Considering how long I myself have been living with this stuff, though, I don't necessarily understand it as well as I might. I was pretty late to the party*, not really taking a serious interest in B's music until this phase of his career was already completed; over time, I picked up all sorts of bits of information to build on my own impressions and what have you, but (as is always the case for an autodidact) I had gaps in my knowledge, resulting from never having this stuff fully explained to me.
So it's worked out quite well recently that I have acquired a few official copies of recordings I only had as rips before, each of which has notes which may well fill in the some blanks. I also came across a useful article - by accident, while searching for something else - and dug out an album I have had for years, but hadn't listened to in almost as long: that, too, has useful liner notes. This then is the first of at least two articles detailing my attempts to learn more about this music than I had been able to glean thus far.
***
One thing I was able to clear up, before I go any further: in a post last summer, I raised the question of why the Sextet (Istanbul) 1996 album should bear that date, when it documents a live recording from 1995... for this one, I had Martinelli's liner notes anyway - they are available on Bandcamp - but one little detail is exclusive to the physical release. At the top of the "credits" page (and only there), the album title is given as Sextet (Istanbul) 1995. So there's my answer: it was a mistake all along, not a perverse choice on the part of the exec producer. These tiny details do nag away at me ;-)
***
Now, something I had been putting off for months: counting the GTM pieces, and listing them. Last year, when trying to get to grips with all the many New Braxton House releases I had missed out on years earlier, I established that the numbering has a neat symmetry to it: the very first GTM piece is Comp. 181, whilst the final one is Comp. 362 - one has to assume this was deliberate. But, of course, not all the opus numbers in between represent GTM works - even though many of them do, this having been the composer's main focus for more than a decade - so we know that the overall total is rather less than 182. For example, Comp. 189 was only very recently unveiled a duo piece, or at least that is how it was finally presented to the world in 2020**. 191 is a solo series, as is 312; probably 307-309 are too, but that is less straightforward***. Many of the opus numbers in the low 3xx range seem to have been used for non-GTM pieces: 301 is a solo piano piece, 304 & 305 are more duo pieces, and so on#. Trillium E bears the number 237, whilst 323 is a short series representing the first group of DCWM compositions. I'm not about to list every single exception, but there are also large gaps in the numbering - for which we (I) have no information at present - which make it impossible to know how many there are for sure.
Even the experts can't agree on this: Timo Hoyer, in his liner notes to the Ghost Trance Septet album, states that there were 138 GTM pieces in total, while Kobe Van Cauwenberghe reckons - in an article which we will look at in due course - that there are "more than one hundred and fifty". Hoyer wrote a German-language book on B's music, and KVC is currently moving towards finishing a doctorate thesis on it, so both of these gentlemen have presumably got well-sourced information - but apparently their information doesn't tally up, regardless. (As much as KVC has rapidly moved to establish himself as one of Europe's foremost authorities on all things Braxtonian, surely he does not possess a complete set of all the GTM scores, including those which never been recorded - in some cases, never even performed..?) Either way, both of them have access to sources which I lack: at time of writing, I myself have only been able to verify eighty-four GTM pieces. In drawing up the list below, I drew heavily on the earlier list compiled by (Rate Your Music user) smartpatrol, as previously mentioned here on the blog; since I can't vouch for the accuracy of this individual's work##, I cross-checked all the ones which I was not already sure about. (I also went back through the archival version of Restructures online, and referred to a couple of other well-visited places.) This is what I'm working with, for the time being:
Comps. 181-188 incl.
Comps. 192-195 incl.
Comp. 199
Comps. 206-214 incl.
Comps. 219-223 incl.
Comps. 227, 228
Comps. 232, 233
Comps. 235, 236
Comp. 239
Comps. 242-245 incl.
Comp. 247
Comp. 249
Comps. 254-256 incl.
Comp. 259
Comps. 264-266 incl.
Comps. 277, 278
Comps. 284-287 incl.
Comp. 289
Comps. 292-300 incl.
Comp. 322
Comps. 338-341 incl.
Comp. 343
Comps. 345, 346
Comps. 348-358 incl.
