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".

Unburied treasure

 

What was I saying about sixteen years ago..? So - it turns out that another October, 2008 event was the release of Mosaic's Braxton box set, collecting all nine* of his albums for Arista on eight remastered CDs... I hadn't remembered that particular month as being when this happened, but I do still remember finding out beforehand that it was going to happen, because I was annoyed about it. The blog was still in its first year at that stage, and was rather more widely read than it is now (... nobody's fault but mine, of course), and having written in considerable detail, and with no shortage of enthusiasm, about four of the albums which were due for inclusion - Montreux / Berlin would follow later -  I felt a bit miffed that nobody was offering me a free copy for my pains. (Sounds ridiculous, I know! But it wasn't just the sulking of a spoiled man-child; I still think I had a fair point, in principle**.)

Anyway, that didn't happen - of course - and in the meantime, I paid less than diligent attention to the set's eventual release since I had no attention of buying it, even if I had had the money for it (which I probably didn't at the time***). Time passes, life happens, and although I continue to catch glimpses of the set's continued life-after-issue in the inflated resale market, I never pay a lot of attention to these either, given that copies only tend to show up for sale in the US - and at prices I'm not prepared to countenance.

And, then, just about a week ago, a UK listing for the set appeared on a well-known internet marketplace, albeit still for £300 (plus postage!! they wouldn't even throw in the shipping without charging for it...) - I still can't justifying spending that sort of money, and even if I could, I wouldn't; but the fact that a copy showed up on this side of the pond was still noteworthy. If there had been another snippet of fleeting news to pair with it, I would probably have posted about it... 

...in the meantime, I had already decided that it was about time for another repertoire post, and after a bit of thought, settled on the Norton & Min album (a rather obscure choice, which is nonetheless currently accessible online). This was partly just because it was easily accessible: I had already dug out my CD-R copy a few months back, while rooting around in search of something else. Still, once I realised that three of the five covers on there were taken from the same album, and that this was an album I hadn't heard in years#, I needed to locate my CD-R copy of Duets 1976 as well; that, because of a bad problem with my lower back which flared up suddenly in the first week of October, was far more challenging than it would normally have been## - but I did manage (on a good day!) to find what I was looking for, only to realise afterwards that I also needed access to my reference copy of Five Pieces 1975, in order to compare the two readings of Comp. 23h...

... but as luck would have it, at almost exactly the same time, I stumbled across a source for a digital version of the Mosaic box. This had nothing to do with my preparation for the post - indeed it probably started out as a distraction from it - and it wasn't until afterwards that it really hit me what I'd got hold of: both of the albums I needed for reference were now suddenly available to me in digital form, after years and years of not having them, and precisely at the point when I'd decided I needed them. This, then, is one of a series of coincidences to crop up over a couple of days last week, all involving the previous post. Another such was already detailed in a footnote to that last post: when I looked properly at my CD-R copy of Duets 1976, I realised it was filed away### with Quartet (Birmingham) 1985 - the only other of B's albums to include a version of Comp. 60. 

But that wasn't all... at the same time as I acquired this new digital treasure chest, I was also gifted another of the few remaining items on my most wanted list: Toronto (Duets) 2007 with Kyle Brenders... this being a double album - like the one in duo with Ben Opie - featuring two long-form all-reed interpretations of GTM pieces... the second of which, in this case, is Comp. 356. My CD-R copy of the Norton & Min album is filed away, very randomly, with another recording I must have acquired at the same time: the 2008 septet performance at the Chiasso festival, featuring... Comp. 356. Oh, and when I listened to this latter disc again (for the first time in ages) in a spare hour, I detected amongst the tertiary material Comp. 6n, which itself was up for consideration as part of the Norton & Min album... all these coincidences were making my head spin a bit by now, coming as they did hard upon one another, although (as I mentioned in another footnote to the previous post) 6n is such a common addition to B's long-form GTM readings that it would almost be more of an event if I hadn't heard it ;-)

This all took place last Tuesday and Wednesday (the post wasn't completed until Thursday 17th, but nearly all of the preparation for it had already been done before then); unable to work as such because of my back, I had unexpected time on my hands and was determined to do something constructive with at least some of it. However, on the Wednesday evening I did have to break off in mid-session to take my daughter to an after-school class; I was deep(ish) in the Composition Notes at this stage, and had just finished reading about Comp. 62. Driving along in near-dark, in pouring rain, still in some pain and not paying any more attention than necessary to my surroundings, I found myself briefly having to stop and give way to a driver on the opposite side of the road: just ahead of me, parked on the street and frozen in my headlights, was a car with the licence plate AB62 xxx^. 

They don't usually come so thick and fast, but synchronicities of this type do frequently attend my work on this blog, and it's one of the reasons why I have no intention of stopping now that I've started again - regardless of how many people do or don't read it at any given time.

Anyway - there, in all the finicky little detail which nobody ever asked for, but which I can always be relied on to furnish, is the story of how and when I finally got hold of the Mosaic/ Arista files after all these years.

