East meets West again. The first
wailings of the encounter between jazz and Indian classical music
were in 1963, the year Impulse! issued “Impressions”, a record by
John Coltrane featuring Eric Dolphy with the beautiful piece “India”,
in which drums and bass were imitating tabla and tempoura while the
saxophonist was pushing at the boundaries his concept of modality.
Then, it was the time for Mr Anthony
Braxton and his 'pulse tracks' to realize a music that was compelled
in blurring the boundaries between African American music and Indian
music avoiding every possible 'fusion' as it happened in the 1970s,
giving life to a structure that remains between the most innovative
and aesthetically accomplished.
The reason why Indian music was so
interesting for innovative improvisers was well explained in a
chapter of Derek Bailey's “Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice
in Music” (Da Capo Press, 1993): in facts, Indian classical music
features a huge amount of improvisation. Ravi Shankar is an
improviser as much as a composer, and this is the same tradition of
people as Coltrane and Braxton.
Umberto Tricca
Now, is the time for the young Italian
guitarist Umberto Tricca to provide the world of improvised music
with a new melting of jazz and Indian music. Tricca studied guitar at
CEMM in Milano, then at the Berklee School of Boston. Then, he
followed the lessons of arrangement with bassist Giovanni Tommaso and
other courses, such as modern harmony and jazz harmony.
Umberto Tricca collaborated with
musicians coming from Florence (Italy) such as Giancarlo Boselli and
Masabo Trio, deepening his own studies on harmony and rhythmic
conduction of musicians as Dave Holland and Steve Coleman. While
experimenting with italian music revised in jazz, bossa nova and
samba and contemporary jazz repertoire, he starts studying Indian
music with tabla player Francesco Gherardi.
The result of these different
experiences are available in his new record “Moksha Pulse”
(Working Label, 2016) featuring Achille Succi (alto sax, bass
clarinet), Giacomo Petrucci (baritone sax), Nazareno Caputo
(vibraphone), Gabriele Rampi Ungar (bass) and Bernardo Guerra
(drums). As happened with Braxton and Coltrane, you will not find any
ethnic inclination in this record.
The tracks of the album show the love
Umberto Tricca has for Indian music, the counterpoints of Afro Cuban
rhumbas, and contemporary music – you will hear in 'Prelude' an
influence by some Iannis Xenakis compositions. The name of the
project comes from the Sanskrit word 'Moksha', that means
'emancipation' underlying the choice of leaving every predetermined
structure, developing the possible interactions between those
traditions and musical languages.
“Instead of replacing the camera with
the rifle, why not have one in each hand?” – Masao Adachi
Born in 1939 in Fukoka, Japan, Masao
Adachi was one of the preeminent figures in revolutionary cinema
during the 1960s/1970s. He was a close collaborator of filmmaker Koji
Wakamatsu, and both had the same photographer director, the legendary
Hideo Ito. Masao Adachi provided the scripts for such masterpieces of
Wakamatsu as The Embryo Hunts in Secret (1966) and Violated Angels
(1967).
After directing his own movies, dealing
with left-wing political themes and sex, quite often mixed together,
Adachi left cinema for revolution, joining the Japanese Red Army to
organize terror attack. But the reason we remember Adachi here at
Complete Communion is one film, titled AKA Serial Killer, we saw
yesterday night for the first time, even if the movie was released in
1969.
Masahiko Togashi - Mototeru Takagi "Isolation"
AKA Serial Killer was the film that
defined the 'landscape theory' for which he is credited as one of the
founders, but that has many followers in Europe – the most famous
are Jean Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet: it is a radical Marxist
theory stating that the landscape is a pure expression of the
dominand political power. In showing the landscape, we show different
degrees of alienation.
To demonstrate this theory, Adachi
focuses on the story of Norio Nagayama, a 19 year old boy convicted
for the murders of four people in four different Japanese cities.
Adachi narrates with his own voice the life of Nagayama, while the
images show landscapes of the places in which the killer lived.
This way, the movie is an act of
accusation of the alienation that forced Nagayama to become an
assassin. To help this, the movie is provided of a beautiful, sharp
soundtrack of free jazz. The musicians involved are Masahiko Togashi
(drums, vibraphone, marimba, timpani, percussions) and Mototeru
Takagi (tenor saxophone, bass clarinet).
The music from the movie was collected
in 1969 in a record titled Isolation (Take One Records), reissued in
2000 by Columbia and in 2005 by Bridge. There's lot of space in it, a
meditative atmosphere broken by the saxophones and their cries. But
it's the mix of images and music in the film by Adachi that creates a
fascinating documentary of an era, an era in which the arts were all
at the service of the revolution, of social change, and it is this
era that we want to celebrate with this post, inviting all of you to
enjoy both the music and the movie.
Žiga Koritnik has been capturing
images of musicians since 1987. He lives and works in Ljubljana,
Slovenia, where he is a regular guest on the music scene and
documents the Ljubljana jazz festival, the Druga godba festival,
concerts in Cankarjev dom and various other events across Europe,
both large and small, including Saalfelden jazz festival,
Konrontationen in Nickelsdorf, Vienna jazz festival in Austria,
Musique Mettisses in Angouleme, France, Womad in Reading, England and
the Talos Festival in Ruvo di Puglia, Musica Sulle Bocche,
Sardegna-Italy, and the Vision festival in New York. Since 1996 he
has been a resident photographer of the Skopje jazz festival in
Macedonia, where each year a calendar with his photos is published.