Comps. 361, 362
[It's not a very pretty list, but as an ex-list junkie, I do try not to make my lists anything other than functional... It would be far too messy and complicated to attempt to cross-reference here the recordings on which each piece can be found, and besides, smartpatrol already did that (thus saving me what could have been quite a lot of effort). Anyone who is not happy to take my word for it or is just curious (and lazy!) can refer to that prior list, which - I am happy to report - is very largely accurate.]
There are a few other "probables" to take into consideration: 190, 327 and 328 are all included on the Rastascan "return engagement" Nine Compositions (DVD) • 2003, and all of them last more than one hour, making it really quite likely that all of them are GTM territories; but I can't currently play this disc without significant logistical upheaval, and it's not an immediate priority to arrange that. What I can confirm is that all three pieces have decidedly train-oriented, GTM-style titular diagrams... really, I would say that eighty-four is almost certainly eighty-seven... but - !###
One piece of information which I am missing, and which I would really like to have supplied, concerns the precise allocation of opus numbers to each species and class of GTM; obviously, the first lot are first species, and (equally obviously) the last lot are third species, accelerator class; but as for many of the attributions in between... this would doubtless be fairly obvious if I had all of the pieces available to hear, but I don't. Looking at some of the big gaps in my list - the probable locations of some of the "missing pieces" - does make me think that KVC may be correct and James Fei mistaken, perhaps, about where second species ended and third species began; as I recently explained, the former classifies (the otherwise unrecorded) Comp. 264 as third species, but doubt is cast on that by Fei's describing Comps. 277-8 as second species; but really, if that latter attribution is correct, there is very little room for third species at all unless that was continued after a "break". After all, we have already established that Comps. 293-300 inclusive were originally designated fourth species, and even though that little piece of history got unwritten in due course, that means in principle that only pieces written before (or during) 2001 can be considered third species; given that Comps. 280-283 are those recorded in duet with vocalist Alex Horwitz and (ostensibly) have nothing to do with GTM, if 278 is still second species then only the numbers between 284 and 292 could be third species... unless, as I say, the latter resumed after a hiatus, somewhere around the 317 mark^. (Realistically, I think it is possible that both of these things might be true: third species may well have been resumed somewhere in the 3xx range, and Fei could plausibly have misremembered which category the works performed in the summer of 2000, and reprised in the studio in November that year, fell into.)
One thing which is not in any doubt, of course, is the identity of the twelve Syntactical GTM works: these were established for posterity by the superlative NBH908 box set. But this is also a different type of classification altogether, and the SGTM pieces themselves slot into the species-and-class scheme... OK, even I have had just about enough of all this angels-on-pinheads stuff for now ;-)
***
I hadn't planned to get caught up in all that, but in the end, it's probably not such a bad way for me to start; I never intended to cover off everything in one post anyway, and if it ends up taking three (or more..?!), that's also fine. I had originally expected to discuss an article which I found online, back in March, while trying (unsuccessfully) to establish what sort of set B. played in Luxembourg; having found the article, which looked promising, I noted its location but didn't read it right away; because of that, even knowing that this was a serious piece of musicological analysis published in a Belgian art magazine, I hadn't noticed at first that it is credited to none other than... Kobe Van Cauwenberghe, even though naturally he was the most obvious person to have written such a thing! (I did recently get in touch with the guitarist, and he sent a very gracious reply: he is quite close to finishing his thesis, by the sound of it.) The article aims to use GTM as a window onto B's wider system of musical philosophy (the Tri-Centric Thought Unit Construct) and - potentially at least - does what I myself can't: lays out an argument in relatively clear fashion, with excerpts from scores by way of illustration. At the same time, being (presumably) a condensed version of the central argument in the writer's doctoral thesis, it seeks to establish B. himself as a crucially important figure within the canon of post-war western art music. At last - ! (This of course is something I could not even conceive of doing, so it's a considerable relief to know that someone else has it in hand.)
