Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

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 Michael Nyman:
Collected Writings

Edited by

Pwyll ap Siôn
Bangor University, UK
Articles © Michael Nyman. Compilation and other original material © Pwyll ap Siôn 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Pwyll ap Siôn has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as the editor of this work.

Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Nyman, Michael.
Michael Nyman: collected writings.
1. Music–History and criticism.
I. Title II. Pwyll ap Siôn.
780-dc23

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Nyman, Michael.
Michael Nyman : collected writings / [edited] by Pwyll ap Siôn.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-6469-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Musical criticism. 2. Music–History
and criticism. I. Pwyll ap Siôn, editor. II. Title.
ML410.N935A5 2013
780.9–dc23
 2012044681

ISBN 9781409464693 (hbk)

ISBN 9781472430472 (ebk-PDF)
ISBN 9781472430489 (ebk-EPUB)

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V
 Contents

List of Music Examples ix

Foreword by Michael Nyman   xi
Preface   xv
Acknowledgements   xvii

Introduction   1
Early Music, Baroque Musicology and Ethnomusicology  6
Musical Modernism and the Avant-Garde  7
Quotation  11
Experimental Music  13
Minimalist Music  19
Conclusion  22

Part I Reviews, Criticisms and Short Prose Writings

Section 1 1968–1969   27
‘Blocks of Granite’ (The Spectator, 12 July 1968, p. 63)  27
‘The Sound of Music’ (The Spectator, 9 August 1968, pp. 201–2) 28
‘Enter Birtwistle’ (The Spectator, 30 August 1968, p. 299)  31
‘New Favourites’ (The Spectator, 13 September 1968, pp. 367–8) 33
‘Shawms and Rackets’ (The Spectator, 27 September 1968, pp. 440–41) 35
‘Alexander Goehr’s Naboth’s Vineyard’ (Tempo, 86, Autumn 1968,
pp. 14–15)  36
‘Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy’ (The Listener, 10 October
1968, p. 481)  38
‘Minimal Music’ (The Spectator, 11 October 1968, pp. 518–19)  41
‘Chaconnes’ (The Listener, 7 November 1968, p. 620)  43
‘About Time Too’ (The Spectator, 6 December 1968, pp. 809–10) 47
‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’ (The Spectator, 13 December 1968,
pp. 850–51)  49
‘Is This a Record?’ (The Spectator, 3 January 1969, pp. 19–20)  52
‘Play Group’ (The Spectator, 17 January 1969, pp. 84–5)  54
‘Work Projects’ (The Spectator, 7 February 1969, pp. 181–2)  55
‘Demolition Squad’ (The Spectator, 14 February 1969, pp. 217–18) 57
‘French Polish’ (The Spectator, 14 March 1969, p. 346)  59
vi Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

‘Two New Works by Birtwistle’ (Tempo, 88, Spring 1969, pp. 47–50) 61
‘Not Being Done’ (The Spectator, 25 April 1969, p. 553)  64
‘This Way Madness’ (The Spectator, 9 May 1969, pp. 626–7)  66
‘Boulez in the Labyrinth’ (The Spectator, 16 May 1969, pp. 658–9) 67
‘Skip and Run’ (The Spectator, 28 June 1969, p. 860)  70
‘Hands Off’ (The Spectator, 12 July 1969, pp. 50–51)  72
‘Patchwork’ (The Spectator, 26 July 1969, pp. 116–17)  73
‘Mr Birtwistle is Out’ (Music and Musicians, 18, September 1969,
pp. 27, 78)  75
‘Purcell in his Cups’ (Music and Musicians, 18, October 1969, p. 30) 77
‘Brass Tacks’ (The Spectator, 1 November 1969, p. 613)  78
‘With Reference to Birtwistle’s Medusa’ (The Listener, 13 November 1969,
p. 676)  79
‘Scratch & Co’ (The Spectator, 13 December 1969, p. 845)  82
‘Drums & Symbols’ (The Spectator, 20 December 1969, p. 877)  84

Section 2 1970–1971   87
‘Old Master’ (The Spectator, 3 January 1970, pp. 23–4)  87
‘Food of Love’ (The Spectator, 10 January 1970, p. 53)  89
‘Six to One’ (The Spectator, 17 January 1970, pp. 85–6)  90
‘Ancient Monument’ (The Spectator, 7 February 1970, p. 186)  92
‘Flowerpot Men’ (The Spectator, 14 March 1970, p. 346)  93
‘Stockhausen and David Bedford’ (The Listener, 30 April 1970, p. 593)  95
‘Birtwistle’s Rituals’ (The Listener, 27 August 1970, p. 285)  98
‘Satiety’ (New Statesman, 2 October 1970, p. 429)  100
‘Anachronisms’ (New Statesman, 30 October 1970, pp. 574–5)  102
‘Big Screen Opera’ (New Statesman, 19 February 1971, p. 249)  103
‘Sign Language’ (New Statesman, 26 February 1971, p. 282)  105
‘Boulez’s Law’ (New Statesman, 2 April 1971, pp. 466–7)  107
‘Stockhausen – The Musician, The Machine’ (Vogue Magazine,
15 April 1971, pp. 82–3)  109
‘Interconnections’ (New Statesman, 16 April 1971, pp. 539–40)  114
‘Stockhausen Kommt’ (Time Out, 18 April–2 May 1971, p. 23)  115
‘Panethnic’ (New Statesman, 30 April 1971, p. 607)  117
‘Steve Reich, Phil Glass’ (Musical Times, 112/1539, May 1971,
pp. 463–4)  119
‘Stockhausen’ (New Statesman, 7 May 1971, p. 646)  120
‘Towards Interpretation’ (New Statesman, 25 June 1971, pp. 889–90) 122
‘Stravarese’ (New Statesman, 9 July 1971, p. 60)  124
‘Uncommercial’ (New Statesman, 20 August 1971, p. 248)  125
‘Melody Rides Again’ (Music and Musicians, 20, October 1971, pp. 26–8) 126
‘Disciplinarians’ (New Statesman, 29 October 1971, p. 599)  131
‘Dart’s Epitaph’ (New Statesman, 17 December 1971, p. 872)  133
 Contents vii

Section 3 1972–1977   135

‘Learning from Scratch’ (New Statesman, 28 January 1972, pp. 122–3)  135
‘Causerie’ (New Statesman, 10 March 1972, p. 324)  136
‘Circle Complete’ (New Statesman, 31 March 1972, p. 434)  137
‘Christian Wolff’ (Music and Musicians, 20, April 1972, p. 8)  139
‘The Experimental Tradition’ (Art and Artists, October 1972, pp. 44–8)  141
‘As the Titanic Went Down’ (Music and Musicians, 21, December 1972,
pp. 10–14)  148
‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’ (The Listener, 22 February 1973,
pp. 252–3) [Morton Feldman]  152
‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’ (The Listener, 19 April 1973,
pp. 521–2) [Electronic Music]  154
‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’ (The Listener, 3 May 1973,
pp. 593–4) [Robert Simpson]  155
‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’ (The Listener, 23 August 1973, p. 258)
[Harrison Birtwistle]  157
‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’ (The Listener, 13 September 1973, p. 354)
[Anton Bruckner]  158
‘Americana’ (The Listener, 31 October 1974, pp. 578–9)  160
‘Tippett at 70’ (The Listener, 16 January 1975, pp. 84–5)  162
‘Peak District’ (The Listener, 9 October 1975, p. 480)  164
‘Bare Essentials’ (The Listener, 9 December 1976, p. 763)  166
‘Mexican Discovery’ (The Listener, 21 April 1977, pp. 520–21)  168
‘Lindbergh’s Flight’ (The Listener, 2 June 1977, pp. 722–3)  170

