What PMP2301 didn't tell me, after all

 

Four Compositions (Wesleyan) 2013

After all that waiting and wondering, when I finally got it together to order this album from a Czech retailer, it came very quickly in the end (a much less stressful experience than I'd had the last time I ordered an album from continental Europe). Unfortunately, this time there are some issues with the actual product, as will be explained - but before we get to any of that, the question was: how many of the outstanding questions - regarding the nature of Falling River Music, and how it does or doesn't relate to DCWM - will be answered and cleared up by the physical version of this release?

For the benefit of those who can't be bothered to read the whole post, but who may nonetheless have been curious about the question - the TL;DR answer is: none of them, basically. 

So, the details... well, as I've already said, the actual purchase was a little expensive (with international shipping rates and "Brexit tax" factored in) - but it was otherwise simple, quick and hassle-free: I was very happy with the service from Minority Records of Prague, who declared my order shipped the day after I placed it, responded very promptly to my message asking how long they thought it might take, and got the package to me in around a week ( - a week which included a UK bank holiday). The seller has also proved very helpful since then with continued enquiries about the state of the discs, as I will make clear.

In terms of value for money and quality of product, this set is sort of halfway between the superb Sax Qt (Lorraine) 2022 box, as detailed back in May, and the much earlier Four Improvisations (Duo) 2007 on Clean Feed (which disappointed me mightily at the time of purchase, its four discs housed in plastic wallets and with an insert consisting solely of one double-sided sheet of glossy paper): again, the four discs here are in plastic wallets - which decision may have caused its own problems - but at least there is a proper booklet, containing photos and liner notes / essays:

When I say photos, these are not of the performances, or of the players themselves - perhaps this is understandable, with a release containing music recorded ten years previously (although it does seem likely that there could have been some pictures taken of the sessions which eventually gave rise to this album) - but rather two double-page photographs, and one single-page one, showing what is presumably supposed to represent the painting process for the FRM scores...

... except that it really doesn't, since a discreet note on the back cover of the booklet - not on the back of the box itself - credits "painting" to Vladimir 518. There's nothing inherently irregular about having cover art which is not taken from one of the scores, but it does seem a bit peculiar to include photos of art which has nothing to do with them, especially when two of the three photos actually show this art being physically painted: quite tasteful, yes, and well suited to the overall tone of the box set, but how is this relevant to the music? Still, the twenty-page booklet is a nice addition, and helps to make up for the disappointment of having the actual discs in those rather tacky plastic wallets* (which don't even quite fit inside the box, as the second pic above shows). Not for the first time, an assumption has been made by a European label that anybody buying this sort of album - regardless of their individual country of origin - will be well-enough educated that they can read English, French and German as a matter of course: the three essays, By Art Lange (written in 2015), Guillaume Belhomme and Pirmin Bossart respectively, do not overlap at all - so that only a polyglot experiencer will be able to read all of the notes with full comprehension**.

What was far more of a concern, when I first opened the package - listed as Mint and sealed, and which arrived shrinkwrapped*** - was the state of the actual discs. All four of these showed quite noticeable marking on the playing surface, of a type which I cannot remember ever seeing before on factory-new CDs, in more than three decades of dealing with this format; the first three in particular looked scuffed and lightly scratched, as if they had all been rubbed against some sort of abrasive surface prior to sealing. This has proved tricky to capture on camera, but this gives an idea of it:

I brought this up with the seller, who couldn't account for it - understandably, since all copies he has in stock are shrinkwrapped and apparently factory-sealed - but then just couldn't decide what to do about it. Despite the marking being clearly visible - at least in artificial light - it does not seem to affect playback at all, so the actual recorded layer of the laminate is apparently undamaged; and although the seller offered me a replacement, this would have meant my having to pay more money again to send the package back to Prague, then wait for a replacement which could potentially be just as bad. I've never seen anything like this, as I say, but if all four discs in one box are marked in this way, why would I assume that other copies won't be? It's not as if the seller can actually check... in the end, it was only today - in taking the pictures for this post, in strong natural light - that I decided not to pursue this any further: oddly enough, in strong sunlight, the markings are barely visible at all from any angle, which is probably consistent with the fact that the CDs play without problems: any damage must be extremely superficial. (It's possible that the plastic wallets themselves are somehow responsible for this, although I can't really see how.) I may very well still contact the label directly about this, just to see what they say - but I am satisfied that the seller has done everything he can, and I shan't be sending this back. Of course, that doesn't mean that I am completely satisfied with the actual product - and that will certainly be borne in mind, assuming this new label goes on to release more albums.

***

As regards the unanswered questions - well, I've already headed this off, earlier in the post, but just to confirm: the whole thing has effectively just been a year-long wait for an anticlimax. Much is made of FRM being "the latest evolutionary stage of Braxton's lifelong conceptualization and personalization of notation" (Lange), and that sort of thing - even if FRM itself is hardly new at this point, and wasn't new in 2013 either (the term having first been used at least as long ago as 2003) - but although there is some attempt (on Lange's part) to explain what it is, at least in terms of the "spontaneously conceived, painted gesture" being the new element in the FRM scores, there is no mention whatsoever of DCWM#, and hence no attempt to clarify why this music - with its pervasive use of the interactive SuperCollider software - should not be considered as primarily DCWM rather than FRM. I have previously sifted through all the granular detail regarding opus numbers and all that, and it's clear that in principle, the primary territories here - Comps. 364f, 366e, 364e and 363a - are within the range traditionally associated with DCWM. That's if those four pieces even are to be considered as primary territories: one detail which is provided in the notes here (but which may have been mentioned already in the label's blurb at the time of release, I think) is that these four long pieces see the three players working from three different scores, and although that is not broken down for the listener, we may infer from this that a title such as Comp. 364f (+364g + 272) should probably be rendered differently, to indicate that each territory was explored by only one of the musicians. Of course, lacking any real detail on this, we can't even be at all sure about that - but it does seem likely, and that suggests that disc two's comprising only two compositions, with disc three comprising four, is probably just an error in the preparation of the tracklist rather than an accurate reflection of what was actually played in these performances. But, again... educated guesswork. I could just as easily be wrong.

