and calculated mischief, in a similar vein to Allais' cheeky subversion, to concert-hall commissions.

This social inclusiveness can be seen in certain ensembles dedicated to controlled improvisation, and in the aleatoric methods found in graphic notation or chance operation. Groups such as [Vinko] Globokar's New Phonic Arts, [Franco] Evangelisti's Nuova Consonanza, MEV, and AMM reduced the patriarchy of the Composer, and allowed the performer to dictate the shape of the music, turning genre distinctions such as "jazz" or "classical" on their collective head.

Appropriation likewise dispels notions of what constitutes a "composition" proper, and of who should be allowed credit. Musique Concrète and Hip Hop alike are free to eat from the same table. Max Neuhaus, taking a tip from Cage, even managed to appropriate the site/time-specific sounds at a given location during a fixed period for his "Listen" series (bussing the paying audience to various places and depositing them there with nothing but the titular instruction).

Few things have transformed the language and dynamic of music more than simple technology in both compositional and social terms. From Russolo's Intonarumori to Antheil's Ballet Mécanique to Musique Concrète to Kayn's cybernetic music to live-electronics, computer music, Acousmatics, and all applications of sound engineering (military research, psychoacoustics, Muzak), the technology involved almost takes precedence over what it produces.

At this late stage of the 20th century, new technologies are available nearly to all, which has created an incredibly vital DIY philosophy. The Anonymous Self has become the most powerful and significant distributor and/or creator of new musical developments; further evolution is dependent on this particular aspect of the century.

As is readily apparent, none of these little hiccups are exclusive to one another; they overlap and cross-pollinate under the Antimusic rubric in a purely organic fashion. One is easily led to believe that the coming century should be no less interesting and enjoyable than the one that will shortly be hearing its own Funeral March.

Michael Monhart
Michael Monhart is a saxophonist with Stinkhorn and Outland.

10 musicians who revolutionized jazz

I looked at the list in terms of people in American jazz who gave us messages to carry into the next century. All expressed, in their own way and time, a radical, courageous creativity that in itself is a fount of inspiration for as much time as there is come.

Louis Armstrong The striking originality, the overflowing exuberance of his Hot Five and Seven recordings turned a nascent entertainment music into an art form. Armstrong shaped the paradigm of an individual solo voice working in the context of an ensemble, setting in motion the course of jazz in our century.

Duke Ellington Education, elan, elegance. A master composer who never ceased writing, an innovator who stood astride commercial success and experimentation, a bandleader who allowed unique, disparate personalities to thrive within a whole. Music as life, life as music.

Charlie Parker / Dizzy Gillespie / Thelonious Monk Archetypal not only because they were instrumental in creating bebop but because they fully embodied the key values of jazz. No one told Charlie Parker how to play like Charlie Parker; no one could have suggested to Thelonious Monk that he play like Thelonious Monk. Jazz as change, change as jazz.

Miles Davis Everyone has their favorite Miles. Few artists in any medium have so completely and so masterfully shaped successive stylistic changes. Throughout his decades he knew what to play and what not to play.

Sun Ra Saturn's gift to us close-minded earthlings. Sun Ra opened the music up to time and space, drawing alike from old Fletcher Henderson charts and cosmo music of the future. His performances were ritual-like invocations of the omniversal muse through music, poetry, dance, lights, costumes. Music as space, space as music.

Jimmy Giuffre An at times overlooked pioneer of free jazz. Giuffre's graceful work remains a delightful listen and a relatively unexplored avenue of the music.

John Coltrane With fanatical technique and a religious openness, Coltrane created a sound that seemed to flow from the core of his being. That sound's not only the essence of jazz, it's the essence of being human.

Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) Muhal Richard Abrams, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, Steve McCall, George Lewis, Henry Threadgill, Edward Wilkerson, the list goes on. Cooperation, music based in a shared value system, new structures for composition and improvisation, texture, silence. The past, present, and future of music.

Art Ensemble of Chicago Deserve their own mention outside of the AACM. The Art Ensemble collectively and individually took the idea of free jazz and made it truly free, encompassing past musical practices, free improv, and new pathways for creative music. Music as the world, the world as music.