Part II Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer

Prose Pieces

‘Towards (a definition of) experimental music’ (Chapter 1 of Experimental

Music: Cage and Beyond (First Edition, Studio Vista, 1974; Second
Edition, CUP 1999))  177
‘Tim Souster’s Night Out at the Proms’ (Tempo, 94, Autumn 1970,
pp. 20–24)  203
‘John Cage in Paris’ (New Statesman, 6 November 1970, p. 617)  208
‘Steve Reich: an interview with Michael Nyman’ (Musical Times, 112,
March 1971, pp. 229–31)  211
‘Harrison Birtwistle’ (London Magazine, 11, October/November 1971,
pp. 118–22)  214
‘Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning’ (London Magazine, 11,
December 1971/January 1972, pp. 130–35)  217
‘SR – Mysteries of the Phase’ (Music and Musicians, 20, February 1972,
pp. 20–21)  222
‘Cage and Satie’ (Musical Times, 114, December 1973, pp. 1227–9)  225
viii Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

‘Cage/Cardew’ (Tempo, 107, December 1973, pp. 32–8)  231

‘The Experimental Scene’ (Music and Musicians, 22, January 1974,
pp. 14–16)  239
‘Experimental Music and the American Vernacular Tradition’ (in the
First American Music Conference (Keele University, 1975), pp. 149–52) 242
‘Gavin Bryars 1971 Michael Nyman 1975’ (in Soundings 9, June 1975)  250
‘Music’ (Studio International, 191, January/February 1976, pp. 64–5) [Glass] 255
‘Music’ (Studio International, 191, March/April 1976, pp. 186–8)
[Obscure Records]  258
‘Music’ (Studio International, 191, May/June 1976, pp. 282–4)
[Fine Art Departments]  261
‘Music’ (Studio International, 192, July/August 1976, pp. 71–2)
[Glass and Budd]  266
‘Music’ (Studio International, 192, September/October 1976, pp. 192–4)
[John Cage]  270
‘Hearing/Seeing’ (Studio International, 192, November/December 1976,
pp. 233–43)  276
‘George Brecht: Interview by Michael Nyman’ (Studio International, 192,
November/December 1976, pp. 256–66)  305
‘Steve Reich: Interview’ (Studio International, 192, November/December
1976, pp. 300–07)  326
‘Music’ (Studio International, 193, January/February 1977, pp. 6–8)
[The music of Hobbs and White]  333
‘Music’ (Studio International, 193, March/April 1977, pp. 134–5)
[Pop Music]  336
‘Against Intellectual Complexity in Music’ (October, 13, Summer 1980,
pp. 81–9)  340
‘Nam June Paik, Composer’ (in John G. Hanhardt (ed.) Nam June Paik
(Whitney Museum of Art, 1982), pp. 79–90)  348

Appendix Michael Nyman’s Collected Writings in Chronological Order

(1968–1982)   359

Index   363
 List of Music Examples

1 Chaconne bass (basic version) 45

2 Purcell’s G minor sonata (bass line) 45
3 Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C minor (WoO. 80) (bass line) 46
4 Howard Skempton’s Waltz © Howard Skempton (reproduced
by permission) 290
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Foreword by Michael Nyman

It all started in July 1968 with a simple phone call from the writer and Kurt
Weill scholar David Drew to ask me, a 24-year-old freelance musician with no
writing experience, to review for The Spectator a single performance – Messiaen’s
Turangalîla-Symphonie – because the regular music critic, Charles Reid (and
biographer of Sir Malcolm Sargent) was understandably not interested. The texts
selected and reprinted here, and Pwyll ap Siôn’s masterly introduction, present
the written consequences of that phone call. This foreword will sketch briefly
the ‘human’ context of the 10 years I spent freely chronicling what at the time
and certainly in retrospect was a truly diverse musical culture of the late 1960s
and 1970s.
First, there was a clutch of distinguished editors that I had little or no
contact with: politicians – during my time at The Spectator Nigel Lawson was
editor (whose career later took a dive as Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor of the
Exchequer), and when I moved to the New Statesman in 1970, the Labour grandee
Richard Crossman had just been appointed editor. My editor at The Listener was
the literary giant Karl Miller, while the art critic Richard Cork (who still writes for
The Times and who quite recently wrote about my film and photographic work)
was the benign and more accessible editor of Studio International.
Secondly, and more crucially, there was direct contact with the generous
and imaginative group of arts page editors: especially, at The Spectator, Hilary
Spurling (subsequently writer of the authoritative biography of Matisse), and at
The Listener, Mary-Kay Wilmers (now editor of the London Review of Books and
author of her remarkable family history, The Eitingons). Hilary Spurling allowed,
even encouraged, me to write about everything and anything, until there were one
or two words too many on Cage, and I resigned. Fortunately my good friend and
fellow critic Dominic Gill, moonlighting from the Financial Times, immediately
offered me the position of record reviewer on the New Statesman. Mary-Kay
Wilmers had assembled a remarkable collection of critics, musicians, writers,
musicologists and composers (such as Tim Souster and Michael Parsons) to fill the
two music columns on The Listener’s ‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’ and feature
longer articles about a significant work to be broadcast during the following
week. Since I lived on New Cavendish Street, a 10-minute walk away from The
Listener offices in Langham Place, I would quite often get an urgent request from
Mary-Kay to fill in for some non-delivering writer to cobble together one of the
feature articles with sometimes only around 24 hours’ notice, and generally on
subjects that I had no knowledge of, such as Handel’s oratorio The Choice of
Hercules, around which I ‘improvised’ a very sketchily researched article. This
xii Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

greatly disturbed the Handel scholar Stanley Sadie, then Times critic and later
editor of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians when we met in the foyer of
the Queen Elizabeth Hall before a concert we were both about to review.
So, thirdly, there were all the other music critics, my so-called ‘colleagues’
who, apart from Dominic Gill, and for wider reasons than an ill-advised article
on Handel, looked on my critical values with suspicion. These were all brilliant,
experienced men: William Mann, Jeremy Noble, Peter Heyworth, Desmond
Shawe-Taylor, Peter Stadlen (a pupil of Webern, no less) and Andrew Porter,
amongst the most prominent. And the Nyman-the-Music-Critic ‘look’ was wrong
too – 24-years old, at the beginning of my career in 1968, balding but with wild
hair and black David Hockney glasses, and not a suit or even a sports jacket in sight
at the Proms or at Covent Garden. But it was the sheer contradictory but inclusive
diversity of music that I was inclined to and encouraged by my arts editor to (dis)
cover on a weekly basis which diverged singularly from that of my colleagues,
who would at times have barely dealt with Stockhausen let alone the Sonic Arts
Union, or Eritrean music (on the excellent Tangent label), or travel from the Fugs
to Peter Maxwell Davies in the space of a single 800-word Spectator article. (Even
though, of course, William Mann had broken ranks by comparing the Beatles to
Schubert, for which he was immediately treated with derision.) And additionally
it became increasingly clear that as a writer I did not adopt the necessary critical
‘distance’, but passionately believed in criticism-as-information about whatever
part of the new music (dis)continuum occupied my attention over those 10 years.
And so, fourthly, my practice as a critic involved hanging out with the very
composers whose work I was writing about. I had met Harrison Birtwistle in the
early 1960s through a colleague from the Royal Academy of Music who chose to
live in the woods surrounding Wardour Castle in Wiltshire rather than in St John’s
Wood, and it was this friendship that led to my attendance at the infamous Wardour
Castle Summer School course in 1964, where I met the other two members of the
so-called Manchester School, Alexander Goehr and Peter Maxwell Davies. And
through them I met David Drew, who (as previously mentioned) recommended
me to Hilary Spurling in the first place at The Spectator in 1968, and who got me
the commission to write Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond in 1974 as part of
Studio Vista’s series of monographs on the experimental arts.
For a time I was more-or-less Birtwistle’s amanuensis – compiling the libretto
for the opera Down by the Greenwood Side under his instructions, writing detailed
articles about his work which I would subsequently review, or editing his scores,
especially the vast Proms commission Nomos for Universal Edition in 1968.
But by 1970, when I signed the book contract with Studio Vista, my allegiances
had shifted (almost exclusively through the accidental and belated discovery of
Cornelius Cardew’s music – his ‘late style’, such as Paragraph 1 of The Great
Learning), and from modernism to what I would loosely and conveniently define
as the ‘experimental’. Cardew, John Tilbury, the Portsmouth Sinfonia, Feldman,
Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, David Berhman,
La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Nam June Paik – and John Cage, obviously – all
 Foreword by Michael Nyman xiii