So I'm back to square one, really - or whatever square that was last October - and until told otherwise, will assume as follows: the music presented in this set is essentially DCWM, utilising (mainly) scores written for that system, and in addition to this - and also to the judicious insertion of GTM scores - there are elements of FRM strategies worked into the music at certain points, or even throughout, thus creating an intensely "hybridised" super-territory##. A sonic element is often present which I have not yet been able to identify, but which could be the sound of brushstrokes in real time; this sound overlaps with the sounds of breathing, and to some extent with the clacking of keys (all of which is captured in minute detail, and all of which is folded into the overall mixture) so I keep doubting myself, but...?### With regard to the allocation of titles, it's worth remembering that the previously-mentioned (-hyperlinked) ABCD album with Chris Dahlgren does not designate any specific opus numbers to FRM, but rather lists four of its eight tracks in the format "Comp. 316 - version a [b, c, d] (with Falling River musics)". (Of course, one thing I forgot to do before writing this was consult the packaging for the 2003 album, which may shed further light on all this; pretty ironic if so, and I'll be sure to check that out before too long.) It would not be entirely out of character for B's original intentions for this system to have become garbled or confused over time, and perhaps I was barking up the wrong tree to begin with, in anticipating that any questions would be answered here at all ;-)

What remains, of course, is the music itself - which is (obviously) multilayered and gorgeous; it's a real treat to hear this kind of instrumentation on this kind of piece, which has generally featured only reeds, small brass and electric guitar - and to hear two such sympathetic musical explorers (sympathetic to the composer, and to each other: Dahinden and Kleeb are married) interacting with the maestro. It is lush and varied enough to function reasonably well as background music, but one suspects that if listeners could give these performances their undivided attention from start to finish, the effect would be extremely rewarding; I do want to try playing this with little or no ambient light sometime, although of course I will not then be able to make any notes (!). Given the doubt over the physical integrity of the discs, and the likely high price of purchase, it is a difficult set to recommend to any and all readers, but there are certainly no question marks over the quality of the actual music. "It all starts by listening", indeed^...

* Don't get me wrong, I still don't really understand how the Italian box was financially viable. Putting these things together must be a complete nightmare for the labels involved... but of course that's not my main concern as a consumer, nevertheless...

** I am lucky to be able to read two of them, I suppose. I can't read German; but I did still skate my eyes over it, hunting for anything which looked as if it might deal with the album's relationship to DCWM, for example, which I could then run through an online translator. Doesn't look to me as if there's anything in there about this.

*** Obviously, the fact of something being shrinkwrapped is not proof of anything much - certainly it does not prove that the contents have not previously been opened, used and resealed. There was nothing on the cellophane to indicate that it was definitively put on by the label, or at their instruction. It's just one of those things which one has to take on trust.

# No mention, that is, except fleetingly, as one of several examples of prior musical strategies and systems employed by the composer.

## Would this also, then, be the case for the twelve duets in the DCWM box? (I'm not going to assume that I would find the answers there, either...)

### It's also a bit of a puzzle: if this sound is that of someone painting, who is doing that, and how? There are times when it can be heard even while all three musicians are playing.

^ Lange's notes. 

Grand Terpsichorean Manoeuvres, pt. 1

 

Octet (New York) 1995 (Braxton House)

Following the unveiling of B's brave new musical strategy in Istanbul on 14th October 1995, there were at least some more dates around South-Eastern Europe - as we know from the presence in the discography of Solo (Skopje) 1995 (documenting a performance given in (what was then called) Macedonia on October 18th) - but the next set of recordings in the sessionography relate to concerts presented under the aegis of the Tri-Centric (Thanksgiving 1995) Festival, at the good old Knitting Factory in NYC. Though not listed on Restructures as being part of this event, the live date which resulted in the Splasc(h) Records release Six Standards (Quintet) 1996 (featuring B. on piano, with Mark Whitecage taking up the reed mantle in this case) took place at the very same venue on November 22nd, two days before the recording we'll be looking at today; it seems overwhelmingly likely that these concerts were part of the same residency*. In any case, what concerns us here is not the standards date but the next instalments in the great GTM experiment...

... both of which took place on November 24th. I haven't yet been able to establish which of the two performances actually took place first: Restructures listed the octet before the ensemble**, but there is no explanation for this - no details of what time the two performances commenced etc - so the tempting assumption is that they were listed in the order of the catalogue numbers assigned to their eventual releases: BH006 before BH007. (Never mind that following the order of the official releases is bound to be somewhat misleading anyway: the studio sessions which produced the very first GTM recordings comprise an album released with the catalogue number BH005, whilst BH001 presents the live performance given almost two months later. The order in which the actual albums saw the light of day, in other words, cannot be taken as representative of the chronology for the source recording sessions or live performances - as a matter of fact, even the order of the releases themselves is now rather open to question***.)

So, lacking any precise information on the order of these two performances - and on the basis that there are limits to how significant a few hours' difference would be, either way - I will proceed on the assumption that the octet was indeed presented first. It is worth just recapitulating, in order to remind the reader: it is possible now for us to listen to these recordings one after another, in the order in which they were made - but anyone present for one or both of the concerts given in NYC on 24/11/1995# would very probably have been witnessing completely new music, as far as they were concerned. There may have been a few people present at the Knitting Factory who were also fortunate enough to attend the previous month's concert in Istanbul, but even if there were, none of them would surely have been aware yet of the studio recordings made in August. I am of course taking advantage of the passage of time - among other things - in order to track the development of this music now##. It's an artificial reconstruction, inasmuch as it would not have been possible for even the most dedicated fan to undertake the same journey of discovery at the time; but it's also an accurate study, with hindsight, reflecting the progress which was made by the musicians, and also therefore the growth of the actual music. 

The other reason why it makes sense to consider the octet first is because that group represents a natural extension of the previous sextet (which itself was an expanded version of the quartet which recorded the first four pieces): Dahinden, Hwang, Reichman, Fonda and Norton all return, and the group is supplemented by the addition of two more reedmen: Brandon Evans and Andre Vida, both of whom would become significant collaborators and senior students###. So, what this recital represented was an expanded version of a musical experiment which was already underway, both in terms of the music itself and of the group which was chosen to play it. This is not straightforwardly the case with the larger ensemble, presented the same day; that will be examined separately, in due course.

When I came to listen closely to this recording recently for the purposes of the present analysis, I struggled to locate the two extra horns in the stereo image, or rather I struggled to tell them apart. As usual, it was no problem at all to pick out the leader, a little to the right of centre: this was obvious early on, confirmed for definite by his wailing away on sopranino around 06:45. However, although it was quickly apparent that one of the students is on the far left and the other near centre-right, confusingly close to the leader (which doesn't help matters much), I really wasn't able to differentiate them with any confidence until the forty-seventh minute (in a fifty-eight minute piece), at which point I was finally able to identify Vida as standing next to B., by his pulling out the baritone sax: this is one of his regular horns to this day, and is confirmed in the liner notes - assuming those can be trusted^. (Prior to this I had tentatively put Vida on the left and Evans next to B. - but that was at least partly down to misreading the notes^^.)