The same essay has a pretty considerable degree of overlap with the video on the Bandcamp page for the new Lorraine box, and believe it or not, these two were going to be my (ahem) starting point for this post, only that didn't quite happen - apparently, knowing that there is disagreement between informed sources as to the precise number of GTM works was something which I needed to start digging into on my own, and you can see the results of that above (or ignore them, of course). But that now feels like a suitable place to pause; this is (yet) another thread I will hope to pick up fairly soon, and let's see how I get on with that..!
* I attended the 2004 Royal Festival Hall performance, it's true; but this itself took place almost a decade into the "GTM experiment" and besides, as I've said on many occasions before, I didn't really understand what I was hearing, however much I paid close attention: vivid impressions of that set still remain, but at the time of performance, I lacked any sort of context within which to locate the experience. I went in the first place because I was aware that this person was - or would be - significant for me, and at that time this was a rare visit to the UK for the maestro. It would then be several more years before I began to focus on his music to any real extent, as the blog timeline demonstrates.
** Yeah, 2018, I know - but not necessarily, since the performance may or may not have been billed as a reading of Comp. 189 at the time. We only now know for sure that it was presented that way when the album was released, two years later. (Had the piece really been waiting all that time for the right duet partner with whom to explore it? Entirely possible... the label describes it specifically as a premiere recording.)
*** Some of this stuff gets complicated enough to warrant (in theory) an investigation of its own, not that I have the (re)sources to do it... The (rather obscure) 4xCD set Solo Live At Gasthof Heidelberg Loppem 2005 is quite clear about the fact that 307, 308 and 309 are all solo series; only, the later album Creative Orchestra (Guelph) 2007 includes a piece entitled "Comp. 307 + language improvisation" - plus another which is either entitled "Comp. 308" (per Restructures) or "Comp. 306" (per Discogs / everywhere else). I don't have this album on CD, only as a rip, and my version lists track two as "306", but even if that's correct, what are we to do with a title like "307" - ? The solo pieces are basically never used as the basis for collaging (or whatever we would call it by that point), but even if they were, which of the 307 series was being used? Sigh...
# I can't account for 302-303 at all... but 301 can be found here and here; 304-305 both began life here, though they are (now) fairly popular duet pieces among serious young musicians and are starting to crop up in all sorts of corners of the internet; see *** above for 306-309 (insofar as I have any info on these at all); 310-311 are on the two duo albums with Andrew Cyrille; 312 is definitely a solo series; 313 appears here (a ludicrous one-off recording which I really must write about, one of these days), along with whatever the hell track four on disc one is, since it definitely is not "508m"; 314-316 all show up on another pair of duo outings, this time with Wadada Leo Smith, and 316 also crops up in yet another duo context, this time with Falling River Music(s) involved. Phew...
## I still have no idea who this person is, but I can say that I was apparently wrong about one thing: when I first mentioned them, I allowed myself to refer to "this guy", feeling safe to say that since, let's be clear about this, the sort of stuff we are (each) doing is exclusively a male obsession - only maybe it isn't, because I did make a bit of an effort this time to look for contact info, and learned that they use she / they pronouns. That told me; I didn't find any contact info, though, and I am not on RYM myself, or I would have pointed out the few mistakes I came across this time. (Yes, there are some - but not many, and I still recommend the list as a valuable online resource.)
### There are other complicating factors with 327-328 (siiiggghhh), too: 327c appears on the quartet album with Matt Bauder, this being one I have heard relatively recently - and I don't remember it having any GTM on it..? What's more, the titular diagrams for B's two originals on that both look decidedly DCWM-ish to me, and the designation 327c is itself highly suggestive of that or of FRM perhaps, and hour-long DCWM readings are also not uncommon... As for 328, well, according to Intakt that is yet another solo series, though I am really not sure about those opus numbers (as I already said recently). I should maybe just stick with eighty-four, for the time being...
^ 317-321 inclusive are blank on my list, and any or all of them might be GTM. (As indeed might some of the ones mentioned in # above; it's been a long time since I heard some of those recordings, and I can't swear that none of them includes any GTM - but I didn't have time to find out before writing this. I will do so before I get round to "pt 2"...)
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