came rushing into my ‘observational’ critical life. And the consequences of this
new allegiance had instant consequences: my ‘new knowledge’ immediately led
me to view Stockhausen’s music differently. I gently pointed out in a Time Out
preview of the London premiere of Stimmung in 1971 that his shape-shifting piece
was very dependent on the work of La Monte Young and that his work in general
owed a lot to Cage in a way that he had never acknowledged. Just as I was leaving
a party thrown by his manager to celebrate the premiere, Stockhausen approached
me rather aggressively and said, ‘You are the person who has been spreading false
information about my music. How could La Monte Young have influenced my
music? HE WAS MY STUDENT!’ It happened with Peter Maxwell Davies …
who objected to my 1969 review of Eight Songs for a Mad King, and with Morton
Feldman, who never forgave me for having suggested in 1972 that he would get
more authentic performances from pianist John Tilbury than from ensembles such
as The Fires of London (or the Pierrot Players).
John Tilbury was also the indirect means through which I met Steve Reich,
with whom I conducted his first European interview in 1970 (published in 1971)
and to whom I was even closer than to Birwistle (who cooked him a mean
Lancashire Hotpot when I introduced them to one another in the mid-1970s). If
Tragoedia had been my ‘Birtwistle moment’ in 1964, a chance encounter (through
the inspired BBC producer Stephen Plaistow) with Come Out, randomly broadcast
on Radio 3 in 1968 was my ‘Reich moment’. The interview not only introduced
me and the world to Reich’s personal history, but it was he who formulated (and
later rejected) the concept of the Four American Minimalists – Young, Riley,
Reich and the then-unknown (to me at least) Philip Glass. Reich also talked
enlighteningly about the filmmaker Michael Snow (he had written an article about
Snow’s film Wavelength in 1968), the ubiquity of the four minimalists, and my
coining of ‘Minimal Music’ in 1968 in relation not to the Americans but to a Dane,
Henning Christiansen, as performed by Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman.
My subsequent involvement with Reich’s work during my days as music critic
was of a significantly different order: as agent for the concert at the ICA and the
performance of Drumming at the Hayward Gallery in 1972; as fixer, organizing
a group of somewhat unsympathetic English experimental composer/performers
(Cornelius Cardew, Gavin Bryars, Michael Parsons, Christopher Hobbs); as
performer, with the English boys in the premiere of Drumming in Bremen, West
Germany, and in subsequent performances.
But it was being a participant/performer in the English experimental musical
culture that finally led to my transition from critic to composer. Cardew’s classes
at Morley College, the Scratch Orchestra, the Portsmouth Sinfonia – these were
all routes towards recovering my voice as a composer, initially with the Campiello
Band, then with the Michael Nyman Band. Curiously this came about through the
‘old guard’: Birtwistle, and his recollection of the even ‘younger’ Michael Nyman,
the would-be musicologist under Thurston Dart from the mid-1960s. And therein
lie the two reasons why I gave up my career as music critic. The first, on principle,
was that I felt it inadvisable, if not dangerous, to have to write about the music of
xiv Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

my now composer colleagues; and, second, because I had run out of the ability to
pass judgment, somehow. In a review of Granville Bantock’s choral symphony
Vanity of Vanities for unaccompanied voices for The Listener, I was unable to
make up my mind whether it was a great work, a good work, or a bad work. I
realized it was time to draw a straight line and follow it … .
 Preface

Nyman has certainly proved himself one of the handful of writers … who
genuinely deserves the name of critic. (Victor Schonfield)

For over three decades composer Michael Nyman has occupied a unique position
in the music of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century. While many
contemporary composers’ music remained limited in reach, Nyman has managed
to connect beyond the margins of modernism to a much wider audience. His film
scores, from the early Greenaway collaboration The Draughtsman’s Contract
(1982) to the enormously successful The Piano (1993) and, more recently, the
Oscar-winning film documentary Man on Wire (2008), have been matched by an
equally active career composing standard orchestral, chamber and operatic music.
In the past few years, Nyman’s work as visual artist and filmmaker has also been
critically evaluated and recognized.1
An important element in unlocking the key to Nyman’s success lies in his
writings about music, which occupied him for over a decade from the late 1960s
onwards. During this time Nyman produced well over 100 articles, covering
almost every conceivable musical style and genre – from the early music revival
and the West’s interest in ‘world’ music to John Cage, minimalism and rock. It
is not so much the breadth and range that marks Nyman’s writings as important
contributions to twentieth-century scholarship, however. Other writers during the
late 1960s were also addressing musical concerns beyond the purview of classical
‘concert’ music.
Nyman’s writings are important because they initiated a number of landmark
moments along the way. He was one of the first to critique the distinction between
European avant-garde music and the American experimental movement – to tease
out significant differences between Stockhausen on the one hand and Cage on
the other. He was the first to coin the term ‘minimalism’ in relation to the music
of (then relatively unknown) composers such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley and
Philip Glass. Nyman was also one of the first critics to seriously engage with
the music of the English experimental tradition, to articulate the importance
of Cornelius Cardew and the contribution of the Scratch Orchestra in bringing
art music out of its avant-garde ghetto in music conservatoires and universities
and into popular culture via the art college circuit, where lecturers and students
alike developed radical alternatives to the modernist mainstream. He also wrote

1
See, for example, Nyman’s photobook Sublime (Turin: Volumina Press, 2008), and
Videofile, an exhibition of his films at the De La Warr Pavilion, East Sussex, in 2009.
xvi Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

about the generation of composers either working in parallel with minimalism or

immediately influenced by it, such as Brian Eno and Harold Budd, and recognized
their importance in traversing the gap between high and low, art and pop. Soon
after writing about these composers, Nyman realized how these elements could be
brought together into a new aesthetic vision for his own musical language, which
was formulated during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Much of what transformed and defined Nyman’s musical character may be
found within the pages of this volume of his writings, comprehensively edited
and fully referenced for the first time with important annotations by the composer
himself, although it is important to note that the articles contained herein are
not about Nyman’s music.2 There is also much in these writings to provoke and
stimulate the minds of those interested in music which falls outside the twentieth
century, from Early and Baroque music (Handel and Purcell in particular) to
Nyman’s treatment of innovative features in Haydn, spatial elements in Berlioz,
or the symphonic works of Bruckner and Mahler. It is important to remember that
Nyman’s training was very much in the classical tradition; he once stated that ‘I
get all my musical kicks and ideas from the European symphonic tradition’.3 It is
this classical sensibility – an ability to grasp, develop, transform, and refine verbal
and musical thoughts and ideas – that marks out both his writings and his music.