***

Naturally, Comp. 188 is a first species theme, so it consists of evenly spaced eighth notes, but alternating staccato with legato attacks. This will be so familiar to anyone reading now that it's worth adding once again: those hearing this performed will have been experiencing something entirely new. Dahinden is the first to break out and essay some solo flights, before the four-minute mark, but quickly enough his playing melds back into the group theme; again, this is completely normal practice (as we now know). Norton, meanwhile, sounds so perfectly adapted to the demands of this music that I am prompted all over again to consider him a natural fit for it: he effortlessly finds numerous ways to fragment the rhythmic pulse, without drawing undue attention to himself. By 06:45, as noted above, B. has peeled away on sopranino, with Norton on hand percussion, Evans and Reichman picking up the pulse. This is also round about the time when Dahinden's fluency on trombone strikes me so forcefully - not for the first time - that it occurs to his command of the instrument is basically as good as any of B's previous collaborators^^^. After a near-pause, the tempo is increased by a few beats and with eleven minutes on the clock we are refreshed and off again.

The GTM compositions are like miniature universes, and represent a new level of complexity and ambition compared with much of the work B. had conceived up until then. Much of it, not all of it - it's all too easy for even serious listeners to fall into the trap of thinking of the four books for the creative ensemble as somehow representing the totality of the composer's work~ - but this new strategy allows for a single composition to contain as much potential for growth and movement as any of the collage sets, and the overall complexity of the musical ideas is such that before the first twenty minutes are up, it's already too hard to trace all of the threads. For anyone present who was really paying close attention, the music must have been almost intolerably exciting, limitlessly full of creative energy and fulfilled possibility, any individual cross-section uniquely complex and varied despite the continuous basic pulse...

... the flow of which increasingly comes to resemble one of B's beloved trains, and although the regular appearance of locomotives themselves in the graphic titles for the GTM pieces is some way in the future at this point~~, the idea of fast vehicular motion has already very much been introduced: indeed, the graphic title for 188 itself includes a racing car. But - I'm not quite sure why this had not really occurred to me before - in listening to this particular recording, I suddenly found myself thinking of a moving train. (Previously I have tended to think in terms of a giant clock, ticking away - an image I mentioned way back when, albeit in the context of the (second part of the) 40f theme, which itself looks forward to GTM, first species - although I have had all sorts of exotic visions presented to me when listening to this stuff, especially in its later forms.) Extending this metaphor to its logical conclusion, the compositional territory becomes a sort of dreamscape which is traversed by the train, carrying the listener along from one gorgeous scene to the next, retaining its familiar identity even while the world outside is essentially unpredictable. With Norton on brushes around 13:30, I found the image of a steam train puffing away to be irresistible; much later on, somewhere around the 39-minute mark, he varies his cymbal attacks to change the character of the music utterly, in a way which instantly recalls the work of Ed Blackwell on the 1981 reading of Comp. 34a - yet another piece which can't help evoking the image of a moving train. Note how these impressions keep referring back to themselves, the recorded canon endlessly reminding the attentive listener of its other constituent parts...

Another rather inevitable feature of this sort of work is that different players will phase in and out of focus over time: Hwang, for example, plays electric violin here, but this not as obvious as one might suppose, though it leaps out on occasion (e.g. 14:15); Fonda also becomes most salient when playing arco (e.g. from 16:00), without which his sound can easily vanish into the mix. This effect is also true of the leader, whose presence is not continuously evident; and indeed with two other versatile woodwind players in the ensemble, this both adds to the sonic possibilities and reduces some of the pressure on B., who no longer has to do it all himself - though, naturally, he still very much makes his presence felt from time to time with some typically expressive bursts at regular intervals.

Like any moving vehicle, this train requires some refuelling stops, and the shifting tempo evident throughout this reading is another key feature, not of this piece so much as of GTM itself, it seems (a similar effect was noted in Istanbul). Here, at 24:45 (with B. on contrabass clarinet), the pulse has stopped entirely, but there is actually still plenty happening; as the theme kicks in again and the journey proceeds, this feels so natural and familiar that one could easily not even notice that we have begun travelling again. From around 29 minutes, the pulse slooooows right down, then gradually speeds up again. This playing around with the sense of time already looks to be an essential element of what the composer wanted to do with this new music - again, to refer back to the canon we can highlight the way in which Comp. 115, the "accordion sound space context"~~~, foreshadows this. Finally, this is not one of the pieces which ends "up in the air" to create an illusion of unceasing motion; it does actually end definitively, although any applause which may have followed that has been edited out on this occasion.

***

As usual with this sort of thing, I had no desire to break the whole thing down, minute by minute - rather I just wanted to comment on some details which struck me, and to give a sense of the development of what was still very much new music at the time of its performance. Over the course of three albums, the composer has shown us a whole new world of music possibilities, and has already very much set about exploring them. Again, this was one of two such performances on the day - the other will be covered separately.

As much as I enjoyed listening to this, I found writing about it to be a form of slow torture, and for whatever reason this post felt as if it was dragged out of me, one sentence at a time. If reading it proves boring - as it well may - please don't let that put you off listening to the music, which is of course available on Bandcamp: that should prove a great deal more entertaining than my tedious ramblings. 

* I can't really take this as being "proof" of anything, since it's not authenticated from another source, but I do have a whole clutch of live bootleg recordings purporting to represent the 1996 iteration of the same "event". The venue is still the same, although the dates are now from June, not November - around B's birthday, in other words - and the concerts ranged from GTM explorations and creative orchestra dates to solo concerts, with a pair of "bebop quintets" somewhere in between. (The recordings were all passed on to me by (Golden-Age blogger) Volkan T., years ago - I can't remember whether any supporting evidence accompanied them to confirm the venue, the occasion or any dates, etc, but I think not.) Come to think of it, the presence in the discography of Tentet (New York) 1996, also recorded at the Knitting Factory in June 1996, but under a different banner (Restructures cites the "What Is Jazz?" Festival), casts some serious doubt on whether there even was a Tri-Centric Festival in June 1996... much as I might like to be, I am very probably not the man to figure all this stuff out. [I'm not sure Volkan is either, since I don't think he ever suggested that he was present in New York at the time these recordings were made... some time I shall have to go through these, and try and work out what we're actually dealing with, even if I am not in a position to date them accurately.]

** Later protocol suggests that this second group would now be classified as a 10+1tet, but B. had not yet started using such terms...

*** Restructures listed both BH006 and BH007 as being released in 1997, which is backed up by listings on Discogs; the individual pages for each album on Bandcamp state the release date for both as being 1st January 1996, which is technically possible - just about - but extremely unlikely. (I've grumbled on before about inaccuracies with this sort of thing, and indeed about the perversity of TCF's apparent fixation on release dates in general; I'm not about to start all that up again here.)