In 2001 he held a major exhibition at the Skopje City Museum to
celebrate the 20th anniversary of the festival, which was accompanied
by a book predominantly featuring Koritnik's photographs. In 2001 he
spent seven weeks in New York, where he documented the Vision
Festival and became acquainted with the musical and artistic events
in the city. He was afforded the opportunity to exhibit in the
Kavehaz Gallery in Soho. In June 2006 he was invited back to New York
to exhibit his work at the Vision jazz festival, at the Angel
Orensanz Center. His photographs are regularly published in Slovene
newspapers and magazines (including Delo, Mladina, Muska, and
Fotografija) as well as in international publications (Time Out, Jazz
Times, Jazziz, Signal to Noise, Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, Ballett
Internationale, Village Voice, All About Jazz, Downbeat, Jazznyt,
etc.).
He is also involved in theater photography and has regularly
collaborated with Mladinsko gledališče Ljubljana. He has worked
with Iztok's Kovač's En-Knap dance company, documenting
performances, and shooting an accompanying film of their performance
Daleč od spečih psov (Far from Sleeping Dogs), as well as a film
about composer Vinko Globokar, Krotilci časa (The Time Tamers) and
Metod Pevec’s film Beneath Her Window, which got many awards at the
Slovenian Film Festival and was the Slovenian candidate for the
Academy Awards in 2005. From 1989 until August of 2006 he has been
employed by the Slovenia’s national television station, Televizija
Slovenija, as a TV and film cameraman, and has worked with directors
Maja Weiss, Peter Braatz, Amir Muratović, Sašo Podgoršek and
Michael Benson, and others. In 2001 he documented the making of Peter
Greenaway's Map to Paradise exhibition in Ljubljana, which was later
that year followed by the publication of a book with extracts from
his documentation of Greenaway's film, the creation of which is still
underway. In 1996 he self-published a book of photographs entitled
Jazzyga! (Jazz-It!). To mark the occasion, he held an exhibition at a
major European jazz festival in Saalfelden, Austria. He was invited
back to the festival in 2003.
His photos have also appeared in many
books by other authors, including a book on the sculptor Jakov Brdar,
whose sculpting of general Rudolf Meister he documented, and Colours
of Music, published on the 20th anniversary of the Saalfelden Jazz
Festival. Žiga Koritnik also created the cover of the Slovene
translation of Miles Davis’ autobiography. He invited photographers
Mauro D'Agati, Raffaella Cavalieri, Matthiass Creutziger, Manfred
Rinderspacher, Jak Kilby, Luca D'Agostino and Enid Farber to exhibit
at the Ljubljana Jazz Festival in Slovenia. In 2004 he made a joint
photography exhibition featuring the works of Slovenian music
photographers. He has collaborated with the publishers of Mladinska
knjiga magazines, and the company Hit Nova Gorica. He is a member of
the Jazz Journalists Association. His photographs were included with
CDs released by labels such as Tzadik, Intuition Music, Nika Records,
Trost Records, The Thing Records and Leo Records. In 1997 the Italian
photo magazine Zoom featured a presentation article on Žiga
Koritnik. In 2005, his work was presented on 16 pages in Jazznin, a
Japanese jazz magazine. He held more than 60 solo and 40 group
exhibitions at home and abroad (Slovenia, Italy, USA, Austria,
Malaysia, China, Hong Kong, Germany, France, Croatia, Serbia,
Macedonia, Monte Negro, Ireland, Japan...). Since 2005, he is a
regular visitor of Sardinia, Italy, where he documented the Musica
Sulle Bocche Festival, Ai Confini tra Sardegna E Jazz Festival, and
the Isola delle Storie Festival of Literature several times. In
collaboration with Tumbarinos di Gavoi and Jana Project, he published
their book about the Sardinian carnival in 2009. He still documents
the carnival every year. In 2009 he published a book of black and
white photo impressions of Lake Bohinj, Slovenia. He regularly
organizes music and landscape photography workshops at home and
abroad. He has received the Special Recognition Award at the Olympus
photo competition in Japan, and the Zlata diploma (Golden diploma)
award for the annual report by HIT Nova Gorica. The internet edition
of Encyclopaedia Britannica has an entry on Koritnik’s first
website, created in 1996 ( www.ljudmila.org/scca/koritnik/), under
The Web's Best Sites.
The Exibition will be held from October
31 to November 6
My reflection about this problem
started quite some years ago. I was going to a concert with a friend,
a trumpet player, who told me that 'women cannot play saxophone
because their rib cage is smaller than that of a man'. Curiously
enough, in that period a woman saxophone player was emerging, Matana
Roberts, and the media dedicated to improvised music were praising
her for the freshness of her sound and vision.
The result was that I started asking
myself: 'is the avant-garde sexist?'. After all, what we needed was
Peter Brotzmann heavy blowing, Cecil Taylor strumming, Han Bennink
hammering. What about hues and shades? Obviously there was Marylin
Crispell playng piano in many records by the Anthony Braxton quartet,
there was Susie Ibarra playing drums with William Parker band 'In
Order To Survive', and the concert me and my friend trumpet player
were attending to was that of Joelle
Leandre.
But that assertion about women's rib
cage was so impressed in my mind that I started aking myself if the
seed of mysoginy was in some way present in my environment. After
all, when I was in London for six months, I attended many gigs and
festivals and I noticed only few women. To be honest, I remember four
of them – and only one from outside the Eu/US. And only few titles
in my CD collection were attributed to women.
At a certain point, I started searching
the web for articles about the subject. I read that women were mostly
hired by the music business in jazz as pianists or singers, while all
the other instruments were taken as instruments for male performers,
as an example. This is mostly true also for improvised music. Then, I
found a dissertation by Dana Reason Myers titled “The Myth of
Absence: Representation, Reception and the Music of Experimental
Women Improvisors” (2002).