Pwyll ap Siôn
April 2013

2
The Michael Nyman Reader, featuring articles and interviews by Nyman and others
about his music, is planned for publication in the near future.
3
Quoted in Robert K. Schwarz, Minimalists (London: Phaidon, 1996), p. 197.
 Acknowledgements

The idea of editing Michael Nyman’s collected writings for publication occurred
to me during research undertaken for my book The Music of Michael Nyman
(Ashgate, 2007). However, in setting out to complete the writings project I had
not fully anticipated the size of the task that lay ahead. The first stage involved
collecting, copying, scanning and editing over one hundred articles, but what
proved more challenging was the process of locating original citations and
references of quoted passages from Nyman’s texts. Search engines (such as
JSTOR) and websites (such as Google Books) certainly assisted me in this task,
but I also had to rely on much needed support by a number of staff and students
at Bangor University, notably Tristian Evans, Nia Davies Williams and Twila
Bakker, who unearthed quotations from a number of relatively obscure sources
and helped with transcribing interviews and articles. Andrew Wilson should be
thanked for setting the ball rolling back in the late 1990s, when he sent a detailed
list of Nyman’s writings and a number of photocopied articles. The chronological
list of articles that appears at the end of this volume is very much based on (and
adapted from) his original list.
In attempting to trace the original sources of Nyman’s quotes and references, I
sometimes had to contact the authors themselves, or experts in those areas. Many
of them very kindly offered to help. I am therefore indebted to the following
academics, musicians and composers for giving generously of their time and
knowledge by responding to my queries: William Brooks, Neely Bruce, Peter
Dickinson, Rob Haskins, Chris Hobbs, Andrea Olmstead, Keith Potter, Josh
Ronsen, Eric Salzman and John Tilbury. Dr Chris Collins at Bangor University
helped with a translation from Spanish of a section from a George Brecht
interview. Steve Reich made some extremely useful suggestions regarding the
revised version of his La Rochelle interview with Nyman. Myriam Blundell and
Nigel Barr at Michael Nyman Ltd were always very helpful, as was Gill Graham
at Chester Music and Novello & Company.
The following libraries were helpful in facilitating my research: The British
Library, the National Library Wales Aberystwyth, Bangor University, Keele
University and Ilsa Porter at Wolverhampton University. I was also fortunate to
gain access to the online Listener Historical Archive at various times. A British
Academy small research grant in 2007–08 enabled me to lay the foundations for
this publication, for which I’m particularly grateful. I am also thankful to Bangor
University for providing me with periods of study leave during 2007–08 and
2011–12, which allowed me to press ahead with work on this book.
xviii Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

I am again extremely thankful to all staff at Ashgate for their patience and
support, especially Beatrice Beaup, Heidi Bishop, Emma Gallon, Laura Macy,
Barbara Pretty, and Rachel Lynch. Many thanks also to Sarah Price who has done
an exceptionally thorough job of proofreading this book.
Finally, of course, I wish to thank Michael Nyman himself for showing such
support and enthusiasm for this project. Despite being extremely busy, he always
made time to respond to email queries and questions, and also very kindly offered
to write the foreword to this book. He was directly involved in the process of
selecting and omitting certain articles when it became clear that there would not
be enough space to accommodate everything he had written. He also advised on
the general format and structure of the book, provided detailed comments and
annotations to his texts via email, and allowed me to view notes, drafts, transcripts
of interviews and copies of articles at his London home, all of which gave
additional insight to his working methods and patterns. His input and contribution
has been, without question, an invaluable one. While I hope that this edition of
Nyman’s collected writings will provide the reader with additional information
about these texts and their sources, suffice to say that any errors, omissions and
inaccuracies are entirely my own.

All texts in this volume © Michael Nyman.

 Introduction

A music of ‘ostinatos, hypnotic repetitions, instruments playing at their piercing

extremes, vivid and high-pressure gestures and conflict through opposition of sound
forces …’. One might for a moment think that Michael Nyman was describing his
own music here – the propulsive punk-minimalism of In Re Don Giovanni (1977),
or maybe the visceral soundtrack to The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) – were it
not for the fact that the composer was writing a decade or so earlier about Harrison
Birtwistle’s Tragoedia (1965) in a review written in October 1968.
Projecting Nyman’s words about other composers’ music onto a style and
aesthetic he himself subsequently adopted with a high degree of artistic and
commercial success from the 1980s onwards is certainly one route into his writings,
collected together for the first time in this volume. But it is one route amongst
many for those reading Nyman’s writings for the first time. Born in London on
23 March 1944, Nyman studied composition with Alan Bush at the Royal Academy
of Music between 1961 and 1964, writing a number of solo and chamber works
that showed the influence of mid-century neo-classical composers such as Bartók
and Hindemith. In 1964 he travelled to Wardour Castle, Wiltshire, attending a
summer school course in composition run by the so-called ‘Manchester School’ of
composers – Alexander Goehr, Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies. The
20-year-old was introduced for the first time to the principles of serial composition
and, upon returning home to London, immediately set about composing using
these methods – having been told unequivocally by his teachers at Wardour that
this was the only route forward for any aspiring young composer. Nyman soon
became dissatisfied with his 12-note endeavours, however, and turned his back on
composition, disillusioned with the one-track route modern music was taking at
this time.1
Nyman’s studies at the Royal Academy of Music also encompassed performance
and music history, and the institution’s authorities acknowledged his nascent skills
as critic in July 1963 when he was awarded a prize for ‘Best Résumé of Review
Week Lectures’.2 Therefore, instead of becoming a serial composer manqué, as was
expected of him and other composers of his generation, Nyman turned to Baroque
musicological research. He attended King’s College, London from 1964–67,
undertaking doctoral research with Thurston Dart on rounds, canons and catches

1
For more on Nyman’s background, see K. Robert Schwarz, Minimalists (London:
Phaidon, 1996), p. 196.
2
Nyman’s teachers at the Royal Academy also included Geraint Jones (1917–98) and
Peter G. Fletcher (1936–96).
2 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

from the late sixteenth century (in the works of Thomas Ravenscroft) to those in
the late seventeenth century, especially Henry Purcell.3 Nyman’s studies with Dart
provided him with a broad range of skills in editing, analysing and writing about
music. Although Nyman’s creative talents remained dormant for the best part of
10 years – 1976 was the year in which he started to compose again with any real
seriousness of purpose – his work variously as musicologist, librettist, performer,
and music critic informed and guided his later creative work.
Nyman’s doctoral studies with Dart came to an end in 1967. The following
year saw him edit Purcell’s Catches and preparing a new edition of Handel’s 12
Concerti Grossi, Op. 6, for Eulenberg Editions, but by this time the 24-year-old was
anxious to secure more regular freelance work. Nyman was therefore somewhat
relieved when The Spectator’s arts editor, Hilary Spurling, approached him via
David Drew’s recommendation to contribute an article on the music of Messiaen,
since the magazine lacked a specialist in twentieth-century music.4 Nyman duly
completed the article on Messiaen in July 1968, the first of over 40 contributions
written within the relatively short period of 18 months. Between 1968 and 1977
Nyman also produced some 27 reviews for The Listener, 22 items for the New
Statesman, and a number of standalone contributions for publications such as
London Magazine, Tempo and Music and Musicians. These form the main bulk
of Nyman’s writings, along with his groundbreaking study on the experimental
aesthetics and influence of John Cage in Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond 5
and a series of insightful articles and interviews published in the arts journal Studio
International in 1976, towards the end of his time as critic.6
In this volume Nyman’s writings have been divided into two main parts:
Part I consists of shorter pieces which focus mainly on specific works, concerts
or recordings. These ‘week-by-week’ pieces, range from avant-garde and
experimental music to minimalism, rock/pop, folk and early music, and were
designed to introduce the knowledgeable but essentially non-specialist reader to a
wide range of musical subjects. They indicate how far Nyman’s musical horizons
extended, while also providing a snapshot of the musical and cultural diversity
found in London during the late 1960s and early 1970s – a diversity also reflected
in the writings of other composer-critics around this time, such as Tim Souster and

3
Evidence of this can be found, for example, in an article written for Music and
Musicians in October 1969 on Purcell’s Catches, which he had edited for publication in
1967. Although the PhD thesis remained incomplete, a folio consisting of research materials
and typed pages found in Nyman’s archive suggests that he was at quite an advanced stage
before progress was halted when he moved to music criticism.
4
Drew was himself highly regarded as a musicologist and publisher, and worked as
music critic for the New Statesman between 1959 and 1967; Nyman draws upon his in-depth
knowledge of the music of Kurt Weill in ‘Lindbergh’s Flight’, The Listener (2 June 1977).
5
Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (London: Alta Vista, 1974;
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
6
See the Appendix for a chronological list of Nyman’s writings.
 Introduction 3

