by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, November 8, 2004
The darkest, grandest noise of the musical season
so far—the fanfare to an angry American autumn—was Michael Gordon’s
film symphony “Decasia,” as played by fifty-five furiously committed
students from the Manhattan School of Music, at St. Ann’s Warehouse, in
Brooklyn. The performance took place back in September, but the
experience is still burned in my mind. Gordon, one of the founding
members of the New York-based Bang on a Can collective, created
“Decasia” in 2001, in collaboration with the filmmaker Bill Morrison,
the director Bob McGrath, and the visual designer Laurie Olinder. The
idea was to create a contemporary equivalent of Disney’s “Fantasia,” a
dream procession of image and sound. Morrison assembled the film
portion from ancient, decaying footage that he found in various
archives. The images are stitched together in seemingly random order,
yet they tell a hallucinatory tale. Camels trundle across a desert,
children stampede through a nunnery, a man in a fez performs a dervish
dance, parachutists descend from the sky. As the nitrate stock
disintegrates, the images melt and shatter.
Gordon’s score weds the hypnotic aura of minimalism to the detuned
snarl of highbrow punk. It packs a punch on CD, but it needs a live
performance to unveil all its power. At St. Ann’s, the orchestra was
arrayed on scaffolding around the audience, in order to highlight
Gordon’s spatial effects: bass instruments in the back tuned to the
given pitch; instruments on one side tuned an eighth-tone above; those
on the other side an eighth-tone below. Also, the music demands to be
played at maximum volume so that it can acquire the proper monumental
presence. With chattering figures building into great washes of sound,
the score is a feat of symphonic minimalism akin to John Adams’s
“Harmonielehre,” except that the façade of grandeur is as unstable as
the images in Morrison’s collage.
In one hair-raising passage, four trombones slide up and down
intervals of a minor third, beginning on E-flat minor, the unofficial
key of death. Glissando trombones were a signature motif in
twentieth-century music: they roared happily in the Original Dixieland
Jazz Band’s “Livery Stable Blues,” and more darkly in Stravinsky’s
“Rite of Spring” and Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth.” Gordon’s trombones
have both a festive and a sinister air, embodying the ambiguity of the
work. Even as “Decasia” celebrates raw sound, it summons an atmosphere
of dread. Too many of its images resemble Cold War footage of
structures vaporizing in nuclear tests. Why, then, are you left with a
visceral thrill? Perhaps it’s the joy of surviving what looks and
sounds like the end of the world.
A month later, the experimental theatre La MaMa
presented Sounds Like Now, a four-day festival of composers associated
with New York’s venerable downtown scene. All manner of unearthly,
post-John Cagean noises were heard, making “Decasia” seem like “Dance
of the Hours.” Programs were long, some more than three hours. Minutes
passed while new gizmos were plugged in and laptops booted up. There
were, inevitably, spells of time-stopping tedium. When one composer’s
modest set of burbling ideas had gone on twenty minutes too long, I
began to feel the sort of silent-scream frustration that grips air
passengers at the end of a hellish flight: the plane’s at the gate,
you’re crouched under the overhead baggage compartment, but some unseen
delay in first class prevents you from escaping. Of course, this being
a crowd filled with the old guard of New York bohemia, listeners
generally played it cool, nodding to a nonexistent beat.
History instructs us to pay close heed to the musical avant-garde,
for the squawks and bleeps that Unabomber-looking composers unleash in
depopulated lofts have a way of showing up twenty years later in the
mainstream. Sounds Like Now convened many giants of American
experimental music—the descendants of such lone wolves as Cowell,
Partch, Cage, and Nancarrow. Alvin Lucier, whose 1970 spoken-word
composition “I Am Sitting in a Room” is an iconic work of electronic
music, offered up icy arrays of oscillating tones, and also tapped
pencils over containers of various sizes. The untouchably far-out
composer Robert Ashley gave us “Empire,” a scene from his opera
“Atalanta,” which mixes family memories with a history of tomato soup.
