Where it all began

 

Muhal Richard Abrams  Levels and Degrees of Light

(Delmark, 1968)

Every Braxton fan worth their salt knows this one, even if it's only by name: this was of course B's first recording credit*. To be precise, his first two recording sessions - both in 1967, but more than six months apart - saw him working on material destined for release on this album, the following year. I myself had not heard it for years until very recently, when an opportunity arose to acquire a copy on CD.

Naturally, as a specialist, I have a very particular and specific interest in this album - although I am to some extent interested in everything to do with the AACM and its members (and have considerable regard for Abrams as a musician and composer, and enormous respect for him as a figurehead). I had a serviceable rip of the album already; the only reason I felt a need to get hold of the CD was because of B's involvement. But there are two aspects of the recording with which I am concerned here, and the second of these has nothing to do with the maestro, as it happens...

First exposure

Limitations of the LP format meant that the running order of the original album was never really in doubt: the two shorter (though hardly short: 10:30, 9:43) tracks made up side one of the vinyl and the remaining track - a twenty-three minute epic entitled "The Bird Song" - comprised all of side two. The CD reissue changed this (among other things, as we will see): for reasons not divulged**, the opening title track (which does not feature B.***) remains in place, with the longest piece now moved into the middle of the set. From the entirely unilateral perspective of the Braxton fanatic, this means that the altoist's first entries are now those which he himself first recorded: "The Bird Song" was recorded at the earlier session, on 7th June. This affords a rather pleasing sense of concord to those of us who approach the album from this angle.

B. had joined Abrams' Experimental Band in 1966, not long after being discharged from the army, and took part in his first recording session just after his twenty-second birthday. The first sounds on "The Bird Song" - which are altissimo squeals - could easily be mistaken for B's own first entries, but they aren't: by listening very carefully indeed, we can discern that we are actually hearing Abrams himself (again on clarinet) in the left channel, and Jenkins in the right, replicating each other's attacks so closely that it's only occasionally they can be told apart. This opening lasts for around seventy seconds, and overlaps slightly with the poetic recitation of David Moore (which above all proved the lightning rod for the controversy discussed below). This lasts a full five minutes and is in turn replaced by a section for the two bassists - Charles Clark, who plays on the whole album and Jones, who appears only on this track - who are eventually joined by Jenkins, and by drummer Thurman Barker (mainly using cymbals to great effect). At 12:53, Abrams enters on piano for the first time, followed immediately by B. (left of centre in the stereo image). 

In a manner which would soon become very familiar, B. opens with some melodic phrases which quickly give way to the fast runs, angular phrasings and abrupt changes of direction and dynamics which would become (some of) his hallmarks. Although this has all the characteristics of a solo, it sees an increased intensity in the musical backing as well, which is only ramped up still further at 14:05 with the introduction (right channel) of Kalaparush(a) Maurice McIntyre on tenor, and for the next few minutes the two saxmen and the pianist-leader batter away at the listener, Ascension-style, over a furious layer of bass(es), drums and percussion which must have been too much for some listeners at the time; the modern ear, if trained in free jazz listening, can fairly easily separate all the individual strands in what would sound to a novice like a barrage of noise  - but note, this separation is probably only possible with the recording in its present form (see below). By 16:55, the two reedmen have reached the point of outright shrieks on their respective axes and such is the level of sustained intensity, Abrams himself disappeared from the mix some time ago without this really being noticed. There are moments when the alto and tenor could conceivably be working from the same written material, rather than just "free blowing", but with the dynamics pushed this far, it almost doesn't matter anyway. Just after 19:30, both saxophones sign off and lay out, signalling a notable drop in the volume level, though the bowed basses continue scrabbling away for all they're worth, over washes of cymbals, bells - and the birdlike tweets and whistles which have been present (though not always clearly audible) almost throughout. For the best part of seven minutes, B. has torn the place up, demonstrating at this germinal stage the energy, technique and stamina which would remain among his trademarks more than half a century later.

The third track on the CD, "My Thoughts Are My Future - Now and Forever", was recorded at the later session and is in a somewhat similar vein, but less frenetic, and the opening couple of minutes are dominated by the leader on piano. When B. enters this time at 2:10, he can be heard much more clearly, and within a few seconds his playing could never be mistaken for anyone else. Pretty much everything we might expect to hear from him is on full display at this point; again, his solo here rises to a pitch of harsh overblowing briefly, but in the much shorter time available to him here, he utilises a fairly wide range of tonal and timbral effects, even (fleetingly) some quite subtle ones, as well as displaying his highly individual approach to vertical and horizontal line-construction. By 3:55 he is all done, giving way to a drum solo; the next time we hear a saxophone entry, just before 5:00, it's again Kalaparusha. The whole band joins in from around the eight-minute mark, but with B. sharing the left channel with soprano Penelope Taylor, it is far from simple to pick him out, and really we have already heard all we are going to hear from him at this point. 

Given less than nine minutes of airtime across two of the album 's cuts, B. nevertheless makes his mark strongly on this date...

The Controversy

At the back of my mind, I knew there was something problematic about the recording process with this one, and had placed a mental bookmark - years ago - to check carefully before purchasing any format of the album. I had forgotten the details (perhaps not surprisingly). I vaguely remembered that the CD was regarded as questionable; trying to retrieve this from memory unaided, I came up with the idea that perhaps it added heavy reverb, not present in the original. As it turned out, I had it arse-backwards: the CD is regarded as questionable, yes, but that is because it removed that same effect. The original vinyl issue - Lewis tells us - "was awash in dense studio reverberation"#. This did not go down well with most critics, for a variety of reasons: the black writer## Ron Welburn, who strongly associated the use of technological studio trickery with rock music (which itself was "not a real music", as he maintained), distrusted this decision on basic principle, while several others - mainly but not exclusively white### - thought it gimmicky, tacky, confusing or just badly done.

I have never heard the original version of this recording - and when I first hunted about online for an answer as to what was "wrong" with the CD reissue (before I remembered to consult Lewis on the subject), I found some quite detailed discussions of the album which were also based exclusively on the later version produced from a digital master. My own rip of the album was from a CD; back in the Golden Age of Music Blogging it was very common for older recordings to circulate in the form of digitised vinyl rips, but that does not seem to have applied to this album. Some commenters on Youtube have weighed in, stating that they prefer the original vinyl - but previous would-be analysts have been forced to speculate, as I am. I must admit that it would be very interesting to hear the older version; all three tracks featured heavy reverb, as confirmed by Lewis, with the principal focus of the controversy being the recitative introduction (David Moore reading his own poetry) to "The Bird Song", which evidently rendered incomprehensible the actual words spoken. How much of the instrumental content of the album was similarly affected, I just don't know.

Lewis observes that the "reverb issue apparently stuck in the craws of some for many years", and makes it clear that many listeners at the time simply thought that someone involved in the recording - presumably engineer Stu Black - had messed up: it did not seem to occur to anybody that the published recording could have been the result of a conscious choice by the artist/bandleader. And this is where things get rather complicated, because while Lewis himself is unequivocal in his own view - the recording sounded the way Abrams wanted it to sound in the first place, and the reissue butchered it - he does not actually cite any sources for this. It is very clearly implied that he knows he is right from his interviews with Abrams; but look through these passages and footnotes as closely as you like, and you won't find any direct quoting or citation for this opinion. It is, however, a very strongly-held opinion indeed: in managing to strip away the reverb when preparing the CD, reissue producer Steve Wagner "seriously damag(ed) the recording's musical integrity". 

I can't quite work this out, despite turning it over and over in my head before (and during) the writing of this post. Abrams was making his debut as a leader - I'm really not sure if he had recorded at all before this^ - and would not necessarily have been given complete creative control, although with a reputable label like Delmark, we would certainly like to think that he was. Most (if not all) reviewers apparently assumed that the studio effects could not have been down to him, but must have been the result of clumsy or overenthusiastic engineering. Label boss (and original producer) Robert Koester seems to have been a bit embarrassed by the whole thing, and this above all is probably what induced Delmark to have the reverb cancelled out by the remastering engineer Konrad Strauss in 1991. But Abrams was very much alive and well at the time, and could have been consulted - or could easily have voiced his dissatisfaction if he wasn't; for that matter, he was still among us when Lewis was writing his book. It should have been easy for us to have on record what the composer himself thought about all this; for some reason, Lewis neglects to tell us that, which seems a rather inexplicable oversight in what is otherwise a work of notable academic rigour^^. Lewis believes that "the electronics were part of the texture" of the recording, but despite offering this and similar statements with no qualification whatsoever, he fails to make it clear that this is anything other than just his personal inference.

In conclusion

With all (considerable) due respect to Abrams, my own interest in this album is very obviously partisan, and if removing the reverb means that I can hear clearly what might otherwise have been blurred details in B's own playing, I am all for it. Actually, from my highly personal perspective, the ideal version of the album would probably be one in which the poetry recitation remained reverb-ed beyond the point of comprehensibility, but everything else was clearly audible: it's not even a matter of my objecting to the words themselves, so much as the heavily-mannered, "I am a poet and will now read from my work of poetry" style of reading them which I struggle with. But there we are; that's just me, and besides, that version of the album will (presumably!) never exist. For the time being, I will have to take Lewis' word for it that the "wash of sound was emotionally telling and dramatic" and that "without the reverb, the drama of the work is largely lost"^^^. I find plenty of drama in the CD version, though.

One other thing occurs to me now: the two possibilities outlined above are not mutually exclusive. It is not inherently implausible that the original electronic processing could have been broadly deliberate, yet clumsily realised; the readiness of the label to "fix" the unpopular effect - and the silence with which this seems to have been met by the artist - perhaps implies that I could be onto something with that. One of these days, I may finally be in a position to make an informed comparison between the two versions of this album; in the meantime, regardless of what Lewis or any original fans might think, I am happy with the one I've got.

* As George Lewis points out, these sessions also represent the first recording credits for bassist Leonard Jones - and, more surprisingly, for Leroy Jenkins (who was already thirty-five at the time, considerably older than either Jones or Braxton). Any source material cited in this post is from Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008)

** My copy is from the first CD issue (1991), which includes only the original liner notes - nothing specific to the reissue. - And this reissue would prove controversial, as will become clear...

*** The title track here, dominated by vibes and cymbals (and wordless vocals), includes a clarinet - but this is played by Abrams himself; B. plays only alto sax on the date.

# Lewis, op. cit., ch. 5, p. 148. This is the first mention of the album, and of the sessions which generated it; the rest of the discussion occupies the following two pages, and numerous footnotes. 

## I have noticed that recent social-science texts have standardised the orthography "Black" (capitalised) and "white" - while the (superb) contemporary novelist Percival Everett tends rather to capitalise both. Personally, I am far from convinced of any grounds for capitalising either word: they are descriptive adjectives, but not designating nationality (which would drive capitalisation - in English, though not in (e.g.) French). I have never had it explained to me why this is suddenly necessary; I am open to suggestions, but until that time... 

### A.B. Spellman criticised "the engineer's sensitivity" as being unsympathetic to the work. Other views cited in this passage of the book seem to be readily attributable to white writers; the only significance of this distinction is that the sociopolitical angle was purely a black concern. Welburn apparently felt that black musicians must resist any pressure or temptation to resort to new technology - and took issue with other artists besides Abrams, notably (of course) Miles Davis - although he doesn't appear to have demanded that black artists avoid using modern recording studios altogether.

^ Lewis mentions only the three players detailed in the first footnote above; the liner notes suggest that other players may have been making their recorded debuts here too, but it's not quite spelled out, and is written in such a way as to leave doubt about the actual leader.

^^ Chapter five alone includes 157 footnotes, some of which are pretty detailed. Would one more have been too many..?

^^^ Lewis goes so far as to (mis)use the word "bowdlerization" for the way in which the CD edition was prepared. (I'll credit him with having his tongue somewhat in his cheek, but still... the reverb was not actually offensive.)

Towards greater clarity... yet another box set

 

Getting back to my continuing attempts to get to the bottom of how and when the Diamond Curtain Wall Music system became inextricably linked in the composer's mind with Falling River Music - as seems to have been the case after a certain point - I figured last year that some light could be shed on the matter by getting hold of an actual physical copy of 12 Duets (DCWM) 2012. The music in this giant box is of course available on Bandcamp, but that provides only a shot of the box cover; for whatever reason, photographic evidence of the box's contents just doesn't seem to be available online. A look at the actual liner notes, I thought, could be quite instructive. 

- Then of course the PMP box was released, and I wrote a detailed post about the various questions which might be answered there, given that the promotional material made much of FRM in its blurb. Months later, I still hadn't managed to find anyone in the UK selling a copy of this set; and eventually I gave up and ordered a copy from an official Czech retailer - only to discover that the questions remain largely unanswered. 

Back in the 2000s, DCWM was DCWM, and performances of it would list a single primary territory (assuming they listed any composition at all*). In 2007, DCWM and FRM were still considered completely separate: B's trio performance at Victoriaville that year listed only Comp. 323c, whilst a foray into something new the same year - later released in digital-only form as Quartet (FRM) 2007** - again lists only a single primary territory for each of the four performances (and does not include any live electronics). Four years later, Trio (NYC) 2011 was a reading of two territories in the 36x range - the same numerical range as the pieces interpreted under the aegis of FRM in 2007 - and although its eventual release in 2013 saw the performance described straightforwardly as a "Diamond Curtain Wall Music trio"... was it? The appearance here of a second listed territory may rather be indicative of a slightly different approach being taken.

2012 and 2013, then, saw an apparent enhancement of this same approach, although I am yet to track down any explanation of what changed, when or why (albeit the last question more or less answers itself: a hybrid strategy pushes the music in new directions, keeps it moving and growing). The PMP set may only have been released last year, but it dates from a full decade earlier, and despite no overt acknowledgement of the music it contains being a mixture of DCWM and FRM, that is pretty clearly implied (indeed it's hard to infer anything else from the liners). Not long before that, the twelve duets were recorded, and of course these performances are ostensibly "just" DCWM: it's right there in the title of the album. However, the track listing - which gives three opus numbers for each piece - rather suggests that the title may not tell the whole story. In every case, the second territory listed is a GTM composition, and the third... well, we already know that opus numbers in the 36x range could represent either DCWM or FRM.

Anyway... I managed to acquire a used(ish) copy of this album last week, and finally got to satisfy my curiosity regarding what it contains (other than the twelve discs, obviously)...

Everyone has seen the front cover, but I certainly had never seen anything else, so let's start with the back of the box***:

- Needless to say, I have no idea what the significance might be of the phrase "mix master" in this context (it seems to be a refugee from a different sort of musical experience altogether), but as you can see from the rest of the writing on there, it is definitely the real thing - nor is there any sign of this having been some sort of promo copy#. The colour-coding for the players, meanwhile, is representative of the contents: the four discs featuring Kyoko Kitamura are white, as are the stiff card folders housing them, whilst those featuring Erica Dicker are turquoise, and those featuring Katherine Young are yellow. 

On opening the box... any question about the possible use of FRM strategies here would appear to be cleared up right away, by the cover for disc one:

Painted images of this type only began appearing around the same time as the term Falling River Music was itself first being disseminated, and as far as I know they were not in use before then##. The remaining three discs comprising the first third of the album follow a similar pattern:

- although the pattern is then promptly disrupted when we move on to the second duo:

Readers with sharp eyes, and plenty of familiarity with the NBH catalogue, will no doubt recognise the cover of disc six as being the same image which adorns yet another box, Trio (New Haven) 2013###. We will have to come back to that album a bit later, fleetingly; in the meantime, as regards disc five, this image would appear less likely to represent a graphic title than it does an extract from a portion of the score. (Maybe...) In any case, discs seven and eight display a (partial) return to the previous pattern:

- and if you look very closely at the cover to disc seven, there, you will see a small detail which invites speculation that this could have been the actual graphic title for Comp. 366g - that disc's designated primary territory - although the distinct lack of alphanumeric content still suggests it probably isn't. Anyway, that's two thirds of the box accounted for, at least in terms of the front covers for those discs; discs nine and ten are along similar lines, only the image for disc ten is far closer to those used in the first group:

- whereas the final two discs have covers which recall those for discs five and six:

Some fun was had with these; as you can see from the back cover of the box, above, the graphic design is by one Ben Heller, who presumably was able to draw from a pretty large pool of images in making his choices. Now that we've seen all twelve individual covers, we can group them into four categories: discs one, two, three, four and ten feature possible graphic titles, maybe even combination graphics (representing in hybrid form the three compositions played in each case); discs five and twelve use partial schematics, either extracted from the graphic titles or from portions of the scores (NB the figures in the cover for disc twelve repeat: like I say, fun was had with these); discs six and eleven use complex shapes with simple colouring, three of these in each case (and where one of these covers was immediately recycled^); and discs seven, eight and nine feature painting only, although as noted above, the image for disc seven looks tantalisingly like something which is trying to grow into a full graphic title. (If so, we have captured it here in its "infancy".)

Of course, in between conceiving of this post and starting to write it, I'd already realised how much less clarity I am going to be able to provide here than I had originally hoped. (Sorry about that... it wasn't deliberate!) Without knowing more about who Heller was, how he was recruited and what remit he was given for the job, we cannot even safely assume - though I would really like to think we can - that each disc's cover represents material germane to its musical content. (Discs six and eleven pose the biggest doubt, for obvious reasons.) For all I know, he was simply given access to a huge variety of scores and told to use whatever he wanted; if he had no musical knowledge himself - no knowledge of B's music in particular - he could very easily have just come up with a series which pleased him, and which he hoped would please the purchaser. (But if that was the case, I would say he did at least succeed.)

Having got this far, let's have a look at some of the back covers for the discs: 

Everyone can draw their own conclusions at this point - or not..! (I have not shown all of them here, of course - some of them are more interesting visually than others. Oh, and I apologise for the poor reproduction of the bright yellow theme for discs nine-twelve.) It would seem inescapably obvious that here, the schematics used must be extracted from the actual respective scores - but since they don't all follow the same pattern, even that is not a safe inference; again, we don't know what the designer's familiarity was with the music, and should probably just not assume anything.

Liner notes which appear on the Bandcamp page for the album are reproduced here, too:

- so that, overall, the purchaser need not miss a booklet at all in this case. Sure, a few photos from the sessions would have been great - but in all honesty, such loving care went into the production of this album that it would just feel greedy to ask for anything more. The set is almost as much of a treat for the eyes as it is for the ears; just let's not break our brains over trying to unpack and make sense of all the various imagery.

Is that it, then? Did I really learn nothing new at all from this, as it turns out..? Possibly not, but - regardless of the provisos above, I cannot help but see the presence of here of some of these images as confirmation that FRM strategies were deployed alongside the stated DCWM; and I am more inclined than ever to conclude that this hybrid approach became typical, some time between 2007-8 and 2011-2. It really feels as if I missed a crucial announcement, somewhere along the line; in addition to the various albums already cited above, we might consider Quartet (Warsaw) 2012 to be significant, with its teasing rubric Comp. 363b+ (even though the group is described as a DCWM quartet)^^. By August 2014, things have become so inherently complicated that two quartet sets utilise five compositions each. But, in terms of narrowing the dates down a bit, we can also observe that not only were 2008's Moscow and Mestre concerts based around readings of a single composition, the same was also true of the Mannheim quartet in October 2010. Whatever development seems to have happened, it presumably took place no earlier than 2011. 

I don't know about you, but the lesson I am getting from all this is to stop worrying at it quite so much: naturally, I can't help trying to figure it out, little by little, but it's becoming increasingly obvious that unless I get the chance to talk at length and in depth to the composer himself, or to someone like Taylor Ho Bynum or James Fei - or to one of the duettists cited above, for example - I am probably never going to get to the bottom of this. Let's not forget that in some recent(ish) cases, music is released without being described as belonging to any strategy at all: I have observed before that this was true of the Knoxville 10+1tet, but it applies equally to Trio (New Haven) 2013 (I said we would need to come back to this one!). The track listings - for want of a better term - on there look to have been patterned the exact same way as those in 12 Duets (DCWM) 2012; but whatever the superficial similarities, it is worth pointing out the very obvious difference between the two releases: the New Haven set includes no electronics at all. Just listen to it... stop trying to make sense of it.

After all, I am no nearer to being able to tell the various systems apart by ear, DCWM from FRM, or either of them from the recent Lorraine system; but that doesn't stop me from enjoying the music. Indeed, I never get tired of it, and yet I'm happy to admit that I am years away from really understanding it. Assuming there are years remaining to me, I am content to spend at least some of them immersed in this music. In times such as these, we may all need reminders of what humans can do when they work together, rather than compete against each other...

* Numerous audience boots appeared during the blog's first year of activity, featuring concerts which had only just taken place; several of these were of DCWM. Obviously, not all bootlegs come with any sort of track listing - and the ones which do often have to be taken with a pinch of salt.

** NBH042-5 inclusive: the four are considered one "album", but with separate catalogue numbers. There is of course also a double digital album, Sextet (FRM) 2007 (NBH046-7), featuring an expanded version of the same band - and where no compositions are listed at all (something I have grumbled about before). 

*** However much I indulge my artistic tendencies - such as they are - with my photography, this does not extend to simple pictures for illustrative or explanatory purposes: photos of album covers or liners, etc, will generally have had minimal effort put into them. I get everything I need into shot, and make sure it's focused, and that's about it. No apologies, therefore, for the crappy quality of the pictures from here on down...

# If those existed at all, I would guess they featured greatly simplified packaging - but of course I don't know.

## The graphic score, on the other hand, is something with which B. first experimented at least forty years previously. An example of this - a fully-graphic score with a colour element - was examined last year; not quite the same thing, of course.

### Identical, actually, except for the background: the brushwork on the three painted shapes is precisely the same in both cases. (They may or may not have been painted, but they were coloured in manually, one way or another.) What is this telling us, exactly..? The same image could have been used without much thought; or, the use in two different contexts of the same cover art might indicate that no inferences should be drawn from any individual use of any image - this has occurred to me.

^ Per their respective Bandcamp pages, both 12 Duets (DCWM) 2012 and Trio (New Haven) 2013 were released on 10th June 2014, although I would never take those dates as being completely reliable. (Indeed, in this case it seems more likely that at least one of those dates is wrong: two box sets released on the very same day? - Why?)

^^ I had completely forgotten this, but the booklet for the Warsaw album includes a photograph of a music stand, presumably used in the performance: on it are two sheets of paper, one of which contains those same three hand-coloured shapes which adorn the cover to disc six shown above - as well as the cover for Trio (New Haven) 2013 - but with numerous alphanumerics attached. Does that mean that this sheet is somehow specific to the multiple sub-variants of Comp. 363? It could do, since the primary territory for disc six here is 363f, whilst disc three of the New Haven album includes the same variant as one of its secondaries, or tertiaries. Or... it might be something else altogether, for use under specific circumstances during any number of performances around this time.

(In)direct to camera

 

Hmmm.

The events in the world this week... well, they raise many questions, don't they? We may not find out the answers to some of them any time soon; and others... But the immediate question for me, here, is: what is the point in continuing to attempt detailed analysis of art music, in a tiny and near-forgotten corner of the internet (or anywhere else)? Does any of this really matter, now? 

It's something I need to address, just so I don't feel like a fraud with my very next post - regardless of its actual content. It is no good putting work and time into writing about music, blithely pretending as if nothing has changed (or is about to). Is it appropriate for me to carry on at all? I don't want to appear to be - whistling past the graveyard, as they say. Equally, if I am to carry on with all this, I don't want to be prefacing every single post with "Not that it matters much now, but..." or words to that effect. So it feels as if I need to deal with all this head on, so to speak, before I go any further.

I've mused before about whether B's stated intentions with regard to raising the level of human consciousness, or saving the planet through music, etc, can be said to have succeeded to any extent (and if they have, how would we go about measuring that, or even observing it?). Actually, I suspect that there has been a gradual raising of consciousness in the last few decades, but such is the way of things, there only ever seems to be so much of any commodity to go around, and raising something in one place will have the (apparently-inevitable) effect of lowering it elsewhere. Net result: everything is less balanced than ever, or at least more unstable. I'm very far from convinced that raising consciousness globally is even possible, never mind practically achievable. 

Still...

Even as my mind keeps remembering that everything seems awfully bleak, I don't feel that all hope is lost. Wilful self-delusion? It's not that, at any rate; I'm not blind to the possibilities, even the direst of them. Whatever the reason, a brief slump into near-total despair has been followed by a lift, of sorts: somewhat to my surprise, I don't seem able to give up hope completely. That being the case, it feels more essential than ever to continue doing those things which will enable me to keep my spirits up. And when it comes to music in general, and to Braxton's music in particular, it's not simply a matter of enjoying it or even of allowing my nerdy detail-freak tendencies to get to grips with it; there are other qualities which sustain me on a deeper level. (A lot of this has to do with the way his music simultaneously requires and facilitates the highest degree of creative involvement from its interpreters...)

In other words, I will keep going, until such time as I can't. With every post from now on, there will be an unvoiced element of even in the face of all this... but the posts themselves will continue, and I shan't excuse them or apologise for writing them. 

***

I have said many times before that I would write this stuff even if nobody ever read it, and that's basically true: it makes me feel better when I do it, so in that sense the work justifies itself. Nevertheless, as small as the potential readership always is for this kind of writing, I know that there must be plenty of people out there who might be interested, but who are not aware of me at all. This is of course entirely my own fault: I am completely cut off from social media, and having built up an initial following, I managed to alienate much of it over the next few years, before going (almost) completely silent. But: if you find yourself here and get anything out of reading these posts at all, will you consider telling a friend? Don't assume they know about us already - they probably don't. Of course, not all of us have friends who can dig this stuff, but - how about it?

C x

Grand Terpsichorean Manoeuvres, pt. 2

 

Ensemble (New York) 1995 (Braxton House)

As previously discussed, then, I have agreed to follow the chronological order of the online discography* when it comes to the performances given in NYC on November 24, 1995: lacking any definitive information, I have treated the octet's rendition of Comp. 188 as the first set, and will now address the larger ensemble's reading of Comp. 187 on the basis of its being the second such performance. Both works are of course GTM, first species, and with this specific set we now have official recordings of the first eight GTM compositions (for anyone besides me attempting to keep a record of that)**. 

I considered the octet performance to be an extension of the "working group", insofar as there was one of those at this stage. The earliest GTM pieces were recorded by a quartet: the leader plus Ted Reichman, Joe Fonda and Kevin Norton. The first recorded live performance featured the same musicians, plus Roland Dahinden and Jason Kao Hwang; the octet which performed at the Knitting Factory - under the auspices of the Tri-Centric (Thanksgiving 1995) Festival - adds two more reed players to the sextet, Andre Vida and Brandon Evans, both (eventually) important senior students and significant collaborators. This allows us to identify a key group of players, involved with the new music from its point of origin.

The "ensemble", as it was then billed - it would later have been more likely dubbed an eleventet, or perhaps a 10+1tet - diverges from this pattern. From the core group outlined above, only Fonda and Norton are retained: a special line-up is convened for a sort of "expanded chamber" feel, with the leader joined by five other woodwind players and three extra strings; and two of the woodwinds are in fact double-reed instruments, oboe and English horn***. Of the eight new musicians, only two had worked with B. before this (as far as I can establish), although all but one would go on to work with him again at least once more. In the interest of completeness, I'll run through the performers in more detail now.

One player with definite prior experience of B's music was Melinda Newman, an oboe specialist who was one of two featured soloists on the recording of Comp. 173 the previous year. (She doesn't, however, appear to have worked with him again after this date.) Sharp-eyed readers looking through the list of players in the 1995 ensemble will also spot "utility reedman" J. D. Parran; I am so used to seeing his name crop up on things that I was a little surprised to discover only two previous encounters with B's music on his CV, and these were separated by fourteen years. Having first worked with together in the 1978 (reconvened) creative orchestra, where Parran was one of five reedmen, the two were reunited much later for the sessions which resulted in 4 (Ensemble) Compositions 1992. In the interim, they had actually both been involved in a third session, but not for one of the maestro's own projects: in September 1984, Parran was part of the group which recorded John Lindberg's Trilogy of Works for Eleven Instrumentalists, conducted by B., who did not play on any of the pieces. Who knows exactly when and where they first met; coming up in St Louis, Parran had joined that city's famed Black Artists' Group, before departing for New York like everyone else#. With that sort of background, any time he appeared in one of B's later groups it was as a sort of special guest, usually surrounded by B's own students: a versatile multi-instrumentalist, he could be trusted to negotiate the demands of the music without much in the way of instruction, and here he is one of the few players besides the leader given licence to branch out as a soloist.

The second double-reed specialist, Libby Van Cleve, has notched up a fair few recording credits with B. over the years, but as far as I can see this was her debut. Described on her website in terms suggesting she's regarded as a  luminary of new music, she would be a featured soloist - again on English horn## - in the following year's Trillium R performances; her credits as an oboist include NBH048 as recently as 2014, and she participated in a Tri-Centric Orchestra extravaganza the following year (albeit one which did not include any of B's music)###. Meanwhile, tenor saxman Aaron Stewart has taken a much more jazz-adjacent path, playing with Muhal Richard Abrams, Steve Coleman and the (confusingly-named^) Julius Hemphill Sextet, among others; Stewart's only other involvement with B's music appears to have been in those same Trillium R performances mentioned above; again, though, he was a featured instrumentalist there (on baritone sax this time). Finally - among the woodwind players - altoist Lily White is the outlier, the one musician who seems to have worked with B. just this once^^. 

The three supplementary string players are violinists Gwen Laster and Jacqueline Carrasco, and cellist Nioka Workman^^^. All three took part in the Trillium R concerts, again - all under the aegis of the Tri-Centric Orchestra, none of them featured instrumentalists - and, like Aaron Stewart, the cellist played only that one other gig with the maestro. Both violinists had some further involvement - although only just, as we will see next time~. Laster (sometimes miscredited as "Lester") has had a rather lopsided career, making her money from backing up pop artists for the most part, but she never completely abandoned her more adventurous side, and eventually joined the Arkestra under the direction of Marshall Allen for a recent recording. Carrasco is evidently another new music specialist, and - unlike Haewon Min~~ - was a member of Cygnus Ensemble when they recorded their reading of Comp. 186 (... wonder where they got the idea for that?). Workman fille has had quite a varied career, but her brief involvement with B's music appears to mark its outermost point by quite some distance.

In summary: four reeds, two double-reeds, four strings and percussion: this was a special line-up assembled with the apparent intention of showcasing GTM's potential as contemporary (semi-)notated music, and the players were (for the most part) chosen for their ability to voice parts of a collective timbral whole, without being required to improvise much if at all. Even with headphones, I found it quite hard to locate all the various musicians within the stereo image; but that's not really the point, since the group sound is the main thing here, and the various instruments which make it up are primarily valuable as component elements of that.

It's worth our remembering - again - that what I am doing here, in tracking the course of the new musical system from its creation onwards, is something which can only be done in retrospect: the official recordings which documented that same system were not released in the same order in which they were recorded, so even the most ardent and diligent fan - someone buying every new album on the day of release, and attending every single live performance regardless of geographical location - would not have been able to do what I'm doing now.

***

On a second play-through with headphones, I placed the musicians thus in the stereo image: Parran is on the left (easily identifiable, as he begins the set on bass sax), then the two double-reeds, then White, Stewart, Braxton, and the strings - with Fonda (I think) farthest to the right, which would make sense - the two lowest voices "bookending" the group - although I kept changing my mind about Fonda's precise placement - not that it matters much~~~. Norton, of course, is behind everybody, which is only as we would expect given how much equipment he uses during the performance: trap set, vibraphone, glockenspiel, assorted percussion. During the first three minutes or so of the set, he varies things up considerably, changing instruments on a regular basis, setting a trend which is to continue pretty much until the finish; the rest of the ensemble spends most of its time focused on the written materials, while Norton effectively treats the entire piece as one extended (tasteful, restrained) solo@.

Comp. 187 proceeds at a brisk, sprightly pace, though naturally the ensemble never sounds hurried. As indicated above, the opening few minutes are played entirely from the chart, and at 4:10 Parran - now on soprano clarinet - is first to peel away and take a brief but expressive solo. Around 5:40, the strings (plus at least one horn) cut loose from the main pack and play something else, but by 6:00 they have slipped back into the theme, and just as one realises that, B. begins his own first solo of the set, on sopranino sax. Even this is brief, especially for him: by 6:40 he too has resumed trotting along with the theme. Already we have heard enough to know - if we're paying close attention - how this will work: there are a few actual soloists in the band, but for the most part individual voices will stand out for a second or two at a time, expressing themselves in a tiny flash of dynamic or timbral variation, while the main body of the ensemble sweeps on unstoppably. First species GTM is where it is easiest to observe the trance element of the system at work, and the effect here on the listener is, indeed, almost hypnotic.

At 8:18, a subgroup emerges, several horns and strings suddenly branching out into a different set of secondary or tertiary material; I can't be sure which, because although this new line, ending in a high trill, strongly resembles some of the 1977/78-vintage 69 series themes, I haven't been able to identify it, and it may or may not be an actual earlier composition. It could be supplementary written material for a prearranged section of the group to unveil (either at this specific time, or at the whim of the designated section leader - if those were already a thing by this stage..?@@). At 9:40 Fonda, who has been bowing away tirelessly at the written theme, finishes up with a low sweep across one string, and then lays out for a while, which does seem to herald a subtle change of tessitura as Norton starts to play all around the rhythmic flow and - without the theme itself ever stopping - the individual utterances do become a little wilder, a little freer - but as always, this is brief, lose focus and you miss it; the prevailing, endless, eighth-note tick-tock theme reasserts itself continually after every apparent departure from it.

These little departures and rejoinings continue to weave in and out as the music forges on. Every time it sounds as if something new might happen, it almost already has - by the time the listener has taken stock of the new development, it's already folded its way back into the theme. Every minute or so, we get something like this although it's very easy for the listener to miss it all if not paying close attention; at 11:20, at 13:20... at 14:15, though, some outrageous blarts from the leader signal his having switched to contrabass clarinet, and after some suitably blasphemous, glorious parps and growls, this ushers in a slightly different passage in which most of the ensemble play a couple of written phrases together - before Norton jumps onto the kit and immediately gets busy, at which point almost all the players lay out, the horns then nosing their way back in one by one... and after the briefest of pauses, just a fraction of an in-breath, at 16:08 we're back to the primary written material again.

This is the basic blueprint for the whole performance, in which focused listening reveals more and more bright moments of self-expression by all the cast - just not usually all at once; move out, move back. You couldn't really call what most of the players do in these moments improvisation as such, but they all get the chance to express themselves nevertheless, and over time, the way in which they voice their attacks becomes varied quite considerably, the effect being almost like that of watching through a kaleidoscope: for the most part the outer ring is turned smoothly, gradually, and the changes in the image are subtle, but every so often there is a sharper turn, and the picture changes more radically as a result@@@. As with previous live outings, there are moments when the tempo sharply increases (18:45; 28:55; 36:25), although exactly when and how it reverts to its previous "resting rate" in each case is far from obvious, so subtly is this achieved; at 38:30, a prolonged ritardando begins, with the tempo gradually slowing with every successive bar until 39:00, at which point it steadies itself at a slowish andante before slowing again from 39:25. Always, the ensemble moves as a single unit in this regard. 

B. takes his first alto solo at 17:30, and another at around 36:00, though in the latter case this emerges (first as about fifteen seconds of trademark altissimo squeaks) from a short passage in which all the saxes get to cut loose briefly, and it ends up overlapping with the third accelerando noted above, so although the maestro is tearing his horn up, there is so much else going on at this point that it doesn't stand out in the way it usually would. Indeed, one of my abiding impressions of the set is how restrained the leader is, in not claiming the spotlight much (as he would tend to do in a small-group setting, inevitably); but then, as I have hopefully made clear already, this is not about solos, really - or not at this early stage, anyway. (Naturally, once you can pinpoint B. in the stereo image, you can hear him pretty much throughout; well, you can if you have listened to him even a tenth as much as I have.) Besides the leader, as mentioned above the other player who really gets to flex is Parran, flipping continually between bass sax and soprano clarinet, playing beautifully on both and granted considerable licence to do more or less whatever he wants, with the proviso that he still carry his weight with regard to the overall perpetual theme. Stewart does get to cut loose at times as well, foreshadowing his own featured-instrumentalist role in the following year's operatic extravaganza; but - again, this is mentioned above - the one who really has the most latitude over the course of the entire performance is Norton, who almost runs the whole show like a conductor%. 

I see no real need to work through the remainder of the set passage-by-passage; I would hope that there are enough pointers above to help any curious listeners navigate their own way through it - but trust me, the more attention and focus you are able to bring to your listening, the more rewarded you will feel by what you are able to hear. There are other points where pre-written secondary or tertiary material crops up, played by a subgroup while the theme continues on in the background (I still couldn't put an opus number to any of these, and therefore can't say for sure what category of supplementary material they are); there are certain passages which seem to acquire special significance, such as around 31:30 - 32:00, when phrases within the written theme are repeatedly punctuated with "triple knocks", most if not all of the players leaning down hard on one attack played three times. There are almost countless moments of great individual beauty.

We might, though, consider the final major phase of the music to begin around 40:25, building out of the slowest passage (as noted above); the pace picks up again and just carries on increasing, almost frantic by the 41-minute mark - Norton here on vibes, Parran on clarinet, everyone else plugging away; by 42:50 Norton has disappeared from the soundscape altogether, returning then on claves, among the simplest of idiophones, while someone introduce a circus-style whistle into the mix. Everyone on the left-hand side of the stereo image is wailing away at this point, and greater and greater freedoms seem to be granted to everyone, in turn, the rhythmic drive at last vanishing completely... until the most fractional pause at 45:52 precedes the da capo al fine, Parran's forceful playing a sheer delight as we approach the finish line at pace. In the end, there is rather an anticlimax, the music breaking off in mid-air as it were, and with all audience noise and applause edited out, it's natural to feel that we have been left hanging; but this simply reinforces the idea the music is endless, and that we have just tuned in to a section of it, which happens to last forty-nine minutes and thirty-six seconds. 

***

My conclusions after the first listening through headphones, a couple of weeks ago, were that this was a bit of a missed opportunity: there are enough voices here for B. to be able to keep up the written material at all times, while allowing individual (groups of) players to experiment more than they do in the event. But on a closer listen, I realise this is really not the case at all: as usual in such instances, the fault lay with the listening ear, not with the music! Able to sustain my concentration across the entire set, I caught myriad tiny details which I had overlooked previously, and in the process, came to a far deeper understanding of what the composer's conception was, at this stage. Taken together, these two performances of 24th November 1995 show just how much potential was contained within this model, so that in hindsight it is easy to see how it came to dominate the composer's attention in the succeeding decade or so. [It's also easy enough to see how Jacqui Carrasco, a few years later, might have put forward B's name when William Anderson was assembling pieces for the Cygnus Ensemble's Broken Consort album; now I want to go back and hear their short reading of 186 again! But that's for another time...]

* Regular visitors will know that I tend to use the archived version of Restructures for this purpose. Recently, I was unable to use it as the Wayback Machine had suffered some sort of cyberattack; a few days later, it all came back online, then I started getting error messages again. It appears at the time of writing that the Wayback Machine itself is back online, but that its version of the Restructures discography is not available for some reason. (Hopefully this will not be a permanent state of affairs.) In the meantime, the only one I know of is the version linked above, i.e. in the first sentence of this post - but it's a fairly old version of the discog and (with rare exceptions) does not allow linking directly to individual recordings.

** Unfortunately, this is as far as we go with that neat and tidy numerical ordering. Comp. 189 only turned up much later in the recorded canon - as the primary material for a 2018 duo concert with harpist Jacqueline Kerrod - although that also does not sound like GTM at all. (Obviously, B. continued composing works outside of the new strategic system he was developing, even if the latter would very much preoccupy him for a number of years to come; still, from this point onwards as regards the opus numbers, there are numerous gaps representing pieces which have either not been performed, or at least not officially recorded - and I have no way of knowing which of these are GTM works and which are not.)

*** I am following here the usage typical for jazz and creative music (where this instrument is only used sparingly to begin with; Sonny Simmons of course played it), and for US parlance generally. Where the same instrument appears in European orchestral music, it is referred to as the cor anglais (which, confusingly, is French for "English horn") - just to make matters even less consistent, the brass instrument known as the French horn is always referred to that way, i.e. in English - regardless of where in the world it is deployed.

# Much of my information here just comes from Parran's Wikipedia page, but other online biogs are of course available for this storied and well-respected player and academic. (Despite having a longstanding association with the AACM by virtue of collaborating with many of their members in various events, I don't think he himself was ever a member as such.... could be wrong, though.)

## Restructures mistakenly credited her with French horn on Trillium R, an error repeated here, but the NBH entry for the official release corrects that. [A handful of jazz-based musicians have been able to play both woodwind and brass instruments to a proficient standard - among players germane to this blog, Joe McPhee springs to mind - but the chances that a classically-trained double-reed specialist would also be able to play a brass instrument well enough to take solos on it are vanishingly remote. It was just a slip, confusing two instruments with similar names, and may even have originated with the Braxton House notes for the CD release.]

### If anyone doubted it, the career arc of someone like Libby Van Cleve is emblematic of the readiness of contemporary new music pioneers to embrace B's work, and that of his students and associates; not that anyone reading this is likely to doubt that, but we know the classical establishment has been terribly slow to catch on. 

^ Confusing, because the band has continued to be billed thus long after the death of its leader. (Repertory bands for specific composers are not all that unusual, but a group called the "John Smith Quartet" would, you might think, generally be led by John Smith - in person, rather than in spirit.) 

^^ "Lily White" sounds like a pseudonym for someone else - if anything it sounds more like an atypically-vanilla drag name than someone's actual name - but Ms White is a real musician and educator, albeit it's far from obvious how she landed this gig, unless she was recommended by one of the other participants, or..?

^^^ A string player called Workman? Got to be a relative, surely, I figured... yes, she's Reggie's daughter. (Mr Workman has done some pretty out-there stuff over the years - I suppose it would be more accurate to describe him as an outward-facing musician rather than an out player as such - but has never, to the best of my knowledge, worked with B. or played any of his music.)

~ I don't mean the very next post, but the next one in this series - actually, Tentet (New York) 1996 is the last recording I intend to cover in this way (... probably).

~~ The explanation for this remark can be found in the second footnote to this recent post.

~~~ Note that I still can't separate the oboe from the English horn, nor can I even detect the relative positions of the violins and the 'cello. [For why this isn't overly important, see the penultimate paragraph in the previous section.]

@ It is of course nonetheless possible that much of what Norton plays here is written out for him - he's not expected to keep to the same rhythm or tempo as everyone else, just to support it and augment it in various ways, but how much of this is left entirely up to him and how much prescribed, I wouldn't like to guess.

@@ I'm tempted to say it wasn't, not least because this isn't a line-up with obvious candidates for such a role, unless Newman was one (having already played once as a featured soloist). Something is also nagging at me to suggest that section leaders weren't brought in until a bit later in the system's development. Hmmm...

@@@ Knowing now, as I do, about B's synaesthesia - which I didn't, at the time I was writing all those Braxtothon station stops - I'm tempted to think that he may have visualised the whole performance very much in these terms (although he almost certainly had in mind complexities and layers and variables which I have not taken into account)...

% Lacking the chance to see the performance, and to witness the extent to which B. deployed his famous hand signals and the like, I ascribe a notional "conductor" role to Norton figuratively, in that he is largely in charge of switching up the mood and feel of the music as it progresses. Obviously I have no way of knowing how much of an official role he had, or didn't have; but as the tenured player here, along with Fonda - who is also somewhat responsible for these subtle changes in mood, although far less noticeably - Norton may reasonably be expected to have had a heavier workload than some of the "new hires".