Michael Parsons. The writings in Part I are ordered in chronological sequence,

with the review-oriented articles for The Spectator featuring prominently during
1968–69, followed by a group of less prescriptive, ideas-based contributions for
the New Statesman in 1970–72, and ending with a series of eclectic and thought-
provoking pieces published in The Listener magazine between 1973 and 1977.
Part II consists of more substantial, single-subject articles that lay outside
Nyman’s weekly demands as music critic. These larger pieces are of a more
detailed and specialized nature, reflecting Nyman’s own emerging aesthetic
beliefs and musicological interests. They point more towards the changing course
of contemporary music from the mid-1960s through to the early 1980s. In contrast
to the strict 12-note dogma that dominated the new music scene of the early 1960s,
the end of the decade offered a quite bewildering diversity of styles, which was
also reflected in the ever-expanding domains of popular and folk music. These
heterogeneous styles and movements eventually gave way to more distinct
pathways established in the form of minimalism, the new tonality and various
offshoots that evolved during the 1970s.
Included at the beginning of Part II is the opening chapter from Nyman’s
important overview of Cage and the experimental tradition, Experimental Music:
Cage and Beyond, ‘Towards (a definition of) experimental music’, still, as
K. Robert Schwarz put it in the mid-1990s, ‘an unsurpassed view of post-war
alternatives to the stifling rhetoric of serialism’.7 A much sought-after and prized
text until Cambridge University Press finally republished it in 1999, chapters from
Nyman’s book have found their way into various anthologies on twentieth-century
musicological writings.8 Unlike previous reproductions, the chapter contained in
this volume is for the first time fully referenced and edited.9 Part II also contains a
number of important interviews, including an extensive discussion with maverick
Fluxus artist George Brecht. These interviews, along with Cage’s address
to members of the Hague Residence Orchestra at La Rochelle in June 1976,
demonstrate Nyman’s interest in recording, publishing and archiving important
statements, an enthusiasm that also transmitted to his work with the Experimental
Music Catalogue, which he edited along with Chris Hobbs and Gavin Bryars
during the mid-1970s.10 His two interviews with Steve Reich, the first given in
London in May 1970, the second at La Rochelle in 1976, have been republished

7
  Schwarz, Minimalists, p. 196.
8
  For example, a highly edited version of Chapter 1 appears in Christopher Cox and
Daniel Warner (eds) Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (New York: Continuum
Press, 2006), pp. 209–20, while Chapter 3 (‘Inauguration 1950–1960: Feldman, Brown,
Wolff, Cage’) is included in Richard Kostelanetz and Joseph Darby (eds) Classic Essays on
Twentieth-Century Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1996), pp. 184–201.
9
  Unless stated otherwise, all footnote references in this volume are editorial ones.
10
Gavin Bryars, ‘Experimental Music Catalogue’, Contact, 6 (1973), 23–5.
4 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

in Reich’s Writings on Music,11 but the La Rochelle interview contains previously

unpublished sections faithfully reproduced from Nyman’s original transcript,
casting interesting new light on the American composer’s thoughts at this time.
The year in which the second Reich interview took place, 1976, was a significant
turning point in Nyman’s career in fact. Since 1968 he had earned a living primarily
through writing about music, but 1976 saw a decisive shift in his career from critic
to composer. Still active as a writer, as evidenced in the substantial article on
post-experimental music, ‘Hearing/Seeing’ (in the November/December issue of
Studio International),12 1976 also saw him compose his first two film soundtracks.
Keep it up Downstairs (dir. Robert Young) was aimed at the commercial market,
and used Edwardian salon music as its basis; Peter Greenaway’s experimental,
non-narrative 1–100 initiated a longstanding artistic collaboration with the film
director, which spanned 15 years and spawned over 18 scores for his films and
documentaries. In the end Greenaway decided against using Nyman’s music for
1–100, but it resurfaced on the LP Decay Music released on Brian Eno’s Obscure
label (which also featured Bell Set No. 1). In October 1976, Nyman’s incidental
music for Bill Bryden’s production of Goldoni’s Il Campiello was also heard at the
National Theatre, which led directly to the formation of the Campiello Band, out
of which formed, a little later, the Michael Nyman Band.
By 1982, the year that saw the last published prose piece in this volume – an
article on Korean conceptual artist and composer Nam June Paik – Nyman had
firmly established himself as a composer.13 The previous year had seen the release
of the Michael Nyman LP on Piano Records and, by 1982, his music had reached
a much wider audience through the commercial success of his soundtrack to Peter
Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract.
Nyman’s writings thus function on a number of different levels: biographical
and critical, both in terms of the development of contemporary music in general and
the development of his own musical style and aesthetic orientation in particular.
Such concepts and correspondences form the basis of the following review of
the main themes and ideas presented in Nyman’s writings. The opening section

11
Steve Reich, Writings on Music 1965–2000, ed. Paul Hillier (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000).
12
Nyman was invited to act as guest editor for this issue of Studio International,
which, in addition to Nyman’s contributions (the article ‘Hearing/Seeing’, and two
interviews – one with George Brecht, the other with Steve Reich), also featured interviews
with Morton Feldman and Tom Phillips (both conducted by Gavin Bryars and Fred Orton),
and articles by Cornelius Cardew (‘Wiggly Lines and Wobbly Music’), Germano Celant
(‘Record as Artwork’), Gavin Bryars (‘Notes on Marcel Duchamp’s Music’, ‘Berners,
Rousseau, Satie’), Brian Eno (‘Generating and Organising Variety in the Arts’), Stuart
Marshall (‘Alvin Lucier’s Music of Signs in Space’), Jeffrey Steele (‘Collaborative Work at
Portsmouth’), and Paul Burwell and David Toop (‘Radical Structure’).
13
Indeed Nyman refers to himself in this article as ‘a former music critic with no great
fondness for the profession or its current practitioners’ (see ‘Nam June Paik, Composer’).
 Introduction 5

considers Nyman’s musicological background in early music and his interest

in the vernacular forms of the Baroque. His understanding of twentieth-century
modernism and his evaluation of the contribution of major figures of the early- to
mid-twentieth-century are also documented in these writings (such as Schoenberg,
Stravinsky, Varèse and Messiaen), as is his recognition of the important role
played by the European avant-garde during the 1960s, especially Stockhausen.
Nyman also engages in some detail with the British avant-garde scene of the
1960s, particularly Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies and Goehr, but his focus gradually
shifts from Europe to America, towards the experimental aesthetic of Cage and
Feldman, the work of Fluxus artists, and the beginnings of minimalism. The
vernacular styles of pop, folk and world music also appear in Nyman’s writings
from the late 1960s and early 1970s, reflecting new scholarly interest in these
areas by musicologists such as Wilfrid Mellers and Richard Middleton.14 Nyman
also sets out an ‘alternative’ tradition based on the significant contribution of
lesser-known or more marginal figures who sought to challenge entrenched views
about the musical canon; composers such as Praetorius, Anthony Philip Heinrich
and, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Stephen Foster, Louis-
Moreau Gottschalk, Erik Satie, and the salon music of Ezra Read.
The second half of this overview expands on a number of themes presented
in Part I, particularly the crisis identified in Nyman’s writings that permeated the
European avant-garde by the late 1960s and the emergence of radical alternatives
in the form of Cage’s experimental music doctrine, the Scratch Orchestra and
especially the new tonality of minimalists such as Terry Riley and Steve Reich.
Nyman’s survey of the post-Cardew generation of British composers, composers
such as Gavin Bryars and Howard Skempton, and his writings on the development
of post-minimalist styles in the ambient works of Eno and Budd, emphasize the
fact that distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ traditions of art and pop were
becoming increasingly blurred.
Developing a new tonal language through the lens of minimalism became the
most effective creative means of resolving such dichotomies in Nyman’s own
music. His eclecticism as a music critic thus anticipates a general move towards
more pluralist approaches in musicology and aesthetics during the last two decades
of the twentieth century while also reflecting his own emerging technical and
stylistic orientation as a composer. Specific themes in the areas of ‘Early Music,
Baroque Musicology and Ethnomusicology’, ‘Musical Modernism and the Avant-
Garde’ and ‘Quotation’ will now be examined and explained in more detail.