Cecil Taylor An American musical shaman waiting for his patients to acknowledge their sickness. Like Coltrane, Taylor has prodigious technical facility and the daring willingness to use it in excavating being. Music as Being, Being as Music.

Joel-François Durand
Joel-François Durand was born 1954 in Orleans, France, and studied in Paris, Germany,and the United States. His international prizes and scholarships include awards from the DAAD, Fulbright Foundation, French Ministry of Culture, and the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis from the Internationalen Ferienkurse in Darmstadt, Germany (1990). He is currently Associate Professor of Composition and Theory at the University of Washington in Seattle. His music has been performed throughout Europe and the U.S. and in South Korea.

Groundbreaking 20th century composers (in chronological order)

Arnold Schoenberg
For those magical years at the beginning of the 20th century when he dared imagine a music without tonality.

Alban Berg
Because for a few years, he managed to construct viable pieces without thematic constraints. And in all his works, for the remarkable richness of the formal constructions.

Béla Bartok
The first real explorer of the small intervals.

Charles Seeger
Not as a composer, but as a most unique and inventive mind, because he fostered creativity in many American musicians; following the example of Charles Ives, he fought for a really original American music.

Giacinto Scelsi
Because he invented a music whose spirituality doesn't rehash past aesthetics. Another master of the small intervals.

Olivier Messiaen
For those moments when he left the theories aside.

György Ligeti
For the poetic vision of some of his works; one of the few able to achieve real poetry without giving up the constructive aspect.

Brian Ferneyhough
For the depth of his musical reflections; the most daring and successful in pushing the limits of instrumental techniques.

Catch & Release:

New Art Quartet at On The Boards, Earshot Jazz Festival 1999
by Jeff Ferguson

My first thought upon seeing that the 1999 Earshot Jazz Festival had scheduled the New Art Jazz Quartet, a group comprised of significant figures who have been active since the fifties and sixties, was that this concert could be a fantastic meeting of individualistic voices or a complete failure. In a word, risky, both for the musicians and the audience. But that's what it's often supposed to be. We need more dangerous jazz shows.

Delta blues/no wave/harmolodic guitarist James Blood Ulmer claimed that the four had first played together a year or so ago in New York and the results necessitated more dates. I jumped at the chance to see Reggie Workman, a bassist who has played inside and out with a wide range of groups, from Red Garland to Coltrane to Marilyn Crispell. A logical rhythm section mate and stalwart nonconformist, drummer Rashied Ali may be best known for his unbridled duets with Coltrane at the end of his life. While far from being considered a stuffy conservative - he's recorded with David Murray and Lester Bowie - pianist John Hicks stood out as the mainstream element of the group.

The show got off to a mushy start with Ulmer letting the trio find a foothold. When he finally stood and meandered to the microphone, his barely audible guitar noodles contributed nothing to solidifying the music into something with an identifiable purpose. Patience in these situations can be rewarded, however. I'm always willing to give the cats a chance to warm up, acclimate, set some levels, and connect. Unfortunately, the first set plodded along ungrounded. Workman did his best to lay down a walking groove most of the time. Ali attempted to walk along, but it's his nature to corrupt the obvious, resulting in a rhythmic feel that neither swung in a traditional sense or laid down a free counterpoint to the rest of the players. Hicks seemed oblivious to finding chords that would complement those of Ulmer's, whose tunes are so integrated with his unique guitar approach that I wonder if any pianist could pull it off.

Ulmer's occasional vocals only added another incongruous component, at one point slurring into what may have been an attempt at "Summertime."

After enduring the first set, I fought the urge to split, again hoping for the payoff of patience. Just into the second set, a fast, free Ornettish piece came along, allowing Ali to forgo his attempt at a "businessman's bounce." Ulmer's characteristic out-blues melodic fragments were right at home and things were cooking. If the idea was to present Ulmer's music in a straight-ahead jazz format, this tune failed and I was delightfully rewarded. Soon after, the original murky concept resumed and I left.

Four big names like these can pull in a crowd, and did in this case; OTB was packed. I'll always give credit to valiant efforts that don't quite come off, but players of this caliber and experience should be able, at the very least, to clarify the intent of the music, even when the execution misses the mark. A friend commented that the bizarre performance sounded like they were, "auditioning for a Holiday Inn gig."