Pauline Oliveros
I will talk about this thesis for all
the lenght of this article, since it's really interesting if you want
to deepen the problem of women musicians in a male-dominated world as
the one of jazz and particularly the avant-garde scene of improvised
music. The thesis of D.R. Myers starts with drawing the life and art
of seven women improvisors: Pauline Oliveros, Marylin Crispell,
Maggie Nichols, Joelle Leandre, Miya Masaoka and Susie Ibarra.
Since all these women are very well
acknowledged nowadays and are well known to my readers, I will omit
their achievements and I'll pass to the rest of the discussion. D.R.
Myers starts analyzing how Down Beat
magazine covers women in jazz from 1960 to 2000. Down Beat doesn't
cover free jazz or avant garde music in general, and his columns are
seen more as an opportunity to sell records of the concerned styles
of music (bebop, fusion, classical jazz, etc.) more than discussing
about issues of interest from the musicians themselves.
Nonetheless, Down Beat sometimes pays
hommage to the masters of free jazz and avant garde music, favoring
male participants: Cecil Taylor, Julius Hemphill, Anthony Braxton,
Anthony Davis, and Ornette Coleman among others. Occasionally a
review of a CD by Marylin Crispell appears. In addition, some
journalists, such as John Corbett, have written about male and female
improvisors. Despite his contributions, prominent American women
improvisors has been very limited.
While the magazine tends to profile
American musicians, on occasion European improvisors appear,
including Barry Guy, Evan Parker, Han Bennink and Alex Von
Schlippenbach. European women from the same generation and field are
not featured: only three have been featured in articles and only five
have received reviews in Down Beat. We obtain similar results
consulting the database of the magazine Cadence,
where, from 1976 to 2000, there are 686 articles about male musicians
and only 30 featuring women musicians.
Myra Melford
As far as the magazine Jazziz,
a special number was issued in 2000 dedicated to women artists. Only
two women, Myra Melford and Carla Bley, are involved in both creative
music and jazz music. Women instrumentalists remain marginalized, and
experimental women remain even more marginalized. Things don't get
better if we consider books. D.R. Myers analyzes the following
titles: Robert Walser's Keeping Time (1999), Ingrid Monson's Saying
Something (1996), Krin Gabbard's Jazz Among The Discourses (1995),
Paul Berliner's Thinking in Jazz (1994), John Corbett's Extended Play
(1994) and the famous book by Derek Bailey Improvisation: Its Nature
and Practice in Music (revised 1992).
All these books provide little mention
of the contributions of women improvisors, and even less on
cross-cultural aspects of the role of women in music. In contrast,
Val Wilmer's As Serious As Your Life (1977) dedicates an entire
chapter titled “You sound Good – For a Woman” in which Wilmer
discusses attitudes towards women musicians and how creative women
improvisors have helped support the male musicians they maintained
personal relationship with (Alice and John Coltrane, Fontella Bass
and Lester Bowie, Linda and Sonny Sharrock).
At this point D.R. Myers ask to herself
if the statement “sound good for a woman” necessarily imply the
notion of a woman who plays like a man, or if the comparison of
creative women's abilities to creative men's abilities engender
notions of the women being understudies of 'big brother' either
directly of indirectly.
Amina Claudine Myers answers in an
interview: “I don't recall actually hearing that statement [“sound
good for a woman”] in reference to me, but I have heard it …
years back when I was playing organ with Gene Ammons, I heard someone
saying 'she plays like a man'. One time I was referred to as a female
Mc Coy Tyner, or Cecil Taylor”. Amina Claudine Myers believes that
statements like “'she plays like a man' means being strong and
aggressive on the piano, but it's been proven that women have done
heavy work and stood up under it.”
Susie Ibarra
It is perhaps safe to assume that the
most valued physical standard would be gendered masculine. In an
article issued on Times, a newspaper from New York, of May 30, 1999,
David Yaffe describes the music of drummer Susie Ibarra depicting her
as an 'exceptional' woman. Susie Ibarra can surely physically handle
the drums differently from what many critics of the past were
thinking about women – as my friend trumpet player – but the
discussion of physicality leads readers to assume that there is a
standard by which physical qualities are to be measured and compared
in order to play the drums.
Yaffe discussion of Susie Ibarra
creates distance between her and other women drummers or women
improvisors. Allan G. Johnson makes an additional claim suggesting
that what makes some women exceptional “is their ability to embody
values culturally defined as masculine” (1997). In addition, many
reviews of women musicians call attention to personal traits,
physical attributes, or compare their music to other male musicians
obscuring why these women's voices are important to be heard.
Coverage by media is not the only
problem women approach through their journey in music. Joelle Leandre
recalls that “as a woman, it is certainly more difficult to enter
the musical 'machine'. We are the minority and it is therefore
difficult to find one's language as an artist while remaining
faithful to ourselves”. Other women have experienced a mixed
reaction to their work, as it happened to Miya Masaoka and her piece
Ritual.
Ikue Mori talks about the feeling of
being displaced in both the improvised music field and technology:
“They see the technology and they don't really consider me a
musician playing an instrument. So I feel that they don't understand.
But then I go to electronic music people's concerts. It's all male
dominated. My music made by machine is not electronic enough, like I
am too female for them”.
Maggie Nichols
Public criticism made by other
musicians or participating colleagues can also alienate women
improvisors. Maggie Nichols and Irene Schweizer, from the Feminist
Improvising Group, recount how they were ostracized at one of the
early important performances at the Total Music Meeting in Berlin in
the late 1970s. Perhaps the discontent expressed by other musicians
towards the ability of the musicians in the Feminist Improvising
Group indicates not only gender bias, but also latent gendered
conceptions of how music ought to sound or be created.
