Terry Riley “Organum for Stefano” (I Dischi di Angelica, 2022)

During these days I’m a little excited since on September 18, 2022 Terry Riley will perform in a small church in Milano with an ensemble of chosen musicians, and I have heard the concert will last 2 hours and a half. So it came to my mind that this year I Dischi di Angelica, a label devoted to document the most important concerts of the Angelica Festival, has released an album of solo organ and voice by Riley himself, an important album since it is devoted to a departured collaborator of the composer: the Italian excellent cellist Stefano Scodanibbio.

Terry Riley started playing piano during the 1950s studying in various conservatories, and during the following decade he toured in Europe with some jazz musicians. But even if Riley was keen on improvising, he wasn’t keen on closing himself into a given format, and wanted to experiment something different, something more. That’s why with his friend La Monte Young he gave life to the first performances of what was called after ‘minimalism’: a music made of musical cells repeated through a phase shifting in order that with the proceeding of the time the music itself would become slightly different from what it was at first.

Later Riley took singing lessons with the master of indian music Pandit Pran Nath, doing many tour with him at the voice and tablas. In 1968 and 1969 Riley released through Columbia Records his most famous albums, highly influentials not only in contemporary music, but also on rock music, electronic music and a vast land of unclassified sonorous objects. Riley was aware of the music around him, and as far as jazz he praised the likes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Gil Evans and Charles Mingus as the most influential figures on his own music, even if indian music, that at least was so important for Davis and Coltrane between many other genres, is clearly audible between his many sonic roots.

Luckily enough we had the opportunity to hear this Organum For Stefano on record, since I’m told that the real concert was affected by a bad acoustics especially in the side aisles. But the recorded performance is excellent, so the document of that particular night maintains his crystalline purity, his moving intention and beauty. Organum, titled from the instrument Riley played that night in the church, is partly a composition and partly full of improvised parts.

Obviously if Terry Riley is so highly praised, it is because his music has evolved during the years and not only he and his friend La Monte Young had an important role in constructing the sound of some of the very first pieces of the seminal band Velvet Underground and other peculiar ‘rock’ bands, but differently from other mimimalist composers they didn’t rest on their laurels, so to speak, but emerged as innovators even when they had to abandon the musical shapes they forged.

The first 3 minutes movement is introduced by a series of organ drones, evolving into a solemn melody. Something many lovers of rock music from the Seventies would like to listen as an introduction to some granitic riff of guitar (as The Who did in their Baba O’Riley). But it’s not the case: the music evolves in the 8 minutes second movement, where Riley accompanies the organ with the voice and we can clearly hear his Pran Nath-influences. India is alive in this performance, and we can see it as in a beautiful sonorous landscape depicted by the voice and the organ for us all.

Not having seen the sheet of this music I cannot know for sure what part has been written and what have been improvised, but I can guess that the melodic chant was the point of departure for the successive sonorous manipulations. I imagine you the listener lost in this beautiful song for a long time collaborator as Stefano Scodanibbio was, and so I can believe that the people who will enjoy this album will lost themselves into the depth of the feelings Riley has experienced while playing for his friend.

It will be like that for all the third 8 minutes part, featuring some kind of fugue-like movement, while the fourth, lasting 11 minutes, is full of reference to carnatic music and singing again. This blending of different traditions, from east to west, is a characteristic of many music from the Seventies. In a recent interview to Giampiero Cane, an important and interesting Italian critic author of the seminal book Canto Nero, Riley himself have told that in that period music was a tool to expand the consciousness, while during the decades after it was all locked inside academia or the media trends.

The 3 minutes of the fifth movement see the organ dominate in a beautiful melancholic but again solemn hymn, while the last 7 minutes are a hint at the hystorical minimalism, with two different melodies, composed both by few sonic cells but the second becoming here and there a drone, are intertwining the one into the other. The effect is highly dramatic, and it is the best closing for a farewell piece of music. Obviously the textures implied here are of different consistencies, and this add to the music another level of tension.

Don’t miss this record, and if you’re in Italy don’t miss Terry Riley live on September 18, 2022 at the Churc of San Vito al Giambellino, with the Orchestra Cantelli and the participants to Riley’s workshop of collective improvisation. I imagine it will be a intriguing night and another step into the career of a master musician in his own right. Possibly this tuesday I’ll report you another concert, that of Rob Mazurek again in Milan presenting a new project. 

 

Unaccomplished identities through unheard sounds

Words + Photos (except the first): Gian Paolo Galasi

This short essay is a first reconnaissance on some interesting points I became aware of in developing my knowledges on improvised music. While I'm planning to develop more with time, I want to start from a couple of books I discussed with their author last year through a brief email exchange. 