I've admired these musicians for a long time and came away very disappointed. You buy your ticket and take your chances.

Davey Jones' Locker

Lester Bowie (1941-1999)
To some, he was the beloved clown prince of free jazz, with his trademark lab coat, stage antics, whinnies, and bleats. To critics such as Wynton Marsalis and other purveyors of well-groomed, hardened-artery jazz, he was a charlatan who couldn't play the trumpet "correctly." But whether you revered or reviled him, it's impossible to deny the lasting impact Lester Bowie made on 20th century improvised music.

Lester Bowie passed away in his Brooklyn home on November 8 from complications related to liver cancer, cutting short a lifetime spent at the barricades of creative improvised music. He was 58 years old. Born in Maryland and raised in St. Louis, where he helped form the Black Artists Group and the Great Black Music Orchestra, Bowie came to prominence in his adopted home of Chicago, where he was a charter member of the seminal Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and its most celebrated and enduring offshoot, the Art Ensemble of Chicago. In its 30-year career, the Art Ensemble radicalized not only jazz - infusing the tradition with new conceptions of form, space, instrumentation, freedom, and inclusivity - but also the way it was presented: Decked out in face paint and brilliant tribal costumes (and Lester's lab coat, of course), the Art Ensemble's performances were more than just great music; they were all-encompassing, life-affirming spectacles. Most importantly, the AEC drew freely from the entire history of jazz, and indeed of all music, while at the same time pushing jazz into uncharted territory - embracing the future without rejecting the past. Hence the group's motto: Great Black Music, Ancient to Future.

With his infectious stage presence and abundant humor, Bowie gave the AEC's sometimes forbidding abstractions a human face, building a bridge for the uninitiated. As a trumpeter, he possessed an unsurpassed repertoire of expanded sounds and techniques and an encyclopedic command of jazz idioms reaching all the way back to parade bands. In addition to the Art Ensemble, Bowie worked with Jack DeJohnette's New Directions, Cecil Taylor, David Murray, Fontella Bass, his own acclaimed groups Brass Fantasy and the New York Organ Ensemble, and countless other stars in the firmament of the new jazz. His passing robs the music of one of its greatest ambassadors. The Tentacle extends heartfelt condolences to Lester's wife, six children, and two grandchildren.

Paul Bowles (1910-1999)
On November 18, author and composer Paul Bowles succumbed to a heart attack in his longtime home of Tangier, Morocco, at age 88, drawing the curtain on a long and storied career. Although best known as one of the most influential figures in 20th century literature, Bowles started out as a composer of exceptional ability who eventually abandoned music to pursue a writing career. Born in New York City in 1910, Bowles became a protegé of Aaron Copland and produced a small body of endearingly quirky works scored mostly for orchestra. While he never fully embraced the contemporary musical avant-garde, his music nevertheless exhibits a singular imagination, at times distantly reminiscent of the work of Kurt Weill. His compositions include "Migrations," Nocturne for Two Pianos, and "Black star at the point of darkness." Bowles frequently composed music for theatrical productions by Tennessee Williams and others, which brought him into contact with luminaries of the prewar cultural elite. He married Jane Auer (later Bowles), also a writer of repute, but the couple's relationship eventually foundered.

Disenchanted with the musical life and with America, Bowles moved to Morocco (via Paris) in the 1940s, where he lived, with brief interruptions, until the time of his death. It was here that he wrote the novel that brought him his greatest fame, The Sheltering Sky. The reclusive author became a lodestar for a nucleus of Beat Generation writers including William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, and Jack Kerouac, all of whom made pilgrimages to Bowles's Tangier residence. Among his written works are the novels Let It Come Down and The Spider's House; the Collected Stories of Paul Bowles; and various writings on North African culture. Bowles translated many important Moroccan literary works into English, and was instrumental in introducing listeners to traditional North African music such as the Master Musicians of Jajouka. An excellent CD of the author reading his works, Baptism of Solitude, with subtle musical accompaniment by Bill Laswell, was released on the Meta label (MTA 9601) in 1995.