“We could be very iconoclastic and
very surreal, or very silly – recalls cellist Georgina Born – I
am sure there were good moments of music and moments of real
hilarity. Only video would do justice to the character of what we
did”. Born elaborates on how this use of humor could have led other
musicians to perceive the Feminist Improvising Group to be not a
serious band. “I am sure that humor is always a weapon from the
margins. We were also using parody and probably the grotesque”.
It's time to have a look at various
festivals of improvised music and its policies. Total Music Meeting
(Berlin) has hired only a small number of women since 1968. Peter
Brotzmann has appeared fifteen times, Evan Parker thirteen times, and
Alex Von Schlippenback twelve. Twenty-eight different women performed
at TMM. No African-American women were presented, and only three
Asians have performed (Aki Takase, Jin Hi Kim and Sainkho Namchylak).
The most women ever presented during a single festival was in 1979
with the Feminist Improvising Group (seven members).
At the Vancouver Jazz Festival, the
number of creative improvisors, both male and female, totaled 45 on
1600 artists represented from 1986, equaling 2.8%. Creative women
improvisors made up only 0.37% (six on 1600). Compared with other
festivals, Taklos (Zurich) includes a large number of women who are
not pianists and singers. This is important, since the festival more
accurately represents the diversity of creative women improvisors.
The number of women presented at this festival ranges from a minimum
of three out of thirty-tree (9%) in 2000, to a maximum of ten out of
thirty-four (29%) in 1996.
Jin Hi Kim
The festival has featured six Asian
performers and two African American women. The programming
demonstrates that there are more women who are not just pianists and
singers which should be hired. The Guelph Jazz Festival (Guelph,
Ontario) began in 1994 run by Dr. Ajay Heble, a professor of
comparative literature at the University of Guelph specializing in
post-colonial studies, and he has been the festival's founder and
artistic director.
Up until 2000, the festival has
concentrated on bringing women improvisors from Canada or the United
States and has presented a handful of women improvisers that were not
presented at the Vancouver festival, including Maggie Nichols, Amina
Claudine Myers, Pauline Olveros and percussionist Gayle Young. The
Festival de Musique Actuelle Victoriaville has programmed a variety
of Asian women improvisors and European women improvisors. The
percentage of creative women improvisors varies from 15.7% in 1985 to
7.8% in 1990, to 5.5% in 2000.
A close examination of the number of
women hired to perform at all those festivals reveals that women are
hired substantially less than their male colleagues. The attention
placed on singers and pianists in festivals and the media over other
istruments may be examined in terms of historical notions of women in
music. In her study of girls' musical education in British schools,
Lucy Green points that teachers tended to identify particular
istruments with girls.
Recent musicological studies address
the history of women pianists and singers in Western classical music,
a tradition that still has enormous influence on music industry and
social practices. During the 19th century the piano was
associated with the bourgeoisie and was almost exclusively an
instrument for females of amateur rank. Many artists used women
pianists as subjects for their paintings and drawings, capturing many
of the dominant culture attitudes towards women.
Mary Lou Williams
“The piano served as an object to be
looked at besides being heard or played … the looking was
insistently gendered, driven by the instrument's extra-musical
function within the home as the visual-sonoric simulacrum of family,
wife and mother” (Leppert, 1993). The notion of women as pianists
and singers is widespread even in contemporary jazz music. The most
famous women in jazz before the 1960s were pianists (Lil Harding,
Mary Lou Williams, Dorothy Donegan, Marian McPartland, Hazel Scott).
The prominence of women pianists still
dominates women's contribution in jazz today. But if a girl is
conditioned and trained on one instrument from elementary school, it
may be difficult to switch instruments once a certain proficiency is
achieved on one instrument. And certainly a visit to any Western
music conservatory will clearly reveal that the majority of women
tend to major in piano and voice. Many traditional music programs
foster the continuation of this kind of gendered construction in
their students and curricula.
One way for women artists to counter
some of the dominant hiring practices at festivals is to produce
their own festivals. Festivals such the Canaille Festival (Frankfurt)
co founded by trombonist Annemarie Roeflos and Irene Schweizer has
created a space for many women improviors. Joelle Leandre, Elvira
Plenar, Maggie Nichols, violinist Maartje Ten Hoorn and Marylin Mazur
have played there.
City of Women, a festival held in
Ljubljana, was started in 1995 with the specific goal of providing
space for women artists, musicians and theorists. The 2001 call for
artists posted by the organizers is especially telling: “City of
Women's main theme for the first edition of the new millennium is
inspired by an in 1989 written, unpublished poem by Audre Lord: 'Most
people in the world are Yellow, Black, Brown, Poor, Female,
Non-Christian and do not speak English.
Joelle Leandre
By the year 2000 the 20 largest cities
in the world will have one thing in common: none of them will be in
Europe none in the United States'. In addition to this we also want
to stress that a large percentage of the European and North-American
population is not 'white'. 'Western society' is multi-ethnic and
multi-cultural. In this new global contest it is not surprising that
the main creative centers, the contemporary art talent is less and
less to be found in 'white' cultural fortresses.
With this in mind we have decided to
call the 7th edition: YEAR ONE, and select only artists
and theoreticians 'of colors'”. However, the women programmed by
the festival still legitimizes the most famous women (Marylin
Crispell, Lindsay Cooper, Ikue Mori, Tenko, Meredith Monk and Zeena
Parkins) and is not committed to the younger generation of
improvisors.
Another festival, Kosmos Frauenraum, is
held in Vienna. There, in 1997 a group of women formed LINK. Part of
its mission was to raise awereness for the need of women-centered
performance space in Austria. They obtained from the governement a
space, a cinema called 'Rondell' as their homebase. After a while,
the governement retracted their promise and so LINK squatted the
'Rondell' for the next months.