Pauline Oliveros created an achingly beautiful soundscape with the Deep
Listening Band. Phill Niblock was represented by “Hurdy Hurry” and
“Sethwork,” in which gyrating masses of tone seemed to be emanating
from the listener’s own brain. (No, I wasn’t stoned.)
Downtown composers generally spurn bourgeois conceptions of
narrative, but a little sense of arrival never hurt anyone. Roscoe
Mitchell and Muhal Richard Abrams achieved it in their jazz
improvisation with the drummer Tani Tabbal: at the climax, Mitchell
played steel-girder tones on the saxophone while Abrams and Tabbal spun
a spiderweb of piano figuration and cymbal washes. David First and Tom
Hamilton, who organized Sounds Like Now, caught a similar wave of
energy in “Two Party System,” pairing long-held drones with rapid,
flippy-dippy patterns. Kyle Gann’s pieces for Disklavier
piano—“Texarkana,” “Bud Ran Back Out,” and “Unquiet Night”—were an
oasis of crystalline chords and jitterbugging polyrhythms. And Morton
Subotnick’s “Until Spring Revisited,” at the end of the festival, sent
everyone home happy: the chief pioneer of synthesizer composition
tapped madly on a laptop, generating swarms of pointillistic sound that
coalesced into shining major triads. The wilderness of noise was bought
up and drilled dry decades ago, but the plainest chords still have the
power to surprise.
There was a fair amount of political commentary
during the Sounds Like Now festival, spouting variously from the left,
the far left, and beyond the fringe. If any avant-gardists raised hell
for Bush this fall, I didn’t hear about it—although I admittedly made
no effort to find them. The composer-pianist “Blue” Gene Tyranny set
the tone by dedicating a melancholy, bluesy fantasia on “America, the
Beautiful” to Ray Charles and John Kerry. Tyranny repeated this piece
at the remaining five concerts—I couldn’t attend the fifth in the
series—and each time he was joined by a new player, until the tune
disappeared into a rage of improvisation.
Meanwhile, up at Merkin Hall, Phil Kline offered two pieces entitled
“Rumsfeld Songs” and “Zippo Songs,” as part of a concert presented by
John Schaefer’s “New Sounds” show on WNYC. (The cycle is also available
on Cantaloupe Music, the same label that released “Decasia.”) The
notion of making music out of Donald Rumsfeld’s press conferences,
which include such T. S. Eliot-like ruminations as “As we know, there
are known knowns,” sounds like a throwaway joke, but Kline, a composer
with a keen ear for speech rhythms, delivers a cunning portrait of a
bureaucrat’s soul. The music is fey and detached, leaning on the raised
fourth degree of the Lydian scale, which supplies a lighter-than-air
quality. By some arcane alchemy, Kline draws clean melodic lines from
such unpromising material as Rumsfeld’s analysis of the looting of
Baghdad: “It’s the same picture of some person walking out of some
building with a vase.” I caught myself singing this the other day, to
my alarm.
The “Zippo Songs” show the underside of Rumsfeld’s flippancy. In
Vietnam, soldiers etched mordant sayings on Zippo lighters. Kline
collected twenty-six of them into one of the most brutally frank song
cycles ever penned. The texts range from the caustic (“If you got this
off my dead ass, I hope it brings you all the luck it brought me”) to
the mystic (“You’ve never lived until you’ve nearly died”). The
detachment between music and subject works differently than in the
Rumsfeld series: the soldiers’ voices seem to be floating in from the
beyond, as, no doubt, many of them are. When you hear all the songs in
sequence—at Merkin Hall, Theo Bleckmann sang with unpolished grace—you
can’t mistake Kline’s agenda. Yet the music has too much psychedelic
mystery to be characterized as mere hectoring from the left. As the
composer-monologuist Chris Mann said at one point during Sounds Like
Now, “I’m pretty sure that music itself votes Republican.”