14
See, for example, Wilfrid Mellers’s Twilight of the Gods: The Beatles in Retrospect
(London: Faber, 1973), Charlie Gillett’s The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and
Roll (New York: Dell, 1972) and Richard Middleton’s Pop Music and the Blues (London:
Gollancz, 1972).
6 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Early Music, Baroque Musicology and Ethnomusicology

Some of Nyman’s early texts highlight the broad-based musicological education he

received during the 1960s, first at the Royal Academy of Music and then at King’s
College, London with Thurston Dart. His admiration for Dart’s ‘pioneering’ work
as musicologist, editor and scholar may be found in a fitting tribute written for
the New Statesman in December 1971, where he praises Dart’s contribution as ‘a
brilliant performer, possessed of a tremendous keyboard flair’. Yet it was arguably
Dart’s holistic approach to music which inspired Nyman, and his ‘remarkable and
enlightening’ achievement in establishing one of the first degree schemes in Britain
in ‘non-western’ music sparked an interest in folk music. Nyman subsequently
spent part of 1965–66 on a British Council travel bursary in Romania transcribing
and collecting examples of its indigenous music.
While in Romania, Nyman’s direct exposure to folk music brought to light
the inherent paradox between musicological theory and folk practice, the latter
often distorting and misrepresenting the former’s true traits and characteristics.
In articles such as ‘Panethnic’ and ‘Towards Interpretation’, both written in 1971,
Nyman draws attention to the ‘insidious’ manner in which the ‘official Culture
Palaces’ deprive folk music of its ‘spontaneity, earthiness and truth’.15 Nyman also
writes about the emerging period instrument movement of the 1960s in similar terms,
preferring the early music consort Musica Reservata’s ‘occasionally … impolite’
sounds to that of the Early Music Consort’s ‘easily comprehended stylishness’.16
More than a trace of Nyman’s folk and early music sensibilities can be heard
in the sound and approach of the Michael Nyman Band, which grew out of the
Campiello Band, the latter originally formed in response to Harrison Birtwistle’s
request for Nyman to find and arrange Venetian popular songs for the National
Theatre’s production of Goldoni’s Il Campiello in 1976.17 The Campiello Band’s
rough and raucous sound mixed old and new through a varied assortment
of folk, pop and classical instruments. Shawms and rebecs were set alongside
banjos and saxophones, creating strange juxtapositions that were made to sound
even more bizarre in the group’s arrangements of ragtime and salon music, or
in unconventional interpretations of well-known arias from mainstream operas.
One is reminded of Nyman’s comments about Kagel’s Musik für Renaissance-
Instrumente, in 1969: ‘[Kagel] exploits the untouched, virgin quality of these old
instruments and gets them to scrape, bang and blow hell-for-leather in a Bosch-
like score staggering in sheer imagination, irony and exuberance’.18 Nyman’s
broad-ranging article on Chaconne forms – from Aston in the sixteenth century to

15
‘Towards Interpretation’, New Statesman (25 June 1971).
16
Ibid.
17
Birtwistle was musical director of the National Theatre at this time.
18
‘Is This a Record?’, The Spectator (3 January 1969).
 Introduction 7

Gerhard in the twentieth – also anticipates an interest in harnessing such repetitive

cycles and overlaying structures in his own music.19
In his discussion of the early music revival, Nyman refutes the notion of musical
‘authenticity’, stating in 1971 that ‘any modern [i.e. present-day] performance can
never be authoritative, but merely a suggestion of what might have been – not even,
perhaps an interpretation but towards an interpretation’.20 Music has, as described
at the beginning of ‘Work Projects’, a ‘built-in obsolescence’.21 These contingent
and unfixable qualities lie in direct opposition to the Beethovenian concept of
the ‘uniquely determined, durable, unmistakably individualistic musical work’.22
Music’s impermanent nature is brought to bear on a whole range of discourses,
including the subject of musical organicism in Deryck Cooke’s comparisons of
the original and revised versions of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony. Nyman points
out that ‘the insights we [gain] into Bruckner’s methods’ from Cooke’s analysis
demonstrate that:

The music is not ‘organic’, does not flow out in an unbroken red-hot lava of
creativity, but is in a permanent state of either/or, decisions to be made, ideas to
be shoved around, so that what might sound organic and flows with impeccable
‘logic’ is as highly ‘edited’ as a film.23

Nyman’s aesthetic position, as set out in a review of George Harrison and Ravi
Shankar’s concert in aid of the Bangladesh famine crisis in 1971, that music
‘may express nothing in particular and may therefore have a magnificent number
of uses, and that words and not musical intentions … make music specific’, is
certainly utilized later in his own music.24 One of the most striking characteristics
of Nyman’s compositional style is its ability to adapt to a variety of different
musical contexts; from screen to stage, from musical soundtrack to concert suite,
from solo instrument to orchestra – Nyman’s compositions often demonstrate his
point that music has ‘a magnificent number of uses’.

Musical Modernism and the Avant-Garde

This ontological conception of music also lies at the core of Nyman’s critique
of musical modernism; especially European avant-garde theories and practices
set out by Boulez and Stockhausen and in the generation of British composers
whose music Nyman had encountered at the Wardour Castle Summer School

19
See ‘Chaconnes’, The Listener (7 November 1968), p. 620.
20
‘Towards Interpretation’, ibid.
21
‘Work Projects’, The Spectator (7 February 1969).
22
‘Ancient Monument’, The Spectator (7 February 1970).
23
‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’, The Listener (13 September 1973).
24
‘Causerie’, New Statesman (10 March 1972).
8 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

in 1964. Nyman demystifies musical modernism’s elevated status by echoing

Carl Dahlhaus’s words that ‘most music was modern once’.25 The avant-garde’s
attempt at claiming artistic and aesthetic superiority over other musical forms
often draws Nyman’s sharpest criticism, however. The whole 12-note project
and its related musical-technical apparatus, which together formed the basis for
modernist theories about music during the mid-twentieth century, is viewed by
him as a false ideological premise in which to judge ‘good’ from ‘bad’ music. This
is encapsulated in Nyman’s review of Boulez’s treatise on 12-note composition,
Boulez on Music Today:

Boulez makes a stringent selection from the huge world of musical possibilities
and submits it to exacting, perceptive analyses, refining the various parameters
of pitch, duration, timbre and space into an elaborate labyrinth of categories,
sub-categories and sub-sub-categories … [but] [s]cattered along the way to
technical self-knowledge are those old familiar forbidden fruits – recognisable
pulse, tonal chords, in effect everything modern music seems to lack – which
are to be avoided at all costs, as their imagery is too strong … for this patently
artificial system to sustain.26

While Boulez’s theories become the target of Nyman’s critical opprobrium, its
practice in the works of Stockhausen and his ‘machine men’ preoccupies the
bulk of his writings in this area.27 Nyman is quick to recognize the importance
of Stockhausen to the avant-garde milieu of the late 1960s – over a half-dozen
articles published between 1968 and 1971 deal directly with his music, including
an insightful overview in Vogue magazine. Yet Nyman’s gradual disenchantment
with Stockhausen’s methods is symptomatic of a general malaise, which he
associates increasingly with the modernist project as a whole.
In trying to pinpoint Stockhausen’s cult following during the 1960s, Nyman
suggests that it is ‘the probing originality of [his] sound-world which draws the
crowds’.28 Stockhausen’s sound-world is linked with his development of ‘group’
or ‘moment-from’, allowing the composer to explore ‘new perceptions of musical
time … [both] the creation of individual sound events … and in the overall
form [exist] only “now”, at this moment in a theoretically endless sequence’.29
Stockhausen’s innovative restructuring of time is designed to allow the listener to
focus on sound ‘in isolation’, a notion that is valued positively by Nyman in his

