Field report

 

Latest news, and continuing efforts to make sense of things, starting with:

1. Sax QT (Lorraine) 2022. I did buy a copy of this four-CD box set, and have been gradually working my way through it. I can't pretend that it leaves me fully able to answer any of my own questions regarding the true nature of the Lorraine system, but the music is extraordinary - amazing, sublime even. 

The overall level of design and finish on the actual box set is very high, although the outer box itself is of the type that will probably "separate" a bit at the top hinge (so to speak) - there's nothing much to be done about that. The front cover itself is of course visible on the Bandcamp page, this being the design for the front of the outer box, of stiff white cardboard; inside we have a 40-page booklet and the four CDs themselves, each individually housed in its own cardboard sleeve with its own cover, and full recording credits on the rear.

The discs themselves are presented after the fashion of the colour-scheme on the front of the booklet, which includes an essay by Mario Gamba (in Italian, and also in a slightly eccentric English translation), many full-colour photos from the various shows, detailed credits and a close-up detail from the score for Comp. 437 (Bologna): *

Really, given the costs involved in putting this sort of thing out in the first place, a friendly experiencer would have to be very picky indeed to find any fault with this purchase**. The presentation and finish of the discs and their individual sleeves compares very favourably with other such sets (especially with this one), and the whole thing rather left me wondering how the label expects to make any profit out of this; then again, it's not exactly cheap (and besides, when it comes to business... what would I know about that?). Full marks for the packaging, anyway. I am, indeed, a very satisfied purchaser.

As for the actual content - as always in such cases, my responses to the music have varied according to how much attention I was able to give proceedings while it was playing. In the case of the Vilnius disc - Comp. 436 - I listened pretty closely and did very little else while it was on, and the music left me almost speechless with admiration. The sheer quality of the playing is hardly a surprise; it would be a surprise if there were anything to complain about on that front. But of course in these cases, none of the players were "side(wo)men" exactly: with all three of B's collaborators for each concert being very highly trained in his music, and extremely experienced at interpreting and playing it, what we are dealing with is not so much a saxophone quartet as a tight-knit cluster of soloists - and the attentive listener is continually reminded of that, from one bright moment to the next. I can't say that I was equally conscientious about hearing the other three discs - yet! - but I have played all four, and none of them disappoint. Electronics, though present, are used rather more sparingly than in a DCWM context; primacy is definitely given to the aerophones, and to the "sonic winds of breath" which B. has talked about in the context of this new system. I still can't claim to have emerged with a very clear sense of what makes the new music different, but as I observed earlier this month, it is obviously quite different for the musicians while they are playing it.

***

2. In my last post, I began looking at GTM from a theoretical point of view, and listed all the opus numbers which I can personally say for sure belong to this extensive system***. Along the way, a few vexed questions arose - when do they not, in doing this sort of work? - regarding details which vary from one official release to another. Something which I thought I might be able to clear up does not actually concern GTM at all: is Comp. 307 a solo series, or a single work? The former seemed far more likely, and when I dug out the digital files for the Guelph release, I was first looking to rule out GTM; having quickly done so, I discovered that track four on that release - listed as "Composition 307 / Language Improvisation" - is a feature for female vocalist, which (I thought... wrongly) should be easy enough to track down. The singer's first entries on this piece ("Here's looking at you, kid/ Yes sir, right this way, please") were quite familiar to me, and I was sure that I had heard them most recently sung by Anne Rhodes, as tertiary material worked into one of the SGTM pieces#. The reference to giving directions, or guiding somebody, made me wonder if it was an excerpt from Comp. 173, which would after all make some sense (at least two of the digits are correct, albeit not in the right order: 173 > 307? not unthinkable); but I later listened to that work all the way through, and drew a complete blank##. From there, I turned towards the various parts of the Trillium cycle, which rather represents the "here be dragons" zone of the larger map, as far as this opera-resistant listener is concerned; as I have said many times before, I struggle with this stuff, although I have lately felt closer to being ready for it, and besides: I am sure that if I could see some of it performed I would engage with it that much more readily. 

Anyway, cutting to the chase here: I did try to locate the relevant passages in both Trillium J and Trillium E, but was unable to do so, and for the time being, I must admit defeat. Trillium E, again, seemed tantalisingly plausible: it is designated as Comp. 237 in the numbering system, which would quite easily allow for a typographical slip in preparing the Guelph recording for release... Trillium J bears the opus number 380, which is still not completely unlikely... but I did scoot through both of these works in search of the text in question and didn't find it, although of course I have not listened to either of them all the way through yet. (I will assume that wherever this passage originally occurs, it is sung by (coloratura) soprano, if Rhodes has it in her repertoire.)

Whatever track four on the Guelph release is, though, I am pretty sure it's not "Composition 307". And that's where I have to park that puzzle, for the time being...

***

3. For all my recent fussing over which composition goes in which category, it wasn't until just after my last post that I stopped to think about another piece with a high opus number: Comp. 403, as seen on one of the few "official bootlegs" which are still available for download: 10​+​1tet (Knoxville) 2016. This being a bootleg, we can consider ourselves lucky to have been given an opus number at all (... although perhaps we might ponder whether its accuracy is less than certain), and the fact that we also have a date, a venue and full personnel is really all that we might reasonably expect. Tertiary materials being listed as well..? That is icing on the cake### ... one need not anticipate any notes, and of course we didn't get any. But when I first downloaded this piece and listened to it (whenever that was exactly... some time last year, at any rate), I really didn't wonder about what I was hearing. So it's only now that I have asked myself: what is this music? 