I'm trying to put down more than a simple 'review' of this works, while at the same time I'm trying to further develop some skills and knowledges whose importance is growing the more I listen to music and I get in touch with musicians.

While discussing about the subject with Davide Sparti, he was also telling me that during this year, 2012, the Oxford University Press would issue wide portions of his writings in English. I hope so to thank him for his availability and his advices, and for some of his writings on Michel Foucault he gifted me with. 

If improvised and avant garde music are becoming objects of academic studies, this can probably mean that one of their cycle is closing, or still come to an end, leaving space to new developments in the future. I tried to discuss some of the thesis included in the last couple of books by Italian Associate Professor in Literature and Philosophy at the University of Pisa Davide Sparti, with some improvisers coming from different parts of Europe to play in Italy, or known through my trips in Europe, last year. 

Davide Sparti started publishing his studies on the relationships between identity, conscience, recognizement and their ethics - a study coming out of his previous works on Ludwig Wittengstein, Annah Arendt and Michel Foucault - and music as a product and a producer of changes in the experience of the musicians in those fields, in 2005. 

Suoni inauditi. L'improvvisazione nel jazz e nella vita quotidiana (in English: Unheard sounds. Improvising in jazz and everyday life) is a serious and well developed attempt on saying something interesting on jazz starting not from musicology but from sociology and philosophy of language, avoiding to use jazz as an excuse or external element. 

Sparti focus on 'improvisation as a generative act', not as 'matching with the realm of freedom' but involved in a tradition shared and in a practical knowledgde, and on improvisation as a cultural, more than only musical, practice, so to use it as a paradigm for every shared action in society. 

While passing through Plato, Aristotheles, Descartes, Leibnitz, until Freud and Marx, it is clear that in Western knowledge from a certain point the visual paradigm prevailed against the aural - how much I'd love to point at this, developing further, but nonetheless what Sparti want to show here is the possibility to use sociology in order to become more conscious about how much of society enters into music and how much sonic constructions are affected by it. 

While he's distinguishing his studies from formalist musicology, I can state that in my experience, being in both UK and Italy, even without taking Sparti's books as a direct reference, my impressions on improvised (but not only) music in both countries is that there are subtle, but unavoidable inflences, between the culture 'deciding', as Sparti says, if a 'family of sound events' is acceptable for a composer or a player, the self perception of musicians and their roles in their respective environments, even if this would lead to a wider discussion; putting Derek Bailey's Improvisation: its nature and practice in music under the same focus, it is clear why European improvisers were through the decades trying both to unmark themselves from the shapes improvised music developed through other countries - e.g. jazz, blues, ragas, baroque music - and sometimes also from their own previous results, as the accounts by the likes of Gavin Bryars and John Stevens can directly testify.

Christian Weber and Joke Lanz, Oslo, Jan. 2011

If improvising is a cultural practice, it is interesting to read Adorno about jazz, as on Sparti's second chapter, aptly titled "history of a reciprocal misuderstanding": for the Frankfurt philosopher, history of jazz is 'an history of regression'. Adorno was studying jazz only as part of a wider analysis on culture and business, pointing at the relationship between individual creativity and 'administered' society, and the attitude of most of the listeners as 'consumers', something every old, or modern jazzman or improviser would subscribe for sure - how about how much a record can really testify of the music and the creative processes behind it, once diffused on a stereo through a room, as an example?

Adorno was misinterpreting jazz as a practice - the example of his encounter with Leonard Feather at a Johnny Hodges concert at the NY Cotton Club is inspiring - but he was on the other hand really digging the risks of the Dialectics of the Enlightenment, that is, the business industry that 'produced' jazz 'as entertainment'. That's why Adorno didn't get, since his first 1933 writings, through his last 1962 Uber Jazz, the moments of transition and the breaking points in the jazz continuum, while his greater quality was pointing at the contradictions between creativity and industry. 

Maja S.K. Ratkje and Zeena Parkins, Oslo, Jan. 2011

In fact, while Ornette Coleman or John Coltrane were giving life to a music whose polyrhythms, polyphonies and multi-tonalities were breaking the accepted cathegories of 'beauty' in music, abolishing also the preconceived hierarchies between musicians - this is true also for the second Miles Davis quintet - as John Cage or Lennie Tristano were experimenting with indeterminacy and improvisation, Adorno efforts were related to denying the ideological conciliation between individual and society, not the ideal of this conciliation. 