25
In his essay ‘“New Music” as historical category’, Dahlhaus poses the question
‘[is] not newness … a quality, which, by its very nature, is tied to a never-recurring moment
in time?’; see Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 1.
26
See ‘Boulez’s Law’, New Statesman (2 April 1971).
27
‘Interconnections’, New Statesman (16 April 1971).
28
‘About Time Too’, The Spectator (6 December 1968).
29
‘Britons at Sea’, The Spectator (23 August 1968); not included in this volume.
 Introduction 9

comments on Aus den sieben Tagen, a work that demonstrates ‘the extent to which
Stockhausen is now directly involved in sonic … material’.30
Writing enthusiastically about a concert of Stockhausen’s music at St Pancras
Town Hall on 25 November 1968, Nyman identifies a new stage in Stockhausen’s
evolution, ‘towards a free, non-European, non-masterwork position’.31 Yet hints
of cracks in the Stockhausen edifice start to appear a few months later in a review
of Mikrophonie II, when Nyman suggest that an ‘over-exposure to Stockhausen’s
music does leave one with the nagging suspicion that he has a fear of leaving
anything out of his scores.’32 Ultimately, Stockhausen’s ‘phenomenally integrative,
totalistic approach’ becomes his Achilles heel. Stockhausen’s ‘desperate all-
inclusiveness’ presents a paradox which cannot be adequately resolved, as
suggested in an article on Stockhausen and David Bedford in The Listener in 1970:

On the one hand, [his music] consumes everything it finds useful in its path,
and on the other, subjects what it finds or invents to a microscopic scrutiny of
which the results are so rich and relevant to the whole that at the final analysis
seemingly nothing can be left out.33

Nyman’s disenchantment is complete when, in an article comparing Stockhausen

and Cage in 1971, he states: ‘Stockhausen is definitely the composer [but] Cage
really does give you as near total freedom as you can have’.34 A review of Mantra
later the same year only serves to magnify such faults. The work fails in Nyman’s
view because ‘the more elaborate the transformations of the innocuous initial
material, the more empty and insignificant the result’.35
It was perhaps due to his more direct contact with the British avant-garde
scene that Nyman’s writings are on the whole less openly critical of the work
of composers such as Birtwistle, Goehr, Maxwell Davies. While experiences
at Wardour Castle in 1964 may not have convinced Nyman of the benefits of
12-note music to his own compositional development (one senses that the summer
school had been set up as a kind of British equivalent to the summer courses for
new music held at Darmstadt from the late 1940s onwards), Nyman nevertheless
proselytized on behalf of many composers who adopted these methods. Indeed,
he shared some sympathy with his British counterparts’ interest in developing
alternative dramatic forms to that of conventional opera; he found their interest
in ritual forms fascinating, and gave considered appraisal of the appropriation of
found musical materials in their work.

30
‘About Time Too’.
31
Ibid.
32
‘Work Projects’, The Spectator (7 February 1969).
33
‘Stockhausen and David Bedford’, The Listener (30 April 1970).
34
‘Sign Language’, New Statesman (26 February 1971); my emphasis.
35
‘Heavy Duty’, New Statesman (10 September 1971); not included in this volume.
10 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Nyman’s closest contact in the avant-garde scene was with Birtwistle, whose
music he reviewed on a number of occasions between 1968 and 1973. He also
edited Birtwistle’s Nomos for Universal Edition in 1968 and collaborated with the
composer by writing the libretto for Down by the Greenwood Side the following
year.36 Reflecting on Birtwistle’s work more recently in the Classic Britannia
series broadcast on BBC4, Nyman said of his Tragoedia that it was ‘kind of [a]
fearless [work] … the way the music was structured, the soundworld and the
clarity … the aggression and the energy. Suddenly there was this piece which just
blew everything away.’37 Nyman’s association with the Brighton Festival during
the late 1960s also placed him in contact with Goehr, Maxwell Davies and David
Drew, the latter with whom he became involved in promoting the first performance
of Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny.38 Later, Birtwistle – in his role as music director at
the National Theatre – effectively kick-started Nyman’s compositional career by
commissioning him to compose and arrange music for the National Theatre’s
production of Il Campiello.
Of the members of the Manchester School, Goehr’s music often received the
most favourable response from Nyman, while Maxwell Davies’s music fared less
well. The former’s Naboth’s Vineyard, first performed at the Brighton Festival in
1968, is described by Nyman as ‘spare and incisive’,39 and in a thorough analysis
of the work for Tempo magazine, is said to be ‘imaginatively conceived, with
great stylistic unity … [it] is one of Goehr’s finest achievements’.40 Nyman relates
the work’s success to the composer’s ability to craft ‘maximum effect – musical,
dramatic or even spatial – with the minimum of means’ – a nod, perhaps, towards
Nyman’s later working methods.41 Davies’s music presents a greater number of
paradoxes, however. In his review of the composer’s L’Homme Armé in 1969,
Nyman suggests that while it is:

Arguably one of the most brilliant scores to have come out of England since the
[second world] war … the progressive corruption of the material in this piece
is, in a way, an acute act of self-criticism, of self-destruction, since what he is
humorously but savagely ‘sending-up’ is not only external objects or styles, but
chiefly his own methods and techniques.42

36
For more on Nomos and Down by the Greenwood Side, see ‘Harrison Birtwistle’,
London Magazine, 11 (October/November 1971).
37
Classic Britannia, BBC4 (first broadcast 2007).
38
For more on Drew’s research into Weill’s music, see ‘Lindbergh’s Flight’ (The
Listener, 2 June 1977).
39
‘Commission Airs’, The Spectator (26 July 1968); not included in this volume.
40
‘Alexander Goehr’s Naboth’s Vineyard’, Tempo, 86 (Autumn 1968).
41
‘Commission Airs’.
42
‘Demolition Squad’, The Spectator (14 February 1969).
 Introduction 11

Nyman also chastises Davies for reverting to ‘purely onomatopoeic’ representations

of musical quotations in the composer’s well-known Eight Songs for a Mad King,
rather than providing a ‘musical framework’ for them.43 Davies’s use of pre-existing
material results in a music which becomes ‘a vast game of private symbolism,
where objects are not used as objects but as symbols’.44 This symbolism plays
havoc with Davies’s musical language in Nyman’s view: quotation in Eight Songs
for a Mad King is ‘too close, too graphic’, whereas in compositions such as Versalii
Icones, it becomes too bland.45
Davies’s foxtrots and gypsy-style music were often heard in concerts given
by Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies’s ensemble, the Pierrot Players, and certain
parallels can be drawn between this group and Nyman’s Campiello Band, albeit
with different artistic aims in mind. Yayoi Everett’s article on parody in twentieth-
century music articulates the differences between the two composers. She notes
that whereas Davies exaggerates the original function of the pre-existing material
by ‘progressively splintering it through distortion and magnification’, Nyman’s
re-presentation of the material in his music maintains critical distance.46 Davies’s
music, unlike Birtwistle, ‘frequently uses not “found sounds” (like national
anthems, foxtrots, or the classics) but found formal archetypes or myths, whether
the forms of Greek tragedy … traditional ritual … [methods] of combining voices
and instruments … found [in] folk [music] … or the mummers’ play’.47 In any case,
both approaches engage with quotation in different ways, either of an implicit or
explicit nature.