Performances, readings, concerts as
well as actions of protest took place not only at the 'Rondell' but
all over Vienna. Finally LINK found the cinema 'Kosmos' suitable to
substitute the 'Rondell' and the space was named 'frauen.raum' and
opened in 2000. In 2002 Kosmos presented an international festival of
music entitled 'Here I am': artists invited included trombone player
and violinist Annemarie Roelofs, The United Women's Orchestra, Joelle
Leandre, sound artist Gabriele Proy, Susie Ibarra, trombonist Abbie
Conant and Sylvie Courvoisier.
Another example of a festival open to
women is the Vision Festival, based in New York and founded by
bassist William Parker and her wife Patricia Nicholson. The 2002
Vision Festival reveals a much stronger commitment to
African-American improvisors and featured women include Joelle
Leandre, bassoonist Karen Borca, and the vocalists Ellen Christi and
Jayne Cortez.
Ellen Christi
In March 2002 the San Francisco Jazz
Festival presented “Women and Jazz: A Panel Discussion” featuring
writer and activist Angela Davis, musicologist Sherri Tucker,
composer Maria Schneider, pianist Mary Watkins and Susie Ibarra. One
would argue that in the near future things will go better for women
improvisors, but the path is still long and full of obstacles.
The lesson we can learn is that the
world of art is not ripped apart from society, and that it reflects
the same dynamics. This means that the music we all listen to
reflects the dynamics of power we all live through our society and
that a music that reflects change and committment is still far from
us. This is also an explanation to the problem I raised up with my
last reviews.
The records I reviewed, all by male
musicians, are records of 'post avant garde' music. A music that
takes improvisation mixing it with other styles of music from the
20th century. A music that has its reference in the past,
that doesn't look at the future. A music that reflects a period of
stagnation. Maybe if in the future men and women will collaborate
together, there will be a new music, reflecting new values and new
musical ideas – think about the Feminist Improvising Group as an
example.
Until that moment, I expect to
encounter music that reflects the past and the status quo, as the
records I reviewed in the past months. It is necessary to include
different genders and races in our culture if we want it to be
renewed. If we fail this target, we will listen to music created
following old schemes and old dreams, a music that is far from being
near to us, a music that will be conservative.
If you want to read Dana Reason Myers
dissertation in its entirety, follow this
link.
At the beginning in the 1950s there was
bebop, with his harmonic complexities. Then, in the 1960s, you had
free jazz, with his stress on the melodic aspects of music and
glossolalia. Then again, in the 1970s, it was the time of the Chicago
avant garde, with his attempt to revisite the structures of the music
and its openness to contemporary music, and the European improvised
music, with every musician involved in creating their own language
detached completely from the blues. And finally, in the 1980s and
1990s, it was the time of the post-modern avant garde, with the likes
of John Zorn, Ikue Mori, Zeena Parkins, in which languages were
colliding to create games with codes.
What happened in the 2000s? In part you
have young musicians as Mary Halvorsom, who works on creating a
language of its own collaborating with masters as Anthony Braxton,
pushing the evolution on the next level, on the other hand you have a
myriads of others young musicians who are not part of a movement –
not at least while developing their own language – who are creating
music taking here and there from the history of music itself; they
have for sure mentors and masters, but they don't affect necessarily
their development as musicians.
This younger generation explore the
values of the music that came before them and then they pick some
elements useful to create their own experimentations. But this time,
there's no such a movement on their back. They're lonely. I called
this music 'post avant garde', and the record Triplain by Paolo Sorge
(reviewed
here) is a good example of this music. On the other hand you have
Sorge's scholar Santi Costanzo, who is clearly another representative
member of this 'post avant garde' style.
His new record Deeprint (Improvvisatore
Involontario, 2016) is a good example of this new tendency. As the
guitarist-composer affirms, this record has three elements:
seriality, extemporaneous composition, and free improvisation.
Seriality is a reference to the classical contemporary music of the
XX century, and it's related to melodic, polyphonic and polyrhithmic
aspects of the music. Extemporaneous composition is present in the
Prologue and Epilogue of the record, while free improvisation is
sometimes guided through the use of conductions.
What is this music we're talking about
here? It is still avant-garde? The press talked for a long time about
'post-rock' during the 2000s, and it was a music thatwas opening for
sure the boundaries of rock music. But it is this 'post avant garde'
music opening the boundaries of the avant-garde? For sure no. It is
music you can enjoy through more listenings, finding new nuances
every time, as it ever happens with complex music. But it is a music,
at least as far as we listened to nowadays, that draw elements from
the past.
It is nostalgic music for nostalgic
times, and I want to state that this is not the fault of the single
musicians, but it is fault of our times: every art is becoming more
and more conservative, and this is what's happening also to music.
But first become politics. They're influencing music, as far as I can
hear. What we can do, so? First thing is try to know everything about
the past of music – that's why Complete Communion is devoted to
document the AACM, the free jazz movement and recently also
contemporary music, with the biography of Iannis Xenakis you all read
this week.
We need to deepen the past of avant
garde music, we need to master it, we need to know more about it.
This is an era in which musicians are left alone, they have
difficulties in sharing their music, they have difficulties in
creating it. There's no such a movement as they were in the past.
This is an era of nostalgia: everybody is looking at the past, and is
trying to travel across countries that were still covered. We need to
widen our knowledge of the past, in order to help the music to find
out new ways to express itself.
As far as this record, I invite you to
listen carefully this quartet, since its combination of atonality,
electric guitar, free movements of the horns and polyrhythms will not
let you disappointed. But I invite you also to discover the music of
the past, so come back to my Xenakis biography and start listening to
new worlds. This is a strange era, and we need all our resources to
put the barricades in their correct order again, to not let pass the
Order of Homogenisation.