# Yes, yes. I am British, and that's how we write dates over here... deal with it ;-)

## It's only just really occurred to me that exactly the same was true of the original Braxtothon... I'm not quite sure why it feels so important to keep stressing it now, in looking at GTM specifically. 

### As far as I can tell, both players first appear in the official sessionography in 1994 - on November 18th, to be precise, as part of (what must have been) a showcase for some of B's most promising students: this was recently discussed - well, part of it was - in my analysis of Comp. 136. (The relevant portion of that rather long post is to be found under point 5.) Evans and Vida, by coincidence or not, appeared on that first occasion in a trio improvisation with B. - just the three horns, no accompaniment. [Fonda was already playing with B. regularly by this point, and Reichman had played with him in a duo setting, also discussed in that same recent post (v. point 4). I don't think any of the others had played with him before - including Norton; or, if they had, we don't have an official record of it. All of these players would of course go on to be significant collaborators, with the exception of pianist Jeanne Chloe and percussionist Eric Rosenthal.]

^ Actually, one is better off never assuming that the instrumentation details on these things are completely accurate... but in the case of Vida and bari sax, we can be fairly sure it's correct.

^^ It wasn't so much misreading the notes as misremembering them: both Vida and Evans play (varieties of) flute, but in my head I had only Evans playing one. (To make matters worse, the section which led me to mislocate the two players occurs from around 16:30, and actually has both of them on flutes, with B. on clarinet; I'd somehow managed to hear the second horn next to the leader as another clarinet, and only realised my mistake when I went back rather later and played that passage again. In the interests of full disclosure, I may as well add that there were presumably opportunities before the 47th minute to identify Evans on bass clarinet, in which case I must have somehow missed that entirely. Something more notable must have been happening elsewhere at that point..!)

^^^ I wasn't consciously aware until afterwards, but the liner notes (by Francis Davis) for this release quote the maestro as having dubbed RD “the first new trombonist I’ve heard who is technically and conceptually on a level with George Lewis.” Davis says that "anyone hearing the Swiss trombonist... for the first time is in for a real treat" - and also singles out Norton, comparing him to both of the percussionists on Dolphy's evergreen Out to Lunch in his feel for colour and texture.

~ Very early on, B. was already conceiving works on a grand scale, something which must not be forgotten in any discussion of the way his composition has developed over the years. (Anyone who is tempted - as some have been - to think of his work in the seventies as being "more traditionally free jazz" than later work must immediately be reminded of the existence of Comp. 82 (For Four Orchestras) before they get carried away...)