The only other pieces I've come across with (semi-reliable) numbers in the 40x range belong to the ZIM system; both of the recordings which have been shared with us from the 2016 Big Ears Festival (in Knoxville, TN) have numbers in the same range, but neither of them is likely to relate to that compositional strategy. When I first saw the listing for Trio (Knoxville) 2016, I just assumed it was DCWM - and perhaps it is; or perhaps it's FRM, or (more likely) one of these eldritch modern hybrids, the true nature of which I still don't understand. But I can't say I gave it much thought - and I can't say I gave any thought at all to the piece which had been played the previous day. Now that I am thinking about it, I am really none the wiser because I just don't know what sort of new musical ideas were being discussed between B. and his select cadre of musicians at that time, beyond those we already know about. The footage from the rehearsals for the performance - included in that same SGTM video already referenced in this post - only show B. explaining how the players should think of 3rd species, accelerator class GTM (... meaning that they were about to start workshopping Comp. 355). There is no indication at all of which system the primary territory belongs to. I did try a bit of online research, which led only to further questions. The website for Tim Feeney - who plays percussion on 403 but was otherwise unknown to me - has a page on which he details a collaboration with his "Tuscaloosa colleagues Holland Hopson, Andrew Raffo Dewar, and the legendary composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton" - wait, when was this exactly? - which "grew from (B's) spring 2015 residency at the University of Alabama. In early August 2015 the quartet recorded four hours of new music, combining improvisation, fragments of music from older compositions, and a new system of performance logic and graphic notation, ZIM Music"^ ...

They did? This was a thing? What happened to those recordings? (For a famously prolific composer. the maestro manages nevertheless to do a lot of stuff which never gets officially documented - or, in this case, apparently did get documented, but has not seen the light of day. Hands up who knew that Dewar had worked with B. again as late as 2015..?) - The placement of the link to TCF's Bandcamp page for the 10+1tet almost makes it look as if he Feeney is proposing this as an example of the "unique" new work he was just talking about, but no, it's just the one place where recorded evidence is available of his having played with B. at all. It's not that I have any reason to disbelieve him - only, I went looking for possible answers and all I found was more unknown variables, dammit. Could 403 be an (expanded) example of the hybrid work described on Feeney's site? The only blueprints we have for the ZIM system suggest that doubled-up harps constitute an essential ingredient, and that there is never a string bass or any percussion... whilst in Knoxville we have both of the latter - even if Feeney's role here is most definitely not that of a "drummer" - and no harps at all (although we do have two guitarists, so...). Questions, just more questions.

But you know what? I can park this for the time being, as well. I would like to know, but it's not going to keep me awake in the meantime. What's most important about this recording, which features plenty of familiar alumni as well as guest luminaries from the creative scene in the guise of Brandon Seabrook and Nate Wooley, is that it's fresh and new and vital (even if it is eight years old already). Those lucky attendees in Knoxville got to witness something hitherto unheard, and in an era when many genres are busily swallowing their own tails, not everyone can say as much. But we can always trust our man to keep forging ahead, even while he takes time to look backwards; he never stops, and he never will, and don't we just love him for it?

* These pictures aren't great, but they are functional / illustrative, which is all they were really intended to be. I didn't feel like taking any great time over them - !

** Of course, I am very picky indeed, but even I would only offer the observation that perhaps the essay in the liners is not the most penetrating in terms of insight... the writer certainly gives the impression that he is familiar with B's back catalogue - or parts of it - but he may not necessarily be the best placed to say what is or isn't strikingly original about these performances: I mentioned before the label's rather bizarre fixation on how little B. had written for saxophone quartet, as such, and apparently that originated in these liners. Gamba seems blissfully unaware of the existence of B's saxophone quintets, nor does he seem to realise that in plenty of GTM contexts, as many as seven saxes have been deployed... 

*** This may be a good time to mention that I'm not 100% sure of Comp. 199, which feels more like an unusually safe educated guess: as far as I know, it only appears on Toronto (Duets) 2007 (with Kyle Brenders), which is still an unchecked entry on my wants list. But all such duo albums from anywhere near that time feature GTM, GTM and more GTM... I felt sure enough to include it. 

# I was right, for once; the video which I wrote about last year shows AR dropping this same material into Comp. 265 (disc nine of the NBH008 box), beginning at 11:41 (- that is, 11:41 on the video, not the actual disc).

## Actually, as soon as I started listening to 173 it all came back to me: its libretto does indeed involve people being guided - sort of - but there's hardly anything that (dare I say it) conventional in there. No, this irresistibly crazy work has to be heard to be believed, in case anyone hasn't... Instrumental readings of (parts of) it are available, and I have heard those more recently, hence my forgetting the character of the sung parts until I was reminded. 

### All three listed tertiaries are of course GTM pieces - not just 355, which is what we see the group being introduced to in the rehearsal footage from the SGTM video. (On the subject of tertiary materials: the list for Comp. 404 comprises vocal pieces exclusively, and although vocal works are sometimes interpreted by all-instrumental ensembles, in this case I will assume that the tertiaries were picked with Kyoko Kitamura in mind - and may indeed have been chosen by her beforehand. 219 was the second ever SGTM composition; 

237 and 380 are, of course - as was noted earlier in this post - Trillium E and J respectively.)

^ All bold and italic text in this quoted material was added by me.

Getting (T)he Measure (pt 1)

Ghost Trance Music has been around a long time at this point. It feels appropriate to put it in those terms - "has been", not "was" - because the creative music community is still very much feeling the influence of this huge musical undertaking, and will be (I suspect) for quite some time to come; B. may have long since moved on as a composer, but the rest of the world is still catching up with what he was working on between 1995 and 2006.  

Considering how long I myself have been living with this stuff, though, I don't necessarily understand it as well as I might. I was pretty late to the party*, not really taking a serious interest in B's music until this phase of his career was already completed; over time, I picked up all sorts of bits of information to build on my own impressions and what have you, but (as is always the case for an autodidact) I had gaps in my knowledge, resulting from never having this stuff fully explained to me. 