Line Up: Santi Costanzo, guitar and
composition; Fabio Tiralongo, flute, soprano and tenor saxophone;
Carlo Cattaneo, alto flute and baritone saxophone; Alessandro Borgia,
drums. Tracklist: Prologo, Lai, Audire Aude!, Jumpfive, Milea, Sphere
Theories, Ziqqurat, Epilogo
In 1967 Xenakis becomes teacher of
music at the Indiana University, in Bloomington, U.S. He' not
completely keen on teaching, but he accepts since he wants to realize
a centre of research devoted to the relationships between music and
mathematics. Unluckily almost all of the funds are redirected for the
Vietnam war. In 1966 the composer resigns, and he comes back to Paris
where he found the CEMAMu (Centre d'Etudes Mathématiques et
Musicales, a non-profit organization dedicated to the study of the
application of information technology to music). During these years
he will realize the Polytopes, architectural spaces that today would
be defined 'multimedia centre' and 'site-specific', dedicated to
performances involving compositions made of light and sound.
The Polytopes (from the Greek
'poli'=multi and 'tòpos'=space) represent an idea of art that
integrates sound, light and space. In that sense, polytopes are not
only ancestors of the soundart, since the sound sculptors of our
times are always working in a given space, and they sculpt it after
choosing it, not before projecting it, and this is Xenakis' most
complete realization, today not overtaken. The architecture of
specific spaces created to enjoy live music and the creation of its
own tools so to realize electronic music come together in Xenakis'
mind and activity. When reading his writings of the 1980s, it is
clear that what pushes the composer towards this form of total art is
the same anxiety he has since the days of stochastic compositions:
"Can we do tabula rasa of all the known compositional rules?",
and "what a rule is?".
Since 1952 to 1956 Xenakis elaborates
in first person in Fortran language a program in order to obtain
scores that realize on cartesian axes analitic geometry, composing
the pieces of the ST Series. The use of the computer as a
compositional tool helps him to overtake 'the art of the fugue',
which is transforming a theme following the rules of transposition,
augmentation, temporal decrease, etc. inventing, instead, his own
musical forms. The ST Series comes from applying to the stochastics
the 'Markov chains' (responsible of the developing of computer
science and of linguistics, at least until Noam Chomsky proved they
were useless in that field).
Not only probability, but also
repetition, determinism, so to measure the symmetry of a composition
(Nomos Alpha is an example, again): 'repetition' is the definition of
one of the smallest conditions to have a 'rule', following Newton.
Nomos Alpha is also the best example of 'symbolic music' realized by
the composer. Unsatisfied by the structures of Western music, for its
limits in polyphonic development, as far as the time logic, Xenakis
points at the popular music, in particular the Bizantine popular
music, for his use of the pedal in vocal polyphony so that it creates
a new tension, the same that will occurr in the music of Debussy or
Schoenberg. The composition is divided in 24 sections, and it is
composed by two layers: the first is composed by a group of 24
elements, while the second, in contrast, is no more determined by the
group theory but it follows a continuous, evolving movement.
Commissioned in 1965 by Radio Bremen for cellist Sigfried Palm, and
dedicated to the mathematicians Aristossenus, Evariste Galois and
Felix Klein, Nomos Alpha represents perfectly the dialectic of
transformation of time between en temps and hors temps from which the
idea of 'amnesia' comes ('to leave at the entrance the emotional and
qualitative burdens passed on by musical traditions' taking under
exam only 'the abstract relationships in every event' [Iannis
Xenakis, Musiques Formelles, 1963]) and that represents the attempt
to recover in music the 'ubiquity' typical of subatomic physics.
The Polytopes are the places in which
to present music not only composed, but also played by computers. The
Polytope of Montreal has been realized in 1967. Commissioned for that
year Expo, it has been realized with wide concave and convex mirrors
suspended to electric cables reproducing 'visual melodies' through
lightning sources. The music created for the polytope will lead to
Kraanerg, a piece of 75 minute of lenght, without any inner
subdivision, including instead 20 moment of silence of different
lenghts integrals to the development of the piece itself. The first
section of Kraanerg contains equal portions of live orchestra and
recorded tape, the second section is mostly live orchestra, and the
third is almost entirely recorded tape. Performed for the first time
at the National Arts Center in Ottawa in 1969, and conceived as
accompaniment for Roland Petit's ballet company, Kraanerg has been
performed until 1972 and then forgotten until 1988, when a new
version coreographed by Graeme Murphy took it at a new peak, with a
performance almost exclusively instrumental. The title of the piece
comes from Greek, and it means 'accomplished act', referring to the
youth movement of those years and the socio-political changes wished
for.
The Polytopes diverge the one from the
other for the spatial-temporal disposition of music and listeners.
The Polytopes of Persepolis and Micenae are the only ones with a
fixed stationing for the listeners while sound and light sources are
dispersed. Works as Terretektorh and Nomos Gamma presuppose, on the
contrary, the listeners to be dispersed between the musicians. The
Polytope of Montreal sees the audience at the center of the
architecture, with the light and sound sources around the audience.
During the 1970s Xenakis teaches
composition and gives public lectures. He creates an atelier as the
IMAMu at the University of Indiana, he teaches at the Sorbonne since
1973 to 1989, at the Gresham College in London since 1975 to 1978,
and he can see his works performed even in Iran. His last work,
O-mega, is accomplished before Alzheimer prevents him to compose. He
falls into a coma at the beginning of February, 2001 and he dies in
Paris few days later.