If art and music, far from reflecting one-sidely social reality, are nontheless not completely far from it - as in the case of Kafka, Beckett, or Schoenberg - they can, as 'expressive vehicle for a subjectivity disfigured by society itself', give a hint at a 'right path', in form of a 'negative utopia'. But jazz, as Sparti points out correctly, is far from the Western categories of the 'esthetics of the negative' - I strongly invite the reader to skim through Giampiero Cane Canto Nero. Il Free Jazz degli Anni Sessanta in order to deepen some useful tools in this sense - while at the opposite, as Sparti states, jazz instead 'reveals a certain critical, experimental, approach related to individual expression that Adorno was taking as the distinctive feature of the avant-garde music'. 

Wadada Leo Smith, Gunther 'Baby' Soemmer, Vitry-Sur-Seine, Feb. 2011

The third chapter of the book is focused on 'improvisation as proficency', in which composition and performance can 'converge through time' until 'composing in real time'; gaining fluency - a feature of every language - requires time, efforts, and soaking up knowledges. It would be really interesting - that's what I did with some 'contemporary' musicians, but mostly in fits and starts - to discuss the five requirements attributed by Sparti to improvising - indivisibility, originality, irreversibility, responsiveness - and the differences he recognizes between improvisation and conversation - for Sparti, in jazz you always have to say something 'new', while in conversations if you don't use common expressions, you are at risk of being not understood; not every musician I told about the subject seems to be necessarily 'pro' - but even not necessarily 'contrary'.

Charles Gayle, Novara, June 2011

Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith told me, as an example, that 'no one is experimenting today with new ways of expression', sounding as 'no one has this courage now', while at the opposite Peter Broetzmann told me 'I don't believe in new forms in arts'. But Broetzmann is both a musician and a painter, and I can recognize at least in some of his projects a direct confluence of both - as an example in Die Like a Dog, even if, when asked, he told me 'maybe'; another example of this convergence can be trumpeter and painter Bill Dixon - while at the opposite, bassist Christian Weber wrote me 'it would disturb me to work with the ambition to create something new everytime i play (since it is a fixed structure it's somehow limited and can become a formula too). But i feel the necessity of inventing anything a play in the moment it appears'. 

This last statement goes on the same direction of Davide Sparti statements, since his idea of 'jazz habitus' - a Latin word used also by anthropologist Marcel Mauss for a knowledge coming directly from the body - involves a convergence of body and mind through a training whose progress is oriented by discontinuous changes that it would be impossible to measure on every performance. Not that far from what Viram Jasani was referring to Derek Bailey about the way an Indian musician learns to play a raga from his master, or from what Johann David Heinichen wrote about baroque music in his Der General Bass in der Komposition (1711). 

Mary Halvorsom, London, Nov. 2011

What I would love to underline in discussing Sparti's Suoni Inauditi here is that his perspective on jazz as a tool for the develpment of the personality and identity of the musicians themselves is part of a bigger picture most of the musicians quite often show to be aware of, even using a different language, as Anthony Braxton in his Tri-Axium Writings, in which music is part of a wider knowledge about man, and his cultural tools as a way to relate to reality and to itself. 

As in chapter four, dedicated to interactivity, what really musicians 'give and take' the one to and from the other is an open possibility to express themselves out of the gained patterns of (technical) behaviour, in a way that can also be developed outside of the music field, at least potentially. 

In this sense it is fully comprehensible why a percussionist as Milford Graves - see William Parker interview with him on his book Conversations issued last year for Rogue Art - relates the art of percussions to some personal research through the field of 'alternative' medical sciences, as well as some statements by altoist Steve Lacy on staying 'on the border' as part of the creative process. 

In 2010 L'Identità incompiuta. Paradossi dell'Improvvisazione Musicale (tr.: 'The Unfinished Identity. Paradoxes of Improvisation in Music'), Davide Sparti goes even further in reading improvisation and its relationships between music and identity, using as references mostly Hannah Arendt theory of human action and Michel Foucault technologies of the self. 

For those readers not completely at ease with those categories, I'd like at firt to invite them to listen to double bassist and composer Stefano Scodanibbio Il Cielo sulla Terra, a piece of contemporary music whose libretto was composed by Giorgio Agamben, a disciple of both Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, as related to similar issues, an effort to give a comprehensive look on the development of avant garde music as an attempt to give men useful tools to regain their comprehension of life and themselves in their entirety against the oppression of an alienated, as in contemporary Western societies, life. 