So it's worked out quite well recently that I have acquired a few official copies of recordings I only had as rips before, each of which has notes which may well fill in the some blanks. I also came across a useful article - by accident, while searching for something else - and dug out an album I have had for years, but hadn't listened to in almost as long: that, too, has useful liner notes. This then is the first of at least two articles detailing my attempts to learn more about this music than I had been able to glean thus far.

***

One thing I was able to clear up, before I go any further: in a post last summer, I raised the question of why the Sextet (Istanbul) 1996 album should bear that date, when it documents a live recording from 1995... for this one, I had Martinelli's liner notes anyway - they are available on Bandcamp - but one little detail is exclusive to the physical release. At the top of the "credits" page (and only there), the album title is given as Sextet (Istanbul) 1995. So there's my answer: it was a mistake all along, not a perverse choice on the part of the exec producer. These tiny details do nag away at me ;-)

***

Now, something I had been putting off for months: counting the GTM pieces, and listing them. Last year, when trying to get to grips with all the many New Braxton House releases I had missed out on years earlier, I established that the numbering has a neat symmetry to it: the very first GTM piece is Comp. 181, whilst the final one is Comp. 362 - one has to assume this was deliberate. But, of course, not all the opus numbers in between represent GTM works - even though many of them do, this having been the composer's main focus for more than a decade - so we know that the overall total is rather less than 182. For example, Comp. 189 was only very recently unveiled a duo piece, or at least that is how it was finally presented to the world in 2020**. 191 is a solo series, as is 312; probably 307-309 are too, but that is less straightforward***. Many of the opus numbers in the low 3xx range seem to have been used for non-GTM pieces:  301 is a solo piano piece, 304 & 305 are more duo pieces, and so on#. Trillium E bears the number 237, whilst 323 is a short series representing the first group of DCWM compositions. I'm not about to list every single exception, but there are also large gaps in the numbering - for which we (I) have no information at present - which make it impossible to know how many there are for sure.

Even the experts can't agree on this: Timo Hoyer, in his liner notes to the Ghost Trance Septet album, states that there were 138 GTM pieces in total, while Kobe Van Cauwenberghe reckons - in an article which we will look at in due course - that there are "more than one hundred and fifty". Hoyer wrote a German-language book on B's music, and KVC is currently moving towards finishing a doctorate thesis on it, so both of these gentlemen have presumably got well-sourced information - but apparently their information doesn't tally up, regardless. (As much as KVC has rapidly moved to establish himself as one of Europe's foremost authorities on all things Braxtonian, surely he does not possess a complete set of all the GTM scores, including those which never been recorded - in some cases, never even performed..?) Either way, both of them have access to sources which I lack: at time of writing, I myself have only been able to verify eighty-four GTM pieces. In drawing up the list below, I drew heavily on the earlier list compiled by (Rate Your Music user) smartpatrol, as previously mentioned here on the blog; since I can't vouch for the accuracy of this individual's work##, I cross-checked all the ones which I was not already sure about.  (I also went back through the archival version of Restructures online, and referred to a couple of other well-visited places.) This is what I'm working with, for the time being:

Comps. 181-188 incl.

Comps. 192-195 incl.

Comp. 199

Comps. 206-214 incl.

Comps. 219-223 incl.

Comps. 227, 228

Comps. 232, 233

Comps. 235, 236

Comp. 239

Comps. 242-245 incl.

Comp. 247

Comp. 249

Comps. 254-256 incl.

Comp. 259

Comps. 264-266 incl.

Comps. 277, 278

Comps. 284-287 incl.

Comp. 289

Comps. 292-300 incl.

Comp. 322

Comps. 338-341 incl.

Comp. 343

Comps. 345, 346

Comps. 348-358 incl.

Comps. 361, 362

[It's not a very pretty list, but as an ex-list junkie, I do try not to make my lists anything other than functional... It would be far too messy and complicated to attempt to cross-reference here the recordings on which each piece can be found, and besides, smartpatrol already did that (thus saving me what could have been quite a lot of effort). Anyone who is not happy to take my word for it or is just curious (and lazy!) can refer to that prior list, which - I am happy to report - is very largely accurate.]

There are a few other "probables" to take into consideration: 190, 327 and 328 are all included on the Rastascan "return engagement" Nine Compositions (DVD) • 2003, and all of them last more than one hour, making it really quite likely that all of them are GTM territories; but I can't currently play this disc without significant logistical upheaval, and it's not an immediate priority to arrange that. What I can confirm is that all three pieces have decidedly train-oriented, GTM-style titular diagrams... really, I would say that eighty-four is almost certainly eighty-seven... but - !### 

One piece of information which I am missing, and which I would really like to have supplied, concerns the precise allocation of opus numbers to each species and class of GTM; obviously, the first lot are first species, and (equally obviously) the last lot are third species, accelerator class; but as for many of the attributions in between... this would doubtless be fairly obvious if I had all of the pieces available to hear, but I don't. Looking at some of the big gaps in my list - the probable locations of some of the "missing pieces" - does make me think that KVC may be correct and James Fei mistaken, perhaps, about where second species ended and third species began; as I recently explained, the former classifies (the otherwise unrecorded) Comp. 264 as third species, but doubt is cast on that by Fei's describing Comps. 277-8 as second species; but really, if that latter attribution is correct, there is very little room for third species at all unless that was continued after a "break". After all, we have already established that Comps. 293-300 inclusive were originally designated fourth species, and even though that little piece of history got unwritten in due course, that means in principle that only pieces written before (or during) 2001 can be considered third species; given that Comps. 280-283 are those recorded in duet with vocalist Alex Horwitz and (ostensibly) have nothing to do with GTM, if 278 is still second species then only the numbers between 284 and 292 could be third species... unless, as I say, the latter resumed after a hiatus, somewhere around the 317 mark^. (Realistically, I think it is possible that both of these things might be true: third species may well have been resumed somewhere in the 3xx range, and Fei could plausibly have misremembered which category the works performed in the summer of 2000, and reprised in the studio in November that year, fell into.)