~~ Many of the GTM works with opus numbers in the 2xx or 3xx ranges have locomotives - sometimes multiple locomotives - included in their graphic titles - and later on the composer would often refer to the scores themselves in terms of train tracks and junctions, etc.

~~~ - as the work is described by the composer, in the notes on the back cover of Six Compositions (Quartet) 1984.

Bet you a tenor

 

(not quite as) rare as rocking-horse shit

1. McClintic Sphere has been busy behind the scenes, bringing stuff to my attention that he knows I won't have seen for myself... last weekend apparently saw a little flurry of activity around a post on Facebook by trombonist Jeb Bishop, linking to a live video of a 1979 trio performance by B. in which he could be seen playing a larger-than-usual saxophone. His question was: is this a C-melody, or a tenor? and the weekend then saw several luminaries from the creative music scene offer their opinions on this.

The trouble I had, when I set about writing this up, was that the video itself (a link to which McC had included in his email) had "gone private" at some point within the last few days. Luckily, it has already been reuploaded to Youtube and - as you can from the screenshot above - you can scoot along to the 22:30 mark and see for yourself what the master reed-wrangler was dealing with.

Opinions were offered, I'm told, by (drummer/ leader/ composer/ etc) Tyshawn Sorey, (guitarist/ bassist/ leader/ etc) Joe Morris and (all-round EFI reed terrorist) Mats Gustafsson; Sorey asserted that B. played tenor on some of the legendary '85 quartet tour, while Morris confirmed that B. owns a C-melody and played it on their duo record*. It was left to Gustafsson to make the definitive taxonomical identification: he said that B. is definitely seen playing tenor at the relevant point in the video. He would know, so who are we to argue? 

The performance in question showcases the prototypical version of what is now known as Comp. 94. By 1980, the role played here by Richard Teitelbaum had been taken over by guitarist James Emery, but the liner notes for the album which was eventually released on Leo Records explain the genesis of the piece, unveiled in its unfinished form - the composer was still writing part of it at the time - on the '79 European tour with the line-up which can be seen in the video. This is confirmed in B's Composition Notes. (Some previous thoughts on this piece were sketched out last April.) Again, when I first came to write this up here I ran into difficulties straight away, because a bootleg live recording I have which purports to be from Berlin, on 1st November 1979, with this same trio - and which I already had ready to hand, precisely because Comp. 94 is in my (rather disorganised) "in-tray" for detailed research relating to the album Ensemble Montaigne (Bau 4) 2013 - appeared at first to be a completely different performance. Happily, that turned out not to be the case: the audio boot is simply incomplete, starting in medias res. If anyone reading this has the same "Berlin 1979 trio" recording in their possession, with a running time of 48 minutes: rest assured that this is indeed the same performance which you can see in this excellent video - but with the first six minutes (or so) missing**. (Limitations of old audio-tape, and all that: better to miss the beginning, or the ending? - answers on a postcard, etc)

As for the instrument seen above, confirmed by MG as a tenor: as far as I am concerned this marks the first positive ID of a tenor sax on one of B's performances that I have come across. Yes, there have been rumours over the years - though not lately - of B. playing tenor, but I have tended to regard these as possibly spurious (at least until such time as they could be confirmed). During the seventies and early eighties, various recordings credited B. with soprano sax, too; but this was generally sopranino, misattributed, and this principle - avoiding the more usual choice in favour of something less obvious - is entirely in keeping with B's aesthetic. Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill have been known to play tenor; B. tended to stick to alto. Mitchell plays bass sax fairly often; B. generally plays contrabass. And so on: of course, we know that he can play all the saxophones and clarinets, among other instruments; but in the usual run of things, we hear him playing the following: alto, sopranino and contrabass sax, soprano clarinet, contrabass clarinet(s***), flute. Oh, and piano of course... But as regards other single-reed instruments, he may bring these out on special occasions#, but I've tended to think that people are mistaken if they credit him with tenor - or soprano - sax in particular. Until now..! As always, I am happy to be proven wrong on this point##.

2. The same YT account, in the name of Jay Korber, has just posted another video which will be of definite interest to anyone reading this, again filmed in Berlin: a forty-four minute performance of the '76 quartet, featuring some of the material included on Arista's Montreux / Berlin Concerts as well as two pieces which were excluded from that album - Comps. 40f and 23g; what we don't have here, but might have expected, is Comp. 6c. This was presumably played as an encore, then edited in out-of-sequence by Michael Cuscuna: we have already established that extensive editing and studio trickery was employed in producing the Montreux parts of that famous double-LP, so it need come as no surprise that something similar was done for the Berlin segment.

These look like terrific videos, and the poster has done us all a valuable service in making them available - there are plenty more concerts on that channel, and hopefully it will not be deemed necessary to take any of them down. (At some point I may get round to looking at the Berlin quartet in more detail... not now!)

3. I finally caved in and ordered a copy of Four Compositions (Wesleyan) 2013 from a seller based in the Czech Republic: shipping costs were not cheap for this, and there is also the pesky matter of added "Brexit tax" these days, but the total amount was still somewhat less than the price quoted by any UK sellers that I could find. It's eleven months to the day since I first posted about this box set, and more than ten months since I wrote in some detail about various unanswered questions which might possibly be resolved by it, once I could get hold of it; I was fed up of waiting - and besides, I didn't go to London in the end, did I? What I saved there might as well be spent here.... is what I finally persuaded myself. 

The package has not yet arrived, though the seller assures me it doesn't usually take very long (fingers crossed). More news as and when - including, at some point in the not-too-distant future, a report on the actual, physical box set...

4. It wasn't an overly onerous task, in the event, to establish for certain that the second primary territory played in Prague by the '84 quartet is, indeed, Comp. 110a - I'm still not too sure why there was ever any doubt about this, but it came up in my recent listening to the Black Saint remasters box, and the Prag album is not the easiest to navigate, so it was just a matter of setting aside some time to play the whole thing. In the event, rather than put that off indefinitely, I dug out my CD-R copy### and played it the next day after I posted about this; you do have to wait quite a while, for the several sections of Comp. 105a to come and go, and for a transition phase to pass too... but there it eventually is, confirming the accuracy of the graphic title reproduced on the album cover, and easily identified by comparison with the studio version^. So, that's one less thing for me to fuss over and wonder about ;-)

* This was of course a 4-disc box set, and it's pretty normal for B. to bring his full arsenal to this sort of date (cf. a similar affair with Gerry Hemingway, etc)

** I'm glad I was able to confirm this so quickly, because it's precisely the sort of unresolved question which would nag away at me otherwise. The (unfinished) Anthony Braxton Project lists the existence of the tape, and gives Berlin as the venue and the date, as well as confirming Comp. 94; but of course this might or might not have been the exact same recording which I had amongst my CD-Rs, claiming to be that concert. When I put the CD on last night to try and confirm a match with the video, I was disgusted... but looking at the different running times of the audio boot and the video, and coming back to the latter this morning, I figured out pretty swiftly what had very probably happened, and that turned out to be correct. (As for 94 itself: there are several pieces of research to be done on this before I am through with it, it's just a matter of bucking down and doing it...)

*** What we casually refer to as a contrabass clarinet actually encompasses several different instruments from the extensive clarinet family, although I believe I am right in saying that of all the possible variants, B. generally plays one in particular (the paperclip version - generally referred to around these parts as the seamonster). 

# C-melody sax is not an especially rare bird among B's recorded discography; of course, for a while he also favoured the (very rare) F-alto, which I saw him play at the Royal Festival Hall in 2004, but which was (alas) stolen to order on a subsequent trip to Europe - this was described, I remember, by THB in an online post somewhere, although I can no longer remember where I read it. [I believe the trip was the one they made for the Glasgow trio concert, but don't quote me on that.] Far be it from me to wish any harm on the thief, or on the person who ordered it stolen. They both have to live with themselves.

## The Restructures entry for the Composition No. 94 album did list B. as having played tenor, but like other such listings, I was never sure about it. Now that we have one confirmed appearance, we can safely assume that there will have been others... although, as regards the '85 tour, Sorey's assertion is a bit of an odd one. He himself was five years old at the time; where exactly is he getting his information from? -!

### One of two people sent this to me years ago, and I can't exactly remember who it was - thanks anyway! The typed track listing which came with it repeats the same "Comp. 110" entry from Restructures, but was probably taken from there anyway (?) - the official release looks pretty clearly to refer only to "110a", but I don't have this yet. (Working on rectifying that, at time of writing...)

^ The notes for the '84 studio date are very much concerned with pulse tracks, which were the latest thing in Braxtonworld at the time, and which were not confined to the 108 series. (No real detail is given as to why the 110s themselves were grouped together; 110c and 110d are both stated to be simple ballad structures which B. wrote for his wife, not intended to be played with pulse tracks, while (as already noted) 110b is on the missing list. I have not yet found time to consult the Composition Notes on this matter, though.)

Triumphant (overdue) debut

 

(tongue slightly in cheek here..!)

In the end, we booked a week away around the time of the BraxProm - as it shall henceforth be known (around here, anyway...) - on the understanding that if I did change my mind and want to attend in person after all, I would still be able to get to London from where we were staying. This would have been possible, but it would also have been a considerable hassle, so ultimately I was happy to stay put - although I did have reason to regret that a bit, as it turned out.

I settled for listening to it on the radio, anyway. This post, I should point out right now, is not a detailed analysis of the eventual performance; that will (hopefully) follow in due course, once I've studied the composition notes (and done a bit more research). This, in the meantime, will simply detail my initial impressions on the night, and some general conclusions regarding the concert, together with its presentation by BBC Radio 3: there will (inevitably) be a great deal of nitpicking, so I had better say up front that I really enjoyed the Braxton set (lest the reader get so fed up with hearing me moan that this happy conclusion might fail to be reached..!).