Quotation

It is difficult not to read Nyman’s writings on the subject of musical borrowing

without drawing links with his own music, since a number of his important works
from the 1970s and 1980s quote from a wide range of sources, such as Bull, Purcell,
Mozart, Schumann and Schoenberg, while his later style utilizes a multilayered,
palimpsest-like approach to self-quotation.48 In truth, the subject does not acquire
a central role when Nyman’s writings are viewed in toto, but it is nevertheless

43
‘This Way Madness’, The Spectator (9 May 1969).
44
‘Drums & Symbols’, The Spectator (20 December 1969).
45
Ibid.
46
See Yayoi Uno Everett, ‘Parody with an Ironic Edge, Dramatic Works by Kurt
Weill, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Louis Andriessen’, Music Theory Online, 10/4 (2004,
http://www.societymusictheory.org/mto/issues/mto.04.10.4/mto.04.10.4.yeverett.html
(accessed 3 January 2012)).
47
‘Harrison Birtwistle’, London Magazine, 11 (October/November 1971).
48
For more on Nyman’s use of quotation, see my The Music of Michael Nyman:
Texts, Contexts and Intertexts (Aldershot: Ashgate 2007).
12 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

interesting to note that many of his theories about quotation were already being
refined and developed some years before he placed theory into practice.
The notion of borrowing extends back to Nyman’s musicological research
into the techniques and methods of Baroque composers during the mid-1960s.
Reference and allusion is first discussed in ‘Peace on Earth and Good Will Towards
Music’ when Nyman compares the ‘parody’ techniques of Renaissance composers
‘who often recomposed material from other people’s music’, or in art-house
movies, such as the ‘self-allusions in Bergman, and all the cult cross-references
in New Wave French cinema’.49 The subject is addressed in more direct terms
in Nyman’s 1969 article on Handel’s The Choice of Hercules, where he states,
paraphrasing Handel’s thoughts, that ‘nothing can be wasted. You must put that
old G-minor fugue, and all that Alceste music you wasted your time on recently,
to productive use … .’50 Nyman also observed while studying Handel’s autograph
scores that there were frequent instructions to the copyist to take a musical section,
transpose it and place it in such a way as to form part of a new work. Such practice
is also identified in the music of other composers, including the late Romanticism
of Bruckner and Mahler: ‘Today’s “collecting mania” amongst composers is, in
fact, nothing new: Bruckner and more especially Mahler did the same, except that,
as inheritors of the Viennese tradition, they filched from their own property.’51
The notion of re-composing is related to Birtwistle’s compositional methods, too,
in the manner in which he ‘[works] over his own material … re-composition =
variation = versions = Verses for Ensembles …’ – one is immediately reminded of
Nyman’s own (re)working methods here.52
Nyman’s comments on such contemporary uses of quotation illuminate his own
position on this subject. In an article entitled ‘Patchwork’ he points out that ‘once
obscure composers, like Stockhausen and Berio, seem to be coming in from the
cold abstractions of serialism to rummage around musical second-hand, antique
and ethnic shops in search of a new kind of musical “realism”’, but contrasts
the ‘bold sound montages’ of the modernists with the past composers’ adoption
of ‘tiny fragile ideas … woven together by means of a permutational system’.53
Implicit in Nyman’s comments is the suggestion that pre-existing material cannot
be mapped onto another style unless they both share a number of common
features and characteristics – an idea which is amply demonstrated in his own

49
‘Peace on Earth and Good Will Towards Music’, The Listener (19 December
1968); not included in this volume.
50
‘Sons of Art’, The Listener (27 March 1969); not included in this volume.
51
‘Giant Strides’, The Spectator (23 August 1969); not included in this volume.
52
‘Two New Works by Birtwistle’, Tempo, 88 (Spring 1969).
53
‘Patchwork’, The Spectator (26 July 1969). Nyman discovered this permutational
system when he became involved in a project led by Australian musicologist Graham Pont,
which involved trawling through every Handel autograph score looking for certain kinds of
cadential patterns: identifying, cataloguing and listing particular ‘linguistic’ units belonging
to the composer’s music.
 Introduction 13

music. Nyman thus favours the practices of past composers who set out to weave
quotation into the very fabric of their musical language, as opposed to the 1960s
phenomenon of setting up stylistic disruptions and juxtapositions. The composer’s
musical language has to be strong enough to sustain the weight of quotation, and
Nyman cautions against John Tavener’s use of it in his Requiem, pointing out that
‘[Tavener’s] music shows that the quotations game is a dangerous one to play
unless the material is submitted to a singularly powerful creative imagination’.54
Nyman sometimes draws comparison between some of the leading lights –
such as Birtwistle, Cardew and Cage – often in order to illuminate important
differences rather than similarities. In comparing Birtwistle’s ensemble, the Pierrot
Players, with the Scratch Orchestra, Nyman points out that the former group, ‘can
only be an alternative within the system’, while Cardew ‘has created in the Scratch
Orchestra a radical alternative to the system’.55 Nyman sees both Birtwistle and
Cage as being concerned with nature ‘in its manner of operation’, but whereas Cage
‘attempts to imitate this manner of operation, Birtwistle develops principles from
it’.56 For Birtwistle, art remains separate from life, whereas in Cage’s experimental
aesthetic the two are inextricably linked. According to the experimental music
doctrine, music partakes of both ‘ethical’ and ‘aesthetic’ positions, and it is this
more radical approach that Nyman defines and develops in the more substantial,
in-depth writings contained in Part II of the collected writings.

Experimental Music

Nyman’s writings are often at their most thought-provoking and illuminating

when discussing the music and ideas of John Cage. Reviewing the first European
performance of Cage’s Musicircus in Paris in October 1970, Nyman writes that
‘[genuine] simplicity, acceptance, even saintliness are the keys to understanding
Cage’s music’, in comparison with Boulez’s cerebral theories or Stockhausen’s
authoritarian writings. Indeed, it is Cage’s abdication of the kind of complete
creative control exercised by Stockhausen that appealed to Nyman: ‘One would
be grateful to Cage simply for seeing his present function as a composer not as a
dictator’s, but as one that liberates the full play of the musician’s imagination in
performance.’57
The extent of Cage’s influence on contemporary music from the mid-twentieth-
century onwards became the focus of Nyman’s book Experimental Music: Cage
and Beyond, first published in 1974, but effectively planned, researched and

54
‘Patchwork’.
55
‘Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning’, London Magazine (December 1971/
January 1972).
56
Ibid.
57
‘Not Being Done’, The Spectator (25 April 1969).
14 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

written during 1970–72.58 Nyman sets out his stall in the opening chapter by
defining ‘experimental music’ as a music-aesthetic term. Described by Victor
Schonfield as ‘a brilliant opening chapter’, it maps a cosmology of experimental
music by applying a wide range of terms and definitions based on the three main
categories of Composition, Performance and Listening. Thus for Composition, the
areas of notation, process, the unique moment, time and identity are examined and
explained. Tasks, instruments, silence, ‘games and the rules and their interpretation’
form the basis for the section on Performance, while ‘focus’ and ‘music and life’
constitute subcategories within the experience of Listening.
Such a complex web of interrelationships reflects the heterogeneous nature of
experimental music, and it is perhaps because of its impenetrable qualities that
Nyman contrasts experimentalism with the European avant-garde in Chapter 1.59
In the area of notation, for example, Nyman states that ‘[a] score may no longer
“represent” sounds by means of the specialized symbols we call musical notation,
symbols which are read by the performer who does his best to “reproduce” as
accurately as possible the sounds the composer initially “heard” and then stored’;60
or when describing musical processes, ‘[experimental] composers have evolved a
vast number of processes to bring about “acts the outcome of which are unknown”
(Cage)’.61 In his discussion of ‘the Unique Moment’, Nyman explains that ‘the
experimental composer is interested not in the uniqueness of permanence but in
the uniqueness of the moment’.62 Time is seