Thaumatogenesis: 1995

 

Four Compositions (Quartet) 1995  (Braxton House, 1997)

It seems like just the other day I was saying - hang on, it was just the other day. Damn, things can move fast when they move at all, around here!

What I was saying was that I really needed to hear this '97 release on (the original, short-lived) Braxton House label, showcasing the very first pieces from a new compositional strategy known as Ghost Trance Music. OK, so the timing was technically a little out of kilter, since anyone who was actually following B's career closely back in the mid-nineties (more than a decade before I myself got hooked) would potentially have heard Sextet (Istanbul) 1996 first: this was released the same year it was recorded, and features a sextet taking on Comps. 185 & 186, which are themselves two very early GTM pieces. But in terms of how the ideas unfolded, and how the new template was introduced to the core group at the time, this quartet of quartets actually came first; it's just that for whatever reason(s), Braxton House didn't get it out until a little later. Of course, in retrospect we can easily correct this temporal anomaly, and slide these first four pieces under the microscope... Istanbul can await its turn*. 

The album which eventually bore the catalogue number BH005 comprises the very first GTM works, then: and these are of course Comps. 181-184**. Without even playing the music, we can see just from a glance at the track list that these are not long readings: the longest is a shade under twenty minutes, and the shortest a shade under ten. (At the time of recording, maybe not even the musicians themselves knew how oddly short this would turn out to be, for music of this type.) This means, among other things, that - as I said in footnote *8 to the previous post - I was wrong when I inferred back in February that the shortest official GTM recording was cut in May 2000. No, it happened right here. Once we play the music, this all becomes clear.

At the very outset, then, this was all simply about laying out the basic template itself, and allowing a few glimpses at the myriad possibilities for expansion and development which that template implied. These first four readings are almost entirely through-composed, consisting of regularly-spaced written themes for the whole group to play without deviation from the score, and to a large extent the growth or movement is to be found purely in the themes themselves: that is, it lies within these specific arrangements of these themes, whereby these four voices bring the material hypnagogically to life. The rather unusual quartet*** which B. used for this date comprises himself, of course, plus Ted Reichman on accordion, Joe Fonda on bass# and Kevin Norton on a whole variety of percussion: some drums may be heard here, some cymbals definitely are, but above all the fourth voice in the written themes is most usually provided by mallet percussion, either vibraphone or glockenspiel. This creates a marvellously rich sound palette which makes a complete nonsense of any assumptions about what a "quartet" will sound like##. Use that palette for the material on display here, and the results are such that an alert and focused listener can find him/herself completely transported to another world within seconds. 

The four pieces are not presented in order: first up is Comp. 182, taken at a very brisk tempo, in which the group tick-tick-ticks its way through the written material in wholly regular fashion, with occasional (fantastic) outbursts from the leader providing what little embellishment there is; hearing this ur-text GTM after all this time, I am reminded very quickly of something I said years ago about the way in which this strategy was foreshadowed, two decades earlier, by Comp. 40f. (The links back there from here seem quite obvious, at this point.###) Comp. 183, which comes next, employs a very similar tessitura, with a subtly different theme taken at a similarly speedy tempo. Here, though, within a couple of minutes we do encounter some subtle but definite variation: even as the group tick-tick-ticks away at the written theme, Norton's crashing cymbals introduce a simple form of rhythmic contrast, revealing an extra layer to the sound - or, really, an extra dimension within the music... since that is how deep this stuff truly is. 

Norton's approach - not at all like a pulse track, even though the basic idea is essentially not dissimilar^ - is twofold, in that he continues to voice the written lines on glockenspiel even while his other hand is following a different clock entirely, at least some of the time. Here, then, within these ten minutes, we already start to get a feel for just how much potential there is for the unexpected to arise, out of what seems on the face of it to be completely regimented written material. Some whistles and whoops are thrown in for good measure: far from coming across as gimmicks, or even as simple expressions of joy, these have above all the quality of surprise, unforeseen as they are within this tightly-controlled soundscape. Even at this germinal stage, it was evidently the idea to generate extra lines of possibility from the written scores; and although hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I don't suppose for a minute that anybody in the studio in 1995 could have foreseen where all this would end up, it is nevertheless completely clear to me that this new musical strategy was always one of limitless possibilities.

Comp. 184 which follows, then, is the longest piece on the album; hence, as more or less experienced listeners, we will expect it to contain more in the way of extrapolation. That is, indeed, how it develops: again, the written theme is fast, and again, it's Norton who is initially in charge of unlocking the door to the dimension beyond; but yes, here we really start to see how the model is really designed, all the players in turn given that little more room to breathe, and by the second half of the piece, it starts to unfold itself marvellously - even as the core pulse is never discontinued: at least two players are right on it, at any given time. And when we reach the last piece on the album, it eventually becomes clear why Comp. 181 has been programmed out of sequence in this way: starting off at a markedly slower tempo, but in equally hypnotic fashion, the piece suddenly gathers pace from around 6.20, accelerating subtly at first, then dramatically, and from this point on the tempo is in fact quite variable^^, which of course produces an effect quite startling in the context of the album: nothing which came before has set the listener up to expect this at all. (The effect is presumably carefully controlled via hand signals from the leader, since all four players accelerate and decelerate in perfect accord.) So this piece introduces a different axis of variation again; I can only repeat what I said above: even at this formative, inchoate stage, we are shown a template in which the potential for extrapolation is simply dizzying. And because the core concept of an infinite continuum, without beginning or end is already encapsulated right at the outset, we can carry the music away with us and live inside it, long after the recording has finished.

***

It remains only to ask myself: have I done certain "cover bands" a gross disservice, in implying that their brief treatments of GTM themes are so short as to be desultory? Maybe... now that I have at last understood how short some of the really early first species GTM works were, I could perhaps be a little more sympathetic to ensembles which take such pieces on. Or maybe not, after all: this would only really get you off the hook if you chose one of those same very early pieces to interpret. If you insist on picking as your primary territory a composition which has been very fully developed in the recorded canon, and then only playing the first couple of pages of it... you do rather invite the suspicion that you're just trying to look more clever than you are, taking on a "difficult" composer - without actually engaging with his work. At the risk of being my old impossible-to-please self... I'd advise anybody trying to take on this material to think very carefully about why they are doing it. Not that they are likely to ask my opinion, of course...

* Now that I've got hold of all this Braxton House stuff at long last, I have every intention of working my way through it... and writing about at least some of it. (The more I write, the more there inevitably is to write about...)

** What became of Comps. 176-180 is something of a mystery, but it seems well established that Comp. 181 is ground zero for GTM. In the brief essay which constitutes the liner notes for Kobe Van Cauwenberghe's Ghost Trance Solos, Laura Tunbridge states that GTM "comprises more than 150 pieces situated between compositions 181 and 363". And it's true: from its inception, this massive compositional experiment would see the opus numbers (almost) literally double. (The statement is slightly misleading, since Comp. 363 is in fact a series, and pertains to Diamond Curtain Wall Music; but the basic point is still true enough.) Future musicologists may, indeed, declare that GTM was the maestro's single most significant compositional framework. [Of course they had better conclude that this was a highly significant figure to begin with, or I will come back down here just to kick their lazy arses...]

*** Quite apart from anything else, it seems weird at this point just to look back and not see THB's name among the personnel; but he was a good few years away from getting involved.

# In the space of less than two years, Fonda was already proving himself to be arguably the most versatile bassist B. has ever had. He was entrusted with practically everything - and never sounds out of his depth.

## About ten years after this, the chattering classes were getting terribly excited about a New York group called the Claudia Quintet, led from the back by drummer Jon Hollenbeck; I was still listening to BBC Radio 3 at the time, and I well remember the fawning attention paid to these guys by jazz journos and the like. A big reason for this was supposedly the group's "unique sound palette", which included accordion and vibes. Unique, my arse: as we can see, this had been done before, and it didn't even take five players to achieve it. (In fairness to Hollenbeck and co, they may not have claimed to have come up with this idea - certainly I hope they didn't, since the accordionist in that band was, in fact, none other than Ted Reichman...)

### I doubt that even B. had so much as a glimpse, in 1976, of where and how this seed would eventually germinate; but it's fascinating to think of all these ideas, simmering away in that fertile brain, vanishing beneath the surface only to rise again much later on...

^ The pulse track is itself just one example of a basic concept which B. has never stopped exploring, i.e. placing two disparate sounds or strategies into contiguity in order to see what emerges from the resulting friction. GTM is arguably an exceptionally sophisticated development of this same idea - although it is not just that, even so.

^^ This of course harks straight back to an earlier piece, again: this time to 1984, and Comp. 115.