Cynic that I am - not without good reason, I will say - I had assumed that the overall programme for this concert was assembled with Ellington first in order to draw punters in; everyone has heard of him, whereas only some serious music listeners have heard of Williams; needless to say, not nearly enough people are familiar (yet...) with the work of the maestro, so I figured that his piece had been carefully tucked away after the interval so that the less adventurous members of the audience could continue to avail themselves of the Albert Hall's hospitality, without having to venture back to their seats. In other words, my initial take on the programme as a whole was that B's name was being stuck on there as a sort of afterthought. This, I will now admit, turned out not to be accurate: credit where it's due, the organisers were actually putting the Braxton piece last as the climax of the event, not the aftershow. (Presumably they trusted Ilan Volkov; I find it hard to believe that enough people at the BBC had even heard of B. for them to have made this assessment themselves.)

I should also point out that I could have been disabused of my false assumptions before the music had even started; as it worked out, I was slightly late tuning in on the night, and the Ellington suite was already very much underway by the time I did. In the event, my opinion on the programme changed gradually during what remained of it; I later discovered that the brief introduction by R3's announcer - sorry, I don't know who that was* - made it clear that the final piece had very much been billed as the main event. I may feel justified in my cynicism, but that doesn't mean that it won't sometimes lead me to wrong conclusions! In retrospect I think I may have been unnecessarily harsh towards the Proms in general (though I am still not taking back anything I previously said about the British listening public). 

But we'll get to that**. As the concert was being broadcast live, I only patched in during "Sophisticated Lady" - and was (eventually) a bit amazed at how much I had already missed. Otherwise, my observations at the time were limited to noting that the music was "sugary and frothy", dominated by the sort of syrup-laden string arrangement which was all the rage back in the 1940s - and which I thought had died an unlamented death, decades ago. It's a sound which I associate very much with (old) Hollywood, which about says it all, and I've never been able to understand why anybody would like it; that is, I get why it is a suitable accompaniment to cinematic melodrama***, but I genuinely can't fathom why on earth anyone with any degree of discernment - regardless of individual taste - would wish to listen to it. I can barely tolerate it; and I couldn't (still can't) help thinking that Ellington - who composed more than two thousand pieces of music, and who was absolutely taken seriously by (at least some of) the classical fraternity during his own lifetime - was desperately poorly served by this quarter of an hour of disposable slush. Once I realised what I was dealing with here, I was pretty glad to have arrived late; as it was, I still had to sit through "Caravan" - a piece which continues to intimidate the hell out of student drummers, here reduced to another smoothed-over, saccharine period piece, on which one can almost hear the sleigh bells. Having survived this, just about, I concluded now that poor Ellington's name had only been stuck on the list in order to draw in some unsuspecting punters - and that the main event, presumably, was coming up next. (I definitely couldn't understand how any of the audience would cope with what was to come after the interval, at this point.)

So, part two of the programme was of course the UK premiere of the Zodiac Suite by Mary Lou Williams - and while the orchestra was getting set up for that, R3 cut to a short link including a few thoughts from the pianist on the night (and "replacement cover star"), Aaron Diehl, whose trio was with him for this next piece. We were told by the announcer that MLW tried to "experiment to keep up with what's going on... I even keep a little ahead of them, like a mirror that shows what is going to happen next"; but this work, composed in 1945#, kept reminding me above all of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and/or## An American in Paris (1928)###. It is true that every so often something dissonant and interesting would draw my attention, and of course it's also true that I was generally quite distracted while the music was playing, and would never claim to be in a position to express an informed opinion on it. I will listen to it again, now that such a thing is possible; for now, I am (obviously) mainly concerned with putting across my views of the concert as a friendly experiencer of B's music, and I shan't bother myself with trying to make a serious assessment of this other work. The only actual observation I made during the performance - besides noting the apparent Gershwinisms - was that those awful strings kept finding their way back into proceedings, and I could only hope that whoever was responsible for the arrangements^ in the first and second parts of the programme was not allowed anywhere the third.

I was not in the best of moods heading into the interval, then; but furiously scribbling notes kept my mind suitably focused, and although by now I was surer than ever that the persons who assembled this programme had a very peculiar concept indeed of its target audience, I was still eager to hear how the players, under the joint guidance of Volkov and of three of B's senior students, would handle what was to come.

***

The interval itself - at least as regards the radio broadcast - was largely spent giving the BBC audience a potted history of the maestro; it needn't come as any great surprise to anybody that I found a number of things to grumble about here. Before we even got to that bit, though, over the applause which followed the Zodiac Suite, the announcer speculated about whether we might have detected any influence in the foregoing music of the various movements' dedicatees: for example, "Art Tatum, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell... now there is a pair of pianists" - leaving me to wonder exactly which one of those three was being left out there^^. This isn't precisely important, no; but the problem is cumulative, and each individual piece of carelessness becomes (I think) symptomatic of a wider lack of respect.

One thing I will give them: the team made a conscious effort to pronounce the name Anthony Braxton, which (for those of you who might not be aware) is not how we generally pronounce that name, here in the UK. Regardless of whether or not the name includes an "h", it is usually pronounced Antony; but of course they would have learned that this is not the way the composer himself says his name, and they made an effort to get it right^^^. Point in the Beeb's favour... good to have that one in the bank, given what came next. 

Several musical excerpts were played in pretty quick succession, interspersed with semi-informed chitchat between the announcer and her guest for this part of the programme, Robert Worby (who - I have since learned - is the BBC's resident "New Music expert" and also a composer in his own right). The first piece, after a very basic introduction, comprised the first seventy seconds of Comp. 51 from the album Creative Orchestra Music 1976; this was announced proudly as "Cut... Number One" as if this were the actual title of the piece~. It surely wouldn't have been that difficult for someone to find out the correct opus number - if, for example, the announcer had stopped for just a second and asked herself "Wait, is that actually the title?"... - It is also a strange choice since it was announced as featuring B. on saxophone - which of course it does, but he is only one of four reedmen on that number, and cannot clearly be picked out from the mix at that point. If looking for examples of his playing, not just his writing, why would you choose a big band number?

The second piece, Comp. 6e from 3 Compositions of New Jazz, is at least given its correct numerical title (because of course that is how it's given on the CD). And, yes, we can now hear the maestro playing - very briefly: one minute or so is played, the very beginning of a twenty-minute piece of music. (Would a "proper" composer be treated in this A-B-C way..? I think not.) The chat between the pieces is no better or worse than one might expect from such an occasion, really - Worby sounds as if he is genuinely enthused by B's music and by the achievements of the AACM generally, even if he hardly comes across as an expert on this music, and the presenter tries gamely to sound excited (while pretty clearly giving the impression that she would be far more comfortable talking about Elgar or Brahms). When a snippet is played from Comp. 136 a little later on - this being Roland Dahinden's version of that piece - the announcer simply reads all four names off the back of the CD, crediting B. as having played saxophone on a trio reading which does not include him. Even a cursory look at the notes for that album would make it clear that all the tracks feature trios, not a quartet - and guess what, so would actually listening to the music which was just played. Not good :(

On the positive side: Comp. 305 - the 2002 duet between B. and THB - finally seems a good choice, even if this may be somewhat accidental (they are discussing language music at that point), and even seems inspired in retrospect (in the light of the live performance); and Worby quotes Cage~~ as saying that "simultaneity replaces harmony" in modern music, something I had not heard, but which seems powerfully emblematic, fundamentally true, of the many different compositional strategies deployed by B. in particular. [I am doubtless showing my ignorance here by admitting that I did not know this already - but I have never made any secret of my own lack of formal tuition.] On a less positive note, when Worby gushes about B's graphic scores and says that "some of the very early ones look like constructivist paintings... beautiful colours, amazing" it is really not clear whether he is actually correct (a few of the very early pieces do indeed have fully graphic scores with no notation whatsoever) or whether he is thinking of Falling River Music, in which case he is way out, by decades even - no pieces are cited in support of this assertion, so one would just have to give him the benefit of the doubt. (Or not...) One subject on which Worby does sound well informed is the matter of conducting, especially when multiple conductors are used - as will be the case here, something I did not know until that point (and which left me finally regretting not being physically present for this concert, as mentioned above). 

Several minutes were used from an interview with (bassoonist and longtime collaborator) Katherine Young, who provides (at last) some valuable insights into B's methods and working practices, and crucially cites his preference for fairly minimal rehearsal "so that everyone is slightly nervous". This ties into another of the maestro's favourite axioms, also quoted here by Young: "You haven't done your job if you haven't made a mistake"~~~. We are told - though not everyone may have been listening - that although the materials have been announced beforehand as Comp. 27 (+46, 59, 63, 147, 151, LM), there is no set plan, and in practice all the musicians - some more than others - have agency to change the direction of the music at will, when it feels appropriate to do so. This much, I hope anyone already knows if they are reading this blog; the presenter definitely did not, and does not really seem to have taken it in. But, on the subject of conducting, and agency: no mention was made on the night of the composer's own absence, as if he had never intended to be there - and his role (for he would clearly have been one of the three conductors, with Volkov and James Fei) appears to have been split: Ingrid Laubrock has taken his place on reeds, but Young herself is the third conductor. One is left to infer that this must have been decided at rather short notice, and to wonder how nerve-racking that may have been for the bassoonist, who (by her own admission) had already been hard at work, woodshedding some of the difficult notated parts, for weeks beforehand.

***

And after all that preamble, all that frustration, we finally arrive at the promised music - and, delightfully, it is quite sublime.