***

There's little to be gained by discussing in depth any of the actual music, on this occasion: everyone knows what was included (and if they don't, they can very easily look it up). Some well-loved albums were presented here in their entirety, and in most cases their contents had never previously been available on CD; and indeed technically, almost all of this stuff is still not available in that format, with this box set having long since been deleted^^. But since I'm at it, it's worth just having a look at what was included, and how that was presented to those lucky fans who obtained the box when it was released.

Nine albums on eight CDs, as noted above; these are actually four double-CDs, all with generic packaging, in each case bearing the same cover shot (from one of the recording sessions) as the actual box itself, which was LP-sized and also included a full-sized, twenty-page booklet. This insert, it must be said, is far superior to the usual liner notes: set out with numerous photographs from the sessions, it contains a really detailed, in-depth essay on the music by Mike Heffley, B's ex-student and collaborator (who had previously written a book on the maestro's music^^^); a full track listing for the eight discs, together with the correct opus numbers for each of the tracks, and the graphic titles where appropriate (or composer credits, otherwise), plus a letter in each case designating one of the recording sessions, themselves fully detailed separately; a list of the original LP releases with their catalogue numbers, again cross-referenced into the sessionography (presented here as a discography, which seems slightly misleading); and a note of reminiscence by Michael Cuscuna, the Mosiac mastermind who produced all the original sessions as well as the reissue itself. (This is to be found on the last page of the booklet, accompanied by a photograph of Leroy Jenkins playing violin at B's wedding while B. and Cuscuna, plus other guests, look on; it is a charming postscript to the notes, with MC fondly remembering the maestro's "indomitable work ethic and childlike enthusiasm" as well as his "great sense of humor", and concluding that the "best part" of the project for him was renewing their friendship.) ~

The aspects which don't appeal so much to me personally about the box set would seem to be general to the Mosaic label, rather than specific to this release. I understand the reasoning behind the generic packaging of the individual CDs, but I can't say I like it: the black-and-white aesthetic and basic layout reminds me too much of Black Lion, which all too often came across as "cheap and cheerful~~" - for me, this rather undermines the good work put in by the excellent LP-sized booklet (... in terms of persuading the purchaser that they have acquired something well worth having). The discs themselves are sequenced in a slightly eccentric way, following neither the order of recording date nor of release as such, but rather cramming all the material in so that it fits onto eight CDs, keeping albums together where possible, breaking them up where necessary. The individual discs, as a result, have to be viewed as entirely functional on an individual basis, valuable chiefly as parts of a whole; for example, For Trio is spread across discs three and four, the first version of Comp. 76 closing out disc three (which otherwise contains most - but not all - of Alto Saxophone Improvisations 1979) while the second version appears on disc four, along with For Two Pianos. (Realistically, there was no way of avoiding this kind of thing, and I'm sure some care and attention went into the running order which was eventually chosen; but I can't honestly say I like it much.) Finally, the one specific gripe which I might have regarding this specific reissue would be misplaced, since this was never intended to be "that" kind of project: knowing that in some cases material had to be edited out in preparing the original albums, I can't now help being painfully aware of what's missing. The Montreux set was butchered in order to squeeze it into one and a half sides of vinyl; I can never forget that, in listening to Comp. 40n in particular. But if these live sets were to be restored to their full glory, how much more expensive and complicated would this have been to produce? It was never going to happen.

The remastered sound, it must be said, is absolutely gorgeous for the most part. Even Creative Orchestra Music 1976 - the one album which was previously issued in its entirety on CD, and which I described last year as sounding rather dated, is clear and bright and vibrant here, with the stereo image remarkably well separated (considering how crammed-in the musicians were, for the actual recording sessions - if the photo in the booklet is anything to go by). I have very much enjoyed listening (again) to this material, some of which was intimately familiar already, some of which I hadn't heard in years (it's quite possible that I only heard For Trio once, at least fifteen years ago; and I can't swear that I ever listened to the whole of Comp. 95 before now). Admittedly, even here there is a caveat, since For Four Orchestras was originally recorded - for obvious reasons -  in quadraphonic stereo, not reproduced in this format; some serious mental gymnastics is required on the part of the listener to hear this as the work of four orchestras. But you can't have everything; B. knew damn well that he was pushing his luck by even attempting this project, and Cuscuna and Steve Backer risked the wrath of the record company by seeing it through and releasing it - however briefly - so let's all just be grateful that it even exists.