One thing which is not in any doubt, of course, is the identity of the twelve Syntactical GTM works: these were established for posterity by the superlative NBH908 box set. But this is also a different type of classification altogether, and the SGTM pieces themselves slot into the species-and-class scheme... OK, even I have had just about enough of all this angels-on-pinheads stuff for now ;-)

***

I hadn't planned to get caught up in all that, but in the end, it's probably not such a bad way for me to start; I never intended to cover off everything in one post anyway, and if it ends up taking three (or more..?!), that's also fine. I had originally expected to discuss an article which I found online, back in March, while trying (unsuccessfully) to establish what sort of set B. played in Luxembourg; having found the article, which looked promising, I noted its location but didn't read it right away; because of that, even knowing that this was a serious piece of musicological analysis published in a Belgian art magazine, I hadn't noticed at first that it is credited to none other than... Kobe Van Cauwenberghe, even though naturally he was the most obvious person to have written such a thing! (I did recently get in touch with the guitarist, and he sent a very gracious reply: he is quite close to finishing his thesis, by the sound of it.) The article aims to use GTM as a window onto B's wider system of musical philosophy (the Tri-Centric Thought Unit Construct) and - potentially at least - does what I myself can't: lays out an argument in relatively clear fashion, with excerpts from scores by way of illustration. At the same time, being (presumably) a condensed version of the central argument in the writer's doctoral thesis, it seeks to establish B. himself as a crucially important figure within the canon of post-war western art music. At last - ! (This of course is something I could not even conceive of doing, so it's a considerable relief to know that someone else has it in hand.)

The same essay has a pretty considerable degree of overlap with the video on the Bandcamp page for the new Lorraine box, and believe it or not, these two were going to be my (ahem) starting point for this post, only that didn't quite happen - apparently, knowing that there is disagreement between informed sources as to the precise number of GTM works was something which I needed to start digging into on my own, and you can see the results of that above (or ignore them, of course). But that now feels like a suitable place to pause; this is (yet) another thread I will hope to pick up fairly soon, and let's see how I get on with that..!

* I attended the 2004 Royal Festival Hall performance, it's true; but this itself took place almost a decade into the "GTM experiment" and besides, as I've said on many occasions before, I didn't really understand what I was hearing, however much I paid close attention: vivid impressions of that set still remain, but at the time of performance, I lacked any sort of context within which to locate the experience. I went in the first place because I was aware that this person was - or would be - significant for me, and at that time this was a rare visit to the UK for the maestro. It would then be several more years before I began to focus on his music to any real extent, as the blog timeline demonstrates.

** Yeah, 2018, I know - but not necessarily, since the performance may or may not have been billed as a reading of Comp. 189 at the time. We only now know for sure that it was presented that way when the album was released, two years later. (Had the piece really been waiting all that time for the right duet partner with whom to explore it? Entirely possible... the label describes it specifically as a premiere recording.)

*** Some of this stuff gets complicated enough to warrant (in theory) an investigation of its own, not that I have the (re)sources to do it... The (rather obscure) 4xCD set Solo Live At Gasthof Heidelberg Loppem 2005 is quite clear about the fact that 307, 308 and 309 are all solo series; only, the later album Creative Orchestra (Guelph) 2007 includes a piece entitled "Comp. 307 + language improvisation" - plus another which is either entitled "Comp. 308" (per Restructures) or "Comp. 306" (per Discogs / everywhere else). I don't have this album on CD, only as a rip, and my version lists track two as "306", but even if that's correct, what are we to do with a title like "307" - ? The solo pieces are basically never used as the basis for collaging (or whatever we would call it by that point), but even if they were, which of the 307 series was being used? Sigh... 

# I can't account for 302-303 at all... but 301 can be found here and here; 304-305 both began life here, though they are (now) fairly popular duet pieces among serious young musicians and are starting to crop up in all sorts of corners of the internet; see *** above for 306-309 (insofar as I have any info on these at all); 310-311 are on the two duo albums with Andrew Cyrille; 312 is definitely a solo series; 313 appears here (a ludicrous one-off recording which I really must write about, one of these days), along with whatever the hell track four on disc one is, since it definitely is not "508m"; 314-316 all show up on another pair of duo outings, this time with Wadada Leo Smith, and 316 also crops up in yet another duo context, this time with Falling River Music(s) involved. Phew... 

## I still have no idea who this person is, but I can say that I was apparently wrong about one thing: when I first mentioned them, I allowed myself to refer to "this guy", feeling safe to say that since, let's be clear about this, the sort of stuff we are (each) doing is exclusively a male obsession - only maybe it isn't, because I did make a bit of an effort this time to look for contact info, and learned that they use she / they pronouns. That told me; I didn't find any contact info, though, and I am not on RYM myself, or I would have pointed out the few mistakes I came across this time. (Yes, there are some - but not many, and I still recommend the list as a valuable online resource.)

### There are other complicating factors with 327-328 (siiiggghhh), too: 327c appears on the quartet album with Matt Bauder, this being one I have heard relatively recently - and I don't remember it having any GTM on it..? What's more, the titular diagrams for B's two originals on that both look decidedly DCWM-ish to me, and the designation 327c is itself highly suggestive of that or of FRM perhaps, and hour-long DCWM readings are also not uncommon... As for 328, well, according to Intakt that is yet another solo series, though I am really not sure about those opus numbers (as I already said recently). I should maybe just stick with eighty-four, for the time being... 

^ 317-321 inclusive are blank on my list, and any or all of them might be GTM. (As indeed might some of the ones mentioned in # above; it's been a long time since I heard some of those recordings, and I can't swear that none of them includes any GTM - but I didn't have time to find out before writing this. I will do so before I get round to "pt 2"...)

Is this actually happening?

 

McClintic Sphere brought this to my attention recently - isn't it just as well one of us is up-to-date with such things? - and I initially just registered it as an upcoming Braxton event, right here in the UK indeed, without fully comprehending just how weird and unlikely an event it is.

For those who may not know, the BBC Proms are/is a long-running annual music festival in which - hell, what am I talking about... I daresay everybody has probably heard of the Proms and has at least some idea what they are - which is, after all, about as much idea as I have myself, not being overly interested in classical music*. As a child I would end up sat in the living room while the Last Night of the Proms was on, but this now seems like one of those tragic imperial hangovers which refuse to go away (in which the orchestra plays things like "Land of Hope and Glory", and everyone waves little union flags and pretends that Britain is still a global superpower). It's been a very long time since I would dream of sitting through anything like that, and as for the concerts themselves... I just wouldn't know. Apparently (sez Wikipedia) 'Czech conductor Jiří Bělohlávek described the Proms as "the world's largest and most democratic musical festival"**' - and clearly I have no opinion on that, but you would have to excuse my cynicism preventing me from believing in the idea of much cutting-edge contemporary music taking place at such a festival, even if it does last eight weeks. The Brits in general conflate art and entertainment to the extent that any attempt to explain the difference sees their eyes glaze over within seconds. People with money treat this stuff as "fun" because they know they are supposed to like it, as with opera and ballet, but really for most of them it's just about getting tanked up and being seen in expensive evening clothes***. 

An-y-waaaay... blow me down if they haven't somehow allowed a programme to slip through the net which contains some actual cutting-edge contemporary music, albeit only in the second half. It would appear that this was achieved with the utterance of the magic words "Duke Ellington", since even the British middle classes have heard of him, and would know that they are supposed to pretend to admire him, even if they have no very solid idea of who he was. But yes, I pretty much have to assume that this was how the event was pitched to the organisers, since very few of their target audience can be expected to know anything at all about Mary Lou Williams (to be fair, I know relatively little myself) - and if any of them have heard of B. at all, this is more or less guaranteed to be along the lines of "that weird American jazz musician who makes music nobody understands". The set has been carefully contrived to open with the Ellington stuff, followed by Williams' Zodiac Suite, followed by the interval... and it will be quite interesting to see how many people make it back from the bar after that. 

But enough of my cycnicism (for the time being). I say that it "will" be interesting, not "would", because however I might feel about attending something like this, I really have to do so - the logistical details will just have to work themselves out nearer the time. As you can see from the event's webpage, the whole concert will be conducted by Ilan Volkov, who has been brought to my attention on at least one occasion recently#, and will mainly feature the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra; but there are also guests and soloists, and B. himself is due to play, together with James Fei and Katherine Young. The post-interval set, projected to last around thirty minutes, is due to comprise a very rare public performance## of Comp. 27, with additional material from Comps. 46 & 151 as well as language musics - which sounds like ( = is) a lot to squeeze into one half-hour set, so who knows exactly how this will be achieved; all three of these pieces were composed for creative orchestra, or rather 27 and 151 were, whilst technically 46 was originally written for ten players, but has "previous" as an orchestral piece. Comp. 27 itself has never been officially recorded, and looks - in the catalog(ue) of works - like a close relative of Comp. 25 (which of course was recorded) - but B's notes say that it is more useful to view it as "the second part of Comp. 24" (which itself had to wait well over three decades to be recorded). [46 has been recorded a few times: besides its 1980 orchestral outing as noted above, it crops up on BH009, where it opens the album; it is also featured on NBH048 - and has doubtless been collaged in as a tertiary before now. 151 has turned up on multiple occasions, and Volkov has prior experience of conducting it.]

Alexander Hawkins evidently knows Ilan Volkov, and describes him as "a great conductor", adding that he is sure they will do a brilliant job of interpreting all this music, so even if there may not be very many of us who can truly even try to appreciate it, I can buy my ticket with faith in the musicians' intention to try their best to do the material justice. Now, how do I let the maestro know that I am planning to be there this time..?

* I was brought up on it, among other things, but I so long ago turned away from the values of the British middle class that any real interest in this stuff went with it. Baby, bathwater..? Yes, quite possibly, but although I sometimes feel a twinge of guilt for not bringing up my daughter to be at least familiar with it, I never really miss it and I don't think it matters much. (She found her way to her own taste with very little help from me.) In principle I am up for exploring contemporary notated music, but in practice I would probably need a guide through it at this juncture. [As for the term "classical music", I trust that anyone reading this understands that term for the misnomer that it usually is, classical denoting a period in Western art music, not the entirety of it.]

** Noted on the Wikipedia page for the Proms, indexed with a link from here - a quick glance at which tells me that the Czech was chief conductor of the BBC SO in 2007, when he said that (... so it's not as if he had no skin in the game at the time). 

*** Grotesque hyperbole aside, I am writing from some personal experience here. But I don't particularly want to talk about it :-S

# I had remembered it as being at least two occasions, but it looks as if it was one occasion, approached from two different angles in fairly quick succession. The point is, Volkov has worked with B's music before, and has worked on at least some of this material before, so his would seem to be a safe and sympathetic pair of hands (so to speak).

## It's not strictly speaking a premiere, though it may very well be the first performance of the "third revision" alluded to in the Composition Notes. Composed in 1971 (Book B) or possibly in '72 (catalogue of works), the piece was first performed at San Jose State University in 1975; that premiere was itself of the second revision, apparently. One thing's for sure: it has very seldom been played at all, anywhere, and this does add some extra spice... 

All sax, all of the time (more new releases, pt 2)

 

Sax QT (Lorraine) 2022

From a solo saxophone album, we move on to a saxophone quartet, for another new release - another box set, actually - which I could easily have missed altogether, if McC had not brought it to my attention: Discogs does list it, but it's one of those outlier releases peculiar to that site, filed (in this case) under Anthony Braxton Saxophone Quartet, but not under the main entry for B. himself. (This really makes no sense, but... ah, fuck it.)

A much more useful place to look for this, then, is under the entry for the release itself on Bandcamp. Here we have full details and excerpts from the performances, as well as a video, just under thirty-two minutes long, of B. talking to camera in a sort of Q&A sessions (where the questions mainly happen offscreen, and what we are left with is the lengthy answers). I watched, this and listened to the audio clips, before posting.

The album is put out by the Bolognese label i dischi di angelica, which (in the style of Moers Music, and others) is attached to a local music Festival: in this case, naturally enough, the AngelicA Festival, under which auspices the second disc from this four-CD box was recorded, on 3rd June 2022; the Q&A session was recorded in the same city the previous day. But the live performance in question was in fact one of four on a short European festival tour that summer, and all four concerts are presented in this box. For these dates, B. was joined by longtime senior student/ major collaborator James Fei and by another Wesleyan alumnus making a return, Chris Jonas; for the first show, in Vilnius, the quartet was rounded out by yet another former student, Andre Vida, who played on just this date; for the remainder of the tour, the fourth voice was supplied by Ingrid Laubrock. Bologna was the second stop, followed by Antwerp and Rome in due course*. 

The label makes a bit of a fuss about the instrumentation: rather surprisingly, they describe the format as an "almost unprecedented lineup for the composer", citing as the only strict precedent the version of Comp. 37 which appears on side two of New York, Fall 1974**; more perversely, they then mention the 2001 album Composition N. 169 + (186 + 206 + 214), which does star four saxophones, it is true - three of which were played by B. plus Fei and Jonas, again - but which also features an orchestra. (Some mention of this album was made on the blog last year.) The point being, if multiple saxophones plus other instruments are to be included in this, there is absolutely no shortage of such recordings - from the mid-1990s onwards***; and if we are only considering multiple saxophones without other instruments, well, there is precedent for that too, isn't there? It just happens that B. has not regularly employed a saxophone quartet, per se; but with that format being used by every Tom, Dick and Harry since the 1970s#... why would we expect the maestro to do the obvious? (We'll allow for a bit of label hype here, but will also assume that they may be unaware of the saxophone quintet recordings.)

Also inducing a steeply raised eyebrow here was the suggestion that the "distinctive feature of this new project is the addition of electronics", with the blurb going on to explain about SuperCollider, as if this were being unveiled for the very first time. Obviously, we all know that that is absolutely not the case, and indeed the question which McC and I have had ever since the first Lorraine document was released is: what is it about this new system which really sets it apart from Diamond Curtain Wall Music? That question was not answered by the Other Minds album, nor was it really cleared up with the release of the recent megabox - and in all likelihood it won't be fully answered by this new set either, at least as regards the distinction between the two systems for the listener. What is becoming more and more clear is that for the composer himself, there is a massive difference.

Much of the content of the video (which is freely available on the Bandcamp page - go check it out) concerns background theory of B's musical systems in general, and won't be looked at here at all (not least because there is a great deal of overlap with the content of an online article which I was already going to post about, hopefully later this month); this was obviously considered necessary as part of the explanation of what the Lorraine system is. This, you see, is part of a "new system of poetics", according to the maestro himself, as removed from the origin systems as clouds are from the ground; all that has gone before is part of the "ground floor" layout of B's Tricentric musical model; centred around winds and breath, the new music is the first of the systems which will make up an "ethereal world", designed to "fly above" the ground floor systems. (In the future, we are told, there will be a corresponding "underworld" layer, too, but this has not yet been formulated.) At the time of speaking in Bologna, B. still did not know how many new systems would make up this "ethereal layer" - he speaks of needing to do more research, which might take as long as another ten years##. In the meantime, he had already composed nine pieces for the Lorraine system, and envisaged "fifteen to twenty" in total before he would be able to declare the system complete and move onto the next constituent element###. 

At the time of writing today, then, there are already fifteen compositions that I know of within this new system; some rearranging of numbers must have taken place somewhere along the line, since the four works unveiled in 2022, and released in this box set, bear the opus numbers 436-39 inclusive, and all the others released thus far have lower numbers than that. (If only nine had been finished by June 2022, clearly they were not all composed in - what is now - strict numerical order.) For the sake of completeness: the recent NBH box collects Comps. 423-28 (all recorded live in 2021) and Comps. 432-35 (recorded in the studio the following year, less than two weeks before the tour documented in this latest box was undertaken), whilst the Other Minds album in duet with Fei presents Comp. 429 (also recorded live in the autumn of 2021). Missing from this list are Comps. 430-31, not yet accounted for; but in any case, and not for the first time, something doesn't quite add up here... leaving aside the whole business of exactly when the opus numbers were assigned to the works themselves, the chronology would seem to confirm that on June 2nd 2022, at the time of the Q&A session in Bologna, twelve new pieces had already been performed live or recorded in the studio; even if we assume that those last three were being finished during the tour - which seems unlikely but is not impossible, given the way this man operates (and allowing for the calibre of his collaborators here, all of whom were very thoroughly versed in B's methodologies by this point) - this still indicates something awry with the maestro's arithmetic... but if I'm honest, that doesn't feel like a new problem and as usual, I'm prepared to overlook it ;-)

What really matters here, after all, is the music itself, which is pretty sublime, as far as can be judged from the available samples. The four performances are subdivided into parts on the Bandcamp page, and presumably on the CDs themselves; of these, one part from each concert can be streamed from the webpage, between seven and eleven minutes in duration, and this is more than enough to glean the overall "flavour" of the music. With the players involved, it is no news at all that a very considerable level of virtuosity is on display, and I will definitely buy a copy of this box in the near future to hear the whole thing for myself. It's worth stating that the excerpts published do make it clear that there are frequent passages with no electronic backing, and some unison written parts which do, after all, sound completely different from anything we might associate with DCWM. It goes without saying that we can hear breath, given the instrumentation; if the listener focuses on the idea of floating or flying, there are passages too which appear emblematic of that. At the same time, when the electronics are present, there are passages which even a diligent listener probably could not distinguish from DCWM in a blindfold test (... I am sure I couldn't). But it does seem apparent that the interactive software is less essential here than it was in that previous context, and there are often is quite a sense of "air and space" about these proceedings. It does sound pretty new and fresh, I must admit; and it is quite beautiful. The conceptual distinctions might only be fully clear to the composer and his players, or to anyone who has access to the scores and understands how to read them; the beauty of the music is completely exoteric and will be obvious to anyone who pays attention.

***

Yet another piece of news concerns an upcoming live event, right here in the UK this time; but that, too, will require a further post all of its own..!

* The itinerary here was nothing like as wearying as the "bad old days" of the 1970s and '80s, when groups had to travel around obscure parts of Europe in no great comfort, and were sometimes booked to play twice in one day - in two different places; but still, it seems bizarre that June 2nd found B. in northern Italy, where he played the following day, but that he thence had to fly up to Belgium for the 5th, only to return to Italy for the 7th... still, I suppose that in this case the scheduling was governed by which slots were available at the various different festivals. Tiring stuff, nevertheless...

** Famously, this utilised (what would later be) three quarters of the World Saxophone Quartet - minus David Murray, still in California at this point. In other words, B. himself actually got there before they did, though who knows whether Hemphill had already conceived of such a thing...

*** This is only to be expected, since the first musicians who sought B. out at Wesleyan were predominantly reed players, and the recordings from that point on overwhelmingly feature his students. 

# Slight exaggeration here, but the format has been used quite a lot since the mid-70s, and the impression I have is that for every ROVA there are about ten far more safe and traditional outfits. 

## One hopes it will take rather less than that, since the same interview sees B. acknowledge that he may not have that much time left to him, and that his main focus is to complete the 36-act Trillium cycle and to realise some more Sonic Genome projects. If any more detail has become available in the last two years regarding the precise nature and structure of the "ethereal world" systems, I am not yet aware of it...

### ... but whilst I immediately though "Thunder Music" when he mentioned moving on to the next system, this same thought clearly occurred to somebody off to B's right at the same time, and the maestro said no, Thunder  Music is part of the origin / ground-floor systems. (Rather confusingly, the account he then gives of Thunder Music makes it sound exactly like SGTM, though surely there has to be a difference... all will become clear, maybe? But let's not count on it..!)

All sax, all of the time (more new releases, pt 1)

 

Since I returned to posting here - indeed, since before then really - it has seemed as if the steady stream of new album releases from B's corner had dried up; of course, one possible explanation for that is that people behind the scenes are busy preparing monster box sets, but still... 

However, that does seem to be changing just lately! Having only just written about one new release - and whilst still waiting to see how easy it might be to get hold of another (albeit from last year) - I was nudged by McClintic Sphere about not one, but two further new arrivals... and I was planning to deal with both of them in one post, but as it turns out there are just too many digressions too many observations to make on the first one, so that the second one will have to follow along in a day or two. The blog can wait ;-)

This first one, then, is another in the long line of solo alto recordings, with the slight difference being that it's not a new recording: titled Solo Bern 1984, First Visit, it comprises a performance recorded live at Altes Schlachthaus, Bern on July 7th 1984, and is released now as part of a special new imprint (itself called First Visit) on the Hat subsidiary ezz-thetics. 

All of the solo albums are well worth hearing - by anyone with a serious interest in saxophone playing, never mind any friendly experiencers as such - and it would be fatuous to do the jazz-journo thing of making out that this is particularly or unusually excellent, but then again not all of the solo albums I've heard (which is most but not all of them) have grabbed me the way this one did. The set consists of twelve originals, plus two Coltrane numbers ("Giant Steps" and "Naima", both also interpreted elsewhere) and two of B's beloved "old chestnuts" from the songbook (in this case "Alone Together" and "I Remember You", both of which must be real favourites of the maestro's: they crop up again and again in various contexts). The originals are (of course) chosen for their variety as much as anything else, so that the programme takes in everything from soaring ballad structures to brutal exercises in multiphonics, overblowing and the like - and a bit of almost everything in between. With no desire to try to unpick each piece individually - anyone interested must simply set about getting hold of this and listening to it - I will just dwell on a few of the marvels on offer here, before turning to those pesky digressions I mentioned earlier. 

Track 6 is Comp. 118f, primarily an exercise in buzz logics - though Composition Notes Book E does list several other specifics in its instructions for this piece - which sounds like an extremely demanding piece to play, requiring both a great deal of breath (as evidenced by the huge gulps of air B. takes every few seconds) and very close and precise timbral control. Even if he was already versed in circular breathing at this stage*, I am not sure that it would have been the appropriate approach to take for this, which naturally seems to want to be broken up into separable attacks as per this performance**.

This is immediately followed by the aforementioned "Giant Steps", played in a rather allusive, indirect manner with only occasional recourse to Coltrane's written theme, interpreted "in spirit" and taken at a suitably brisk pace. B's reading lasts just under four minutes, but given that it follows on from a piece which would surely leave many players dizzy and light-headed, and that he has only had 20-30 seconds of applause in which to recover and get ready, this really showcases his amazing stamina and tests his technical mastery to the full.