I had managed to finish my frantic scribbling just as the presenter finished talking, so was able to put the pen down for a minute, sit tight and focus in closely on the actual music. Beginning with very quiet and restrained sounds, the piece opens up fairly quickly - at least, this is how I remember it (again, my self-dictated remit here is to cover my impressions on the night, so I deliberately have not replayed the concert yet). The first note which I made here concerns those pesky strings again: as if they are stuck in the mode which was required of them for the two suites before the interval, they still somehow manage to sound a bit syrupy to my ears - but, thank goodness, this doesn't last long. After the opening couple of minutes, Fei and Laubrock cut loose, and this in turn unlocks some far more ominous, dense and chewy string textures. From here, the music really takes off, with the three experts in B's system showing the way to the others. Tasked now with playing far less orthodox sounds, the strings are finally freed from their previous confines. 

I noted that Fei is the perfect "stand-in" for this sort of occasion, so intimately involved with B's musical systems for such a long time now that he lives and breathes them, surely more knowledgeable about this stuff than any other musician bar THB; with B. himself absent, Volkov could not have anyone better to help him guide the less experienced players@ through the constantly-shifting territory. Long, sustained tones indicate that language type 1 has been cued up (by whoever was in charge of that; this was when it really hit me how much I was still missing, by not being present in the audience); a miniature crescendo develops, with the strings very much playing their part, but for all the general excellence on display, there is no doubt about the star players, all three of whom are on top form. By this point I was starting to feel some real excitement, even while concentrating intensely: complex and ambitious though it is, the music has real cohesion to it, and the performance is turning out far better than I dared hope.

Somewhere around the halfway mark, I hear elements from Comp. 59, the first of the supplementary materials I have been able to recognise: the call-and-response effect between woodwinds and orchestra (first giddily described all those years ago) is instantly identifiable. But I will also say right here that I did not manage to spot any others on the night; we'll see what emerges from repeat listens..! I was naggingly reminded soon after this of something I am sure I have heard just recently, by a simple two-note motif, repeated a few times like a bird's call; I couldn't put my finger on it and I'm pretty sure it is nothing to do with any of the other pieces listed.

I made hardly any other specific notes from this point on, focused as I was on just enjoying the music. I did find myself noting that although the audience was being worked far, far harder here than they were before the interval, I hoped that they were also feeling suitably rewarded, since this level of musical creativity and technical invention is not something they will stumble across every day. The character of the applause which followed the decay into silence of the last notes would suggest that my hopes were well grounded: even if there seemed to be a slightly stunned quality to some of the reactions, there were real whoops and cheers in there too, something which the pre-interval pieces entirely failed to elicit, and the applause continued for several minutes as the players and conductor presumably took their various bows. In the end, I myself felt a mixture of ecstatic pleasure at the performance, and mild exasperation at the extent to which my own ingrained cynicism had led me to set my expectations low enough that I hadn't prioritised attending the concert, especially once I knew that B. would not be present. Even without him, this would have been a valuable opportunity to see the tricentric model in action, with the assembled players responding to the three conductors. It wasn't to be; but who knows, now that it's been established that music like this can be played for an appreciative audience in this country, might we reasonably expect more of it in the future..?

***

Once I had access to the full broadcast, I realised that what only gradually dawned on me during the evening - the fact that the Braxton piece did actually have top billing on the programme - was flagged up right at the outset by the presenter. Some of my hardened cynicism was unwarranted; the Proms are in fact used as a vehicle for introducing British concertgoers to sounds they may not have heard before, and indeed this wasn't the first work by an AACM alumnus to be unleashed under the auspices of the festival: a piece by George Lewis has already been played, apparently (though I only learned this during the course of the night, and I don't know which piece was played, or when). The Proms as a whole - unlike the (in)famous

Last Night, in which the likes of "Land of Hope and Glory" still get played, and everyone pretends there is still such a thing as the British Empire - are probably rather more forward-facing and open-minded than I'd assumed. (And it was an assumption: clearly, I don't normally follow this sort of thing at all.) 

Of course, this doesn't mean that the organisers are always able to grasp that for which they have reached: the existence of this desperately lopsided programme - put together under the aegis of American experimentalism with roots in jazz - is proof of that. Once the enthusiasm which greeted the final piece has been registered, the subdued applause which followed the Ellington suite - with its stale and outdated arrangements - can be heard for what it was: polite but unimpressed, even bemused, since anyone who was actually looking forward to the evening's climax must surely have wondered at the bland fare they were fed as an appetiser. The second piece at least makes some sort of sense on this kind of bill; but if they wanted to include some Ellington - and why not? - then surely some fresher and more contemporary treatments could have been provided. But that would not have been thought necessary. The rather lazy or half-hearted attitude behind this approach - we'll do it, but we don't have to worry about whether or not we are doing it "properly", because of course it's not real music anyway@@ - very much spills over into the presentation of the live broadcast: the announcer conveys some sense of enthusiasm for the "new sounds" which are going to be heard, but of course she has not bothered to do any homework in preparation for it, leaving that to Robert Worby, who can be expected to have done enough for both of them. 

It seems to be my fate that I am always the "ungrateful voice" on these occasions, but I have set myself the task of speaking as I find, reporting faithfully back on the conclusions I have reached through careful listening and reflection. What I will say by way of summary: I learned nothing new from this about the BBC or those who represent it, or (for that matter) about the British approach to the creative arts, generally; I will stray towards optimism in positing that when the presenter spoke afterwards of "this major American composer", she meant it, perhaps newly won over by what she had heard. Perhaps she will now be inspired to explore further; perhaps not. But the event took place and was well received, and I will take that as a win for friendly experiencers everywhere. The music itself, ultimately, is what is most important in all of this.

* If the presenter's name is given anywhere during the broadcast, I haven't caught it. I also don't listen enough to Radio 3 to recognise her by voice alone; basically, I had not listened to Radio 3 at all for more than ten years, since I stopped listening to their occasional jazz programmes; just recently we got a new car and I have added the channel to the shortlist of stations which I flick through (and usually end up turning off). Years of getting into complex and ambitious music seems to have left me incapable of standing most of what gets played on a "classical" station these days, especially now that R3 itself has gone the way of Classic FM and just plays "hits", not full works...

** After the concert was broadcast, I was sorted out with a recording of it by McC. (Thanks are also due to the artist formerly known as King Kennytone...) Besides the obvious advantage of being able to listen again, this has also allowed me to listen to the very beginning of the broadcast for the first time.

*** Mrs C. wandered in while I was swearing and expostulating about "awful and revolting strings", and asked; what is wrong with them? "They make me think of a nice old black and white movie... I like it!" Little did she realise that she was perfectly illustrating my point XD

# At least, that's the date given on the concert's webpage, and it's backed up by Wikipedia - but we are told that there were multiple versions of the work. It looks to me as if 1945 represents the date of eventual completion, and the version used for this concert would seem to have been the last one.

## I haven't heard either of these works in a very long time - certainly not since I took a serious interest in music. Whether I was reminded of one or the other, or both, I couldn't say - and it took me a few minutes to identify the "bell which was being rung".

### I was unsure enough about the dates here that at first I couldn't even be certain whether MLW's piece was influenced by Gershwin, or whether it was perhaps the other way round - this would hardly have been an isolated example of a black artist having their ideas plundered by a white follower. I was pretty sure the Gershwin works dated from the 1930s or earlier, but this is not exactly my speciality, and one of the drawbacks of the place we stayed last week - out in the countryside - was feeble and unreliable internet. (Luckily I was able to hear the radio broadcast through the TV, otherwise I would have been unable to listen on the night at all.) In the end, I had to wait until we returned home to check these little details. 

^ It was mentioned fleetingly in the broadcast that the Ellington pieces were arranged by Morton Gould. This name meant nothing to me, so I looked him up: he died in 1996, which makes these particular arrangements (realistically) at least thirty years old, probably more. He would appear to have been respected in his field(s), but as far as I am concerned the string arranging in particular on these numbers is shocking, reducing the work of a significant composer to the status of a commercial. The announcer gushed brightly about the "Hollywood sparkle" which Gould's arrangements lent to the music: from my point of view that is enough of a condemnation that I don't need to provide any gloss on it. What I do wonder is why nobody in the orchestra - or Volkov himself - objected to playing this drivel. Presumably the timeframe and budget did not permit anything more up-to-date; but it left me thinking that Ellington's legacy would have been better served by not playing the pieces at all. As for Zodiac Suite, presumably the arrangements were those finalised by Williams herself, in conjunction with Milt Orent.

^^ One might assume Powell, since even the most blinkered of classical snobs must surely have heard of the other two. But I have heard enough Radio 3 just recently to know that Powell's is very much a known name to the channel, though I am not quite sure how or why. Has enough time lapsed since Tatum was active that people have forgotten who he was? It's an odd one, since "pair" is a highly specific term and doesn't admit any leeway.

^^^ This did actually leave me thinking that perhaps *I* need to make more effort to get it right. I have always pronounced the name Antony, despite knowing that B. says it differently. But we Brits also pronounce the name Cecil as Sessil, and that doesn't stop me referring to Seasil Taylor... hmmm...

~ All this means is that whoever sourced the excerpts was using the CD reissue, which itself simply reproduces the original packaging and therefore does not update the titles (I have already posted about this). It still sounds a bit ridiculous to announce "Cut Number One" as if it were somehow the name of the piece.

~~ Worby's biog on the BBC website informs me that he actually worked with Cage himself, back in the laye eighties. So he can be assumed to know a thing or two about modern music... I didn't know until the other night about his radio show on Saturday nights, but I may try and listen to some of it on the iPlayer. (I 

am still pretty uninformed about a lot of contemporary notated music.)

~~~ The presenter, who was talking to Young - at some time before the night of the concert, obviously - completely misses the point of this dictum, understanding her to have said that she had been practising the parts with mistakes worked in. If you stop and think about that, it tells you quite a lot about the causal carelessness of the presenter's attitude, and by extension that of the channel in general. How could that have meant that?

@ All I mean by that is: less experienced at playing B's music. I understand that Volkov has been working with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra for some time already, and they can all be assumed to be players who are used to interpreting and performing "new music" -  I don't know why I'm repeating that term... I don't like it, born as it is of the entrenched prejudice that only "classical" music is music at all. Speaking of which...

@@ I don't think this has anything to do with B's ethnicity, mind you, or even really to do with his nationality (although that is more plausible, as I will explain presently); it's just derived from the (still) prevalent opinion among "classical types" that nothing without a pretty tune to it is music at all (given that if it's not played by conservatory-trained musicians in evening dress, it can't be considered music in the first place - so when Beecham said that "great music is that which enters the ear with facility", this could not be carried forward to apply to Britney Spears or Ed Sheeran: pop doesn't count, and neither does jazz. Don't get me started on Beecham). Some of this is doubtless rooted in the traditional view of music as an application of mathematics (of course, none of these people would ever stop to consider that someone like B. might be working from much the same type of basis, only wider in scope). Some of it is just inherited prejudice, which I have seen first-hand on more than one occasion. As for the idea that American music (art, literature...) might be taken less seriously: it may surprise some readers to learn that there are still people over here who think that way, even now. Naturally, this is itself based on the false assumption that the British are arbiters of artistic taste and excellence, an idea which doesn't really hold up to even fairly casual scrutiny.