Overall, I fully understand why this was so eagerly-anticipated by those who preordered it, and I would have to say that Michael Cuscuna in particular did a sterling job with it. Was it worth doing? Definitely. Do I wish I had obtained a proper copy, back in 2008? Probably, yes. Would I now pay three hundred quid for it? Almost certainly not - but hey, who knows what the future may bring ;-)

In memory of Michael Cuscuna (1948 - 2024)

Thanks (as always) to McClintic Sphere

* In his detailed essay, Mike Heffley refers rather to thirteen LPs - which might seem an odd way of looking at it, but is technically correct (Alto Saxophone Improvisations 1979 and The Montreux / Berlin Concerts were both double-LPs, and For Four Orchestras was a 3xLP set). It's still odd, because nobody could have purchased the thirteen records separately, so counting the actual discs seems rather irrelevant - unless Heffley is making the point that the reissue contains all the music presented on the original albums, rather than restoring alternate takes, etc (as is very often the case with this sort of undertaking).

** I genuinely felt that I had done as much as anybody to analyse this music and promote a continued interest in it, and in this regard I still think the point was valid. But although it was not unknown for the blog to be contacted by musicians in the early years - most notably by B. himself, of course - I never had any evidence that my work had come to Michael Cuscuna's attention; and even if it had, would that have been sufficient for Mosaic to send me a copy, gratis? Not in this world, anyway. (One still suspects that even with a project like this, some promotional copies were sent to magazines and radio stations... or, I dunno, maybe not?)

*** I have to say "probably" because I can't remember how much this box set cost at the time. (I do vaguely remember some chat online about preorders - it may even have sold out before it was released.)

# In a footnote to the previous post, I somewhat disingenuously suggested I had no explanation for why I hadn't heard the Duets with Abrams for so long. This is only really true insofar as I hadn't intended to leave it as long as I did, in the end; but I do in fact know why I tend to avoid returning to an album, in the short term, once I've "dealt with it". In case it's not obvious, I tend to make more observations on (various aspects) of a given album or recording than most people would - and, subject to no deadlines or editorial oversight, I am free to leave in as many of them as I wish. Having got down everything I want to say about a particular recording, the last thing I want to do is listen to it again a few days later and immediately start noticing yet more details which I had overlooked..! Returning to an album months or years later - well, that's another matter, and there it's often just a case of getting round to it. With a discography as vast as B's - and so many unofficial recordings besides - it's pretty difficult to get back round to most things, frankly. [One day maybe I'll learn the ancient yogic secret of bilocation, and can just lock myself away and permanently listen to this stuff while continuing to live a separate life elsewhere! Until that time...]

## The second picture in this post from last year helps to explain the problem, but it's actually got worse since then: quite a lot has been added to that right-hand storage unit, and all of the CD-Rs have been shunted down to the sixth and seventh shelves (bottom shelf not even visible). Further clutterage in the room in question doesn't make things any easier; I can move stuff out of the way when I need full access, of course - but not when my back is crocked. I did manage to grab a handful of envelopes off the doorway-end of the sixth shelf, and luckily the one containing Duets 1976 was in that handful. I wasn't about to risk going back for a second - but then, as it turned out, I didn't have to anyway...

### All through the Golden Age of Music Blogging I proceeded thus: as music became available to me in digital form, I burned it to CD-R and then filed away the results, usually two or three discs to an envelope, writing all the details out painstakingly as I did so. (This habit reduced the number of different envelopes, but made it inevitably harder to keep track of what was where, so I also had to create a spreadsheet with a searchable list of all the "extras" in each little package. Sigh...) You would scarcely believe how long I kept up this habit, before I finally gave up and started just archiving the digital files themselves; in most cases - and this was as true of B's material as of anyone else's - once I had burned a CD-R "master" I deleted the mp3 files. It's a pattern I got into and was very reluctant to change. Collectors (of anything) are a weird bunch ;-)

^ xxx in this case stands in for the actual letters, which spelled out the shortened form of my given name. (It's unlikely that anyone reading this will have access to the UK police's car index database - but still, this is someone's actual number plate and it doesn't feel right to give it in its entirety here.)

^^ Mosaic never owned copyright on the vast majority of the stuff they put out; instead they would typically lease it for a finite (short) period, allowing them time to press up limited editions of their sets and sell them, on the understanding that once the licence expired, that was that: the item would be deleted from their catalogue.

^^^ Heffley also recorded his own album of BraxRep, Meditations on Early Braxton, which I will cover on the blog at some point. (Since a key theme of this post is coincidence, it's worth pointing out that said album contains a reading of Comp. 60 - probably: it is actually listed as 60b, which officially doesn't exist, so who knows what it really is. (When I get there, I will endeavour to figure that out...))

~ The digital version which I got hold of - who knows where it originated - also came with two PDF files, one of which appears to be a longer, draft version of Heffley's essay for the booklet, and the other of which is entitled "AB Arista Outtakes" and is - I really don't know quite what it is, but again it appears to be a draft version of that same essay, shorter, and with ellipses covered by the text "[con’t (sic) in Mosaic notes]". Despite being (quite a lot) shorter than the version entitled "Heffley On Braxton Arista Liner", it is actually a larger file - go figure. I honestly have no idea what these are doing there, or whence they were sourced... 

~~ This rather quaint British expression, a bit outdated now, is not to be confused with "cheap and nasty"...