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt discuss about action and its effects over recognizement, as a production of a potential 'new identity'. Under this focus, the attempts of many jazz players trying not to reproduce themselves and to avoid repetition as an esthetic trap is at one corner, while the other extreme is loosing their own identities - and as consequence, the opportunity to play and to be heard, this is the 'paradox' of the title. If this is particularly true for the 'avant garde' movements of the past - AACM, Sun Ra Arkestra, Eric Dolphy - this frame is used to explain also the attitude of a musician like Sonny Rollins even today.

On the other hand, Foucault's 'technologies of the self' are in Sparti's view an attempt to preserve the musician through his journey from the desertion of the common shores of a certain solidified style of music to his new developing style and his new possible social and economical recognizement, avoiding isolation and misconstruction. 

Guro Skumsens Moe, London, Oct. 2011

Since this last book involves such concepts as tranformation, authenticity, experience, in a way that can reconnect on one hand Sparti's studies to a wider broad of the last century philosophy developments, the ones related to reflections on identity opened after the end of World War II and leading Michel Foucault to his studies on the history of knowledge and sexuality, and their relationships with culture and power, and on the other hand the studies of phenomenological perception through Husserl and Merleau-Ponty at the limits of the self perception in Western Culture since Cartesian's Cogito and the developments of Western science as separated from the arts and other human knowledge fields, I'd love to start a new discussion more over in time, after some reflexions and studies on the subjects. 

For the moment, I'd limit myself to consider that Sparti's references on Foucault are the ones that pushed me at a certain time to develop a knowledge of non-Western cultures, and their relationships with creativity. For those who would like to put an eye on Wadada Leo Smith's writings on music - but is the same with Anthony Braxton writings on the Tri-Centric Vibrational Dynamics - it will be clear that, far from being only tools to develop music, they are part of an attempt to re-connect, as Smith himself told me, 'the head and the heart' or, as Braxton would possibly put it, to restore a continuum in which human knowledges can be connected in a more, organic way through their own 'upper and lower partials'. A good starting point for the curious reader can be the last part of Graham Lock book on Braxton music, Forces in Motion. The Music And Thoughts of Anthony Braxton (see an extract here).

Related bibliography:

Davide Sparti, Suoni inauditi. L'improvvisazione nel jazz e nella vita quotidiana, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2005
Davide Sparti, L'identità incompiuta. Paradossi nell’improvvisazione musicale, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2010

Further Readings:

Leo Smith, Notes (8 pieces) source a new world music: Creative Music, self published, 1973

Graham Lock, Forces In Motion: The Music and Thoughts of Anthony Braxton, DaCapo Press, 1989

Derek Bailey, Improvisation, Its Nature and Practice in Music, DaCapo Press, 1993

Davide Sparti, Musica in nero. Il campo discorsivo del jazz, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 2007
Davide Sparti, Il corpo sonoro. Oralità e scrittura nel jazz, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2007

AngelicA - Festival Internazionale di Musica - May 5-28, 2011

Art shows us what is still invisible: it opens us up to new realms, it awakens us. 

“Contemporary” is anything we are drawn to by our inspiration, free from interference: it can be something ancient, or that is seen as ancient and old-fashioned, but that is absolutely new and necessary. 

“Contemporary” is anything that poses questions and makes us think, that corresponds to a time (which one?). 

“Contemporary” is also the reflection, the result of the culture of the time, of a state of
things. In this case its function may appear to be limited, inadequate, perhaps because it is too close to the world we are living in and almost closed upon itself, with no chances to grow and take off. A great amount of energy can be spent on a project, especially when its organizers want to bring something useful, stimulating and innovative to a stagnant scene.

In these times of crisis of the Institutions and of a great need for renovation, such choices can bring solutions, new life and a sense of hope that used to be let down in the past. 

Bologna welcomed us. 

Bologna is permeated by a contemporary reason, sedimented through time, and made up of the most diverse experiences: it is a hidden treasure that stirs silently.
 

An apparition, an event beyond our measures, causes a change with no return.
Giving shape to an idea requires an exchange beyond mutual limits.
In the midst of a thousand manifestations of protest, immersed in chaos, the opportunity to listen to an imaginative, creative voice that can reestablish a balance on several levels, open up once again the doors of imagination and give hope to our doings…this is a key.
Neptune among us, for a sensitive city.
 

Massimo Simonini

 

Complete program here: featuring Jim O' Rourke, Pauline Oliveros, Roscoe Mitchell, John Tilbury, Wadada Leo Smith, Stefano Scodanibbio, Cristina Zavalloni, Maja S.K. Ratkje, Paal Nilssen-Love, Lasse Marhaug, Heiner Goebbels, and many others.