In "Art/Sciences, Allianges",
Xenakis formulates the link between the arts, and between art and
science, already affirmed in his own works: he uses the compositional
methods of Metastasis in order to realize the shells of the Phillips
Pavillion. 'Allianges' in French means alloy, but it is to be
interpreted more as 'synthesis', than in the sense of a perfect
fusion between parts. The base of this fusion is Pithagorean math,
with his implied links between arithmetics, astronomy, geometry and
music. In the following articles collected in "Musiques
Formelles" the word 'formalization' is substituted with
'axiomatization'. An entirely 'axiomatic' composition in the opus of
Xenakis is Nomos Alpha. Examples of 'axiomatics' developed by the
composer is the 'reticulum theory', on whose base has been realized
the first part of Jonchaies, and the 'vectorial spaces'.
If it is possible to compare exactly
composition and theory in Xenakis, it's because the idea of
formalization, of 'mechanism', has a practical goal. There is an
independence of theory from composition, as in hindustani music "a
book of theory cannot be distinguished from a book of religious
teachings and [...] the purely theoretical instructions the musician
obtains are almost exclusively aesthetical, not technical [...] since
he finds a practical instruction among an active musician"
[Derek Bailey: Improvisation and practice in music, Da Capo Press,
1993]. A reference to an improvised style of music helps us to hint
at the distance between this world and the one of Xenakis ("The
expression aleatory music today means improvised music. Using this
way the word 'alea', that in scientifical terms implies casuality,
means making an abuse, and it reflects a counterfeiting and
sentimental attitude" [Iannis Xenakis, "Ad Libitum",
in The World of Music, vol. 9, no. 1, 1967]) and to have a clue on
John Cage ("he introduced a new freedom in music, and its
realitazion, as it happened in painting with Jackson Pollock"
[Iannis Xenakis, "Su John Cage", 1993, in "Universi
del Suono", Ricordi, 2003]).
Xenakis developed first of all a
compositional method, the 'stochastic theory' – the use of function
of distribution of probability in order to compose instrumental
music, then the theory of games, the symbolic logic, the groups
theory, the reticula theory, the stochastic dynamic synthesis –
the use of functions of distribution of possibilities applied to the
synthesis of sound, the theory of arborescence, the theory of
brownian movements, the theory of cellular robots, and finally the
UPIC system (Poliagogic Unit of CEMAMu), a technological invention.
It's now time to look closer to some
compositions, in order to verify how theory and compositional
practice intertwine. Metastasis, whose title means 'after the
stasis', it's a composition for orchestra of 61 instruments: 12
winds, 7 percussions played by 3 musicians, 46 strings, and it's long
about 9 minutes. It ain't a stochastic composition, but a piece based
on the idea of continuity and discontinuity, something of interest
for Parmenides and, after, Albert Einstein – the relationship
between matter and energy: if you modify one of the two variables,
you act also on the other, and at the same time the composition is
influenced by Olivier Messiaen and his theory of rhythms. In 1954
Xenakis was still studying composition with him.
The ideas of rhythms and of
continuity/discontinuity help Xenakis to put together the linear
perception of the music with a relativistic vision of time. It all
starts from the sounds of nature, about whom Xenakis wrote in his
writings about stochastic music. The aim of the composer is to "blow
up the frames of representation" [Makis Solomos, Apollo e
Dioniso, gli scritti di Xenakis, in "Universi del suono",
Ricordi, 2003] so to obtain that the events you listen are not evoked
or represented, but burst in through music. We're not that far from
Antonin Artaud's 'Theatre of Cruelty'. If in Pléiades-Mélanges, as
an example, at a certain point we can hear a group of percussions
that hint to something that can remember the shuffling of horses,
while the ones coming immediately before can evoke some war drums,
their value is never descriptive, exactly as it occurs in baroque
music.
"The textures act directly,
without passing through language, through representation, through
codification: they provoke a physical shock. Their violence is a
mean to divert the listening from the research of a 'meaning' [...].
There's no need to look for a reality outside the perceptible".
[Ibid.]There's no duality, in Xenakis, between nature and culture:
nature is the only thing that exists, and if there is tension,
conflict, it is because "composing is a fight [...] a fight to
produce something interesting". From there it comes the hint to
the inner time, and the interest of the composer for the evolution of
human perception, starting from the study of the perception of the
time in prehistoric societies and the attention on Jean Piaget's
experiences on the development of that perception in children. The
time itself is nothing more than a surface phenomenon of a deeper
reality, the movement ('déplacement'), what Xenakis try to reproduce
with his music.
Strings open Metastasis in unison,
before they part in 46 different segments, one for each instrument.
Intensity, register and density are the variables on which the score
lingers, taking the place of progressive linearity of traditional
scores, included serial scores. First and third movement of the
composition doesn't have a theme or a motif, relying entirely on the
force of the idea of time. The second movement, instead, has a
melodic element played by the strings, and conceived following the
dodecaphonic method of Schonberg and elaborated using the Fibonacci
series, a technique that Bartòk used for some of his own themes. The
score has been written on a cartesian diagram, then translated
tri-dimentionally into the structrure of the Phillips Pavillion.
Pithoprakta ('acts of probability') is
born from the idea of developing musically a sound matter using the
applications of Boltzmann and Maxwell and the Newton calculation of
temperature and pressure of gas. The composition is conceived as a
modulation from order to disorder, realized through a 'swarming of
molecules' whose parameters submitted to the calculation of
probabilities are density and degrees of order, whose diagram has
been realized thinking about gaussian distribution of the height. The
two compositions are the result of a reflection towards the problem
of how to realize a musical work making tabula rasa of the previous
compositional methods. "To compose is to fight" said
Xenakis, "a fight for the existence. A fight to be. When instead
I imitate the past, I do nothing in reality, so I don't exist. [...]
The difference is the proof of existence, of knowledge, is
participation to the things in the world". [Bàlint Andràs
Varga, "Conversations with Iannis Xenakis, Faber & Faber,
1996]
"The soul is a fallen God. Only
the ek-stasis (the exit out of the Self) can reveal its true nature.
We need to escape the Circle of Birth (reincarnations) through
purifications (katharmoi) and sacraments (orghia), tools of the
ekstasis"
-- Iannis Xenakis, "La voie de la
recherche et de la question", 1965
It's 1958. Architect Le Corbusier and
his scholar Iannis Xenakis are working on commission at the Philips
Pavillion for the Bruxelles Fair. Composer Edgard Varèse is engaged
in the sequence of sonic events that will compose his Poème
Electronique, whose name comes from a statement of the architect when
he had the assignment: "I will not create a building, but an
electronic poem in which colors, images, sounds, and architecture
will merge so that the audience will be completely dominated"
[A. Capanna, "Il Padiglione Phillips a Bruxelles", Turin,
2000]. Xenakis, assistant of Le Corbusier since ten years, is working
on the analytical study, and his work is based on the same ideas that
led him few year before to give life to music works starting from the
intuition – inversely pythagorean – of making music using
mathematical formulas, until the definitive overtaking of seriality
and the creation of the first 'stochastic' works as Metastasis
(presented for the first time to the Donaueschinghen Festival in
1955), Pithoprakta (1956) and Achorripsis (1957).
Those are the years in which Xenakis
issues some articles in the magazine “Gravesaner Blätter” by
Hermann Scherchen, later published on the volume "Musiques
Formelles" (1963, reedited and expanded in 1971 and in 1990),
writings that mark the decade that is more related to the
'formalization' of the vast theoretical and musical work of the Greek
composer. Twenty years later, during an interview, at the question
"Doesn't mathematic interest you anymore?", Xenakis answers
"It was an idea, today we need new ones, maybe more disturbing,
more strong" [Anne Rey, "Expliquez-Vous Xenakis",
Le Monde de la Musique no. 71, october 1984]. The 'disturbing'
Xenakis hint at is the movement through time and space, and the
primal chaos, and the energy under the phenomenic coordinates of time
and space. In the same historical period who produced structuralism
and the phenomenology of perception, both signs of the evanescence of
Décartes and his self-consciousness, one of the two cornerstones of
the last centuries along with Newton physics. A link between Apollo
and Dyonisus, science and nature, whose analysis, as Makis Solomos
underlines in his essay included in the Italian version of "Universi
del Suono. Scritti e interventi 1955-1994" (Ricordi, 2003) is
far from being understood in its own complexity, gives life to the
art of Xenakis, as long as Nietzsche's philosophy.
Born in Braila, Romania, on May 29,
1922, at the age of twelve Iannis Xenakis move with his family in
Athens. Here, he study architecture and engineering, quitting in
1941, when the Nazis occupy Greece. Soldier for the national
Resistance, and after for the Communist Resistance, in 1945 the
future architect and composer refuses to enter the national military
guard created by the British protectorate in order to defeat the
partisans, and he becomes a clandestine and is condemned to death in
1947 as a terrorist. That same year in September he leaves Greece for
Paris, initially a stage befor going in the U.S.
In the European capital he starts
studying composition under Darius Milhaud and Arthur Honegger, then
he leaves to study with Olivier Messiaen. Graduated in engineering in
1947, the following year Xenakis enters in Le Corbusier's studio, and
with him he designs different works applying on architecture the same
principles of his research on composition. Since his "The Crisis
of Serial Music" (1955) Xenakis attracts resentments and
critiques, first of all for being not satisfied with a way to think
about music whose crisis at the time was not completely evident.
Between the lines, his personal vision emerges: "Music is a
message conveyed by the matter between a man and another man, or a
message of men to other men, so it has to speak to all the range of
perceptions and human intelligence [...]. We need to establish a
constant flow between the biological nature of the man and the
buildings of his intelligence, otherwise the abstracts developments
of the music of today are at risk of loosing themselves into a desert
of infertility." ["La crise de la musique sérielle",
1955]
If the first works of the composer,
from 1948 to 1953, are still ideally linked to the ideas developed by
Gyorgy Ligeti and Franco Evangelisti, recovering popular tradition,
it's the conflict with serialism to push Xenakis to develop new
compositional tools. About serialism, its more evident limit is, for
him, the predominance of the frequency of sound over intensity and
timbre, and the predominance of quality and geometry of sound, whose
result is a shape consisting primarily in a multilinear manipulation
of the fundamental series. This is very limiting for Xenakis, at the
point that, when in 1958 he will dedicate a text to Alban Berg,
noticing the affinity with his first steps, he will riaffirm that "it
is an error to say that dodecaphonic music abolished tonal functions
replacing them with other functions. It is possible instead to evoke
the influence of the Renaissance's polyphony." ["Alban Berg
le dernier romantique", Le Figaro, february 7, 1985]
Between his contemporaries, Xenaki has
affinities with Varèse – according to whom music is "the
intelligence of the sound becoming body" [Edgard Varèse,
"Ecrits", 1983] – since both are researching a
rationality not foreign to the inner and visceral sense of the sound
matter. This necessity has been also interpreted biographically,
since the composer himself made statements as the following:
"Everybody has observed auditory phenomenons of a great
politicized crowd of dozens or one hundred thousand people. The human
river articulates one rallying cry with an unvarying rhythm. Then
another rallying cry is launched from the head of the demonstration
spreading to the end of the crowd, and it substitutes the first
rallying cry. A wave of transition [...]. Dozens of thousands machine
guns and the whistles of the bullets add themselves to that total
disorder. [...] Stochastic laws of those events, emptied of their
political or moral content are the laws of cicadas or rain. They are
the laws of the passing from pefect order to total disorder, in a
continuous or explosive way. They are stochastic laws".[Iannis
Xenakis, "La musique stochastique: éléments sur le procédé
probabilistes de composition musicale", 1961]