Track 8 then is Comp. 26b, rather a storied piece - first recorded in a Paris studio in 1972, it is dedicated to (Kalaparush(a)) Maurice McIntyre, was played live in 1974, and has been regularly revived at intervals since - which runs through an extraordinary sequence of orthodox and extended techniques, including (to great effect) the noisy clacking of keys at one point. 

Track 12 is listed here as Comp. 118q (we'll get to this presently) and is basically "just" a five-note, ascending and descending arpeggio sequence which gradually acquires more and more harsh subvocalisation along the way, switches octaves, gathers speed, acquires more harsh tonal distortions, and - eventually twists itself into something quite different, over the course of three and a half minutes. There is a real release from some of the audience when this one ends, but once again it's a piece which must surely require such controlled power and technical skill that one can imagine it finishing most lesser players off. Come to think of it, this one does seem to be a circular-breathing exercise***, and one of quite extraordinary ambition, varying its pitch, timbre, tempo and dynamics along the way - all to great effect, of course. 

So, this brings us to the digression phase of the post, as we turn our attention to some of the opus numbers given on the official release (and which pass unquestioned by Art Lange in his liner notes#). I just described a piece named here as 118q: but according to both Composition Notes Book E and the Catalog(ue) of Works, the 118 series only runs as high as 118L; track 5 is titled Comp. 99q, where the 99 series (offically) terminates at 99k. Track 10 calls itself Comp. 106r, where the official listings for the 106 series go only up to 106m. And as for track 4... ok, we'll come back to that in just a minute.

There is precedent for this sort of thing, and I'm not about to blame it all on Werner X. Uehlinger (even if we might legitimately ask him where some of these purported titles really came from). The 106 series does indeed only go up to 106m, but that didn't stop Leo Records from giving us "106n" or Intakt from putting out "106p"##; another Leo release gave us "118m", and its sister release offered both "99L" and "99m". Who knows where these titles originate, or whether any of the respective producers bother to check them much when putting these albums out? After all, it's normally only a tiny handful of super-pedants like me who would ever notice, and clearly it's taken me long enough... mind you, Graham Lock famously flagged up one such anomaly years ago, even if he didn't actually solve the puzzle. And let's be clear, some of this confusion might originate with the maestro himself: after all, the Catalogue confirms that there was in fact a Comp. 99a - unrecorded - but there is no listing for it in the Composition Notes, where the 99 series begins with 99b### .

The real enigma on this album, though, and the one which prompted me to do all this checking in the first place, is track 4, listed here as Comp. 170c. In this case, there is no problem with the opus number as such; but there is a major conceptual hurdle to clear with regard to the date of recording. The studio solo albums, at least, tend to focus on the most recent series of original solo works, whichever one that was, often dipping into the earlier canon as well, and/or throwing in the odd "cover" (more common in live settings). The studio album which unveiled the 170 series is this one, which showcased no fewer than seven entries from that series. The recording date was November 14th 1992. How could one of these same pieces have been played more than eight years earlier? This just seems extraordinarily unlikely, not least because in 1984, although the (Martinelli) numbering system was very much in place, the range of numbered pieces was nowhere near that high yet. Works with numbers in the range 15x - 16x very much continue to appear (for the first time) in the early '90s. So I am going to say unequivocally at this point that whatever track 4 was called at the time of performance, it most definitely was not known as 170c. 

The odd thing is... if you compare it with the version on Wesleyan (12 Altosolos) 1992, it really could be the very same piece, allowing for interpretation on the day; as Lange notes in his liners here, few of the solo pieces are actually written-out, but instead comprise short (or in some case long) lists of instructions: this is absolutely borne out by the Composition Notes. So I can well understand how, somewhere along the line^, that title got attached to this piece; I just don't think that decision was properly thought through, and I suspect that what B. actually played in Bern back in '84 was a different piece altogether, which just happens to have several common features with a later work. (Even the maestro revisits his ideas, after all.) 

The only other digression, really, is to note that it's a bit of a disappointing copout to say that "the space on the backcover is not wide enough to show the symbols of Anthony Braxton’s compositions". This is a digital-only release and the solo pieces have very simple, easily-reproduced diagrams assigned to them. Really not sure what happened there - unless of course the process was started, but foundered on the rocks of non-existent opus numbers, as detailed above - but it does come across as uncharacteristically weak of this producer, whose various labels have set such a high standard in the past for their design and packaging.

Gripes and puzzles aside, though: what a brilliant release, and well worth waiting for! Forget all about the mystery titles and just cheer along with the Swiss audience, from all those years ago...

* I remember hearing B. say (in a BBC radio interview) that he was taught circular breathing by Evan Parker, his "last saxophone teacher" - but he didn't say when that was exactly. [If I ever felt I had pinpointed that in the recorded discography, I have forgotten it now... (but see footnote ***)]

** 118f has been revisited a number of times, both live and in the studio - I'm not about to make a comparison at this point. 

*** There are occasional missed notes, but no actual audible inbreaths that I can hear - and indeed if you listen closely enough you can hear him breathe while he is playing, so this has to be done with circular breathing. Pieces which don't use it, therefore, don't call for it.

# Not beating up on Lange, here: he is "one of the good guys" with a definite affection for B's music, and extensive knowledge of it - no question about that. But he's also Uehlinger's in-house essayist for this stuff, and there is only so much effort any writer will bring to that sort of paying gig: painstaking research/fact-checking is not likely to be included. 

## The Intakt release - Willisau Solo, recorded in 2003 (released 2007) - has a pretty weird track list all round, it must be said... probably I should look into that at some point..!

### Composition Notes Book E, p.89. The diagram confirms this is 99b; p.88 contains the last of the notes for Comp. 98. It's as if Comp. 99a doesn't exist - but there it is, in the Catalog(ue) of Works.

^ The back cover confirms that this 2024 digital release is the first edition; but Lange's notes were actually penned in August 2015, "revised 2024"... so clearly this project has been a long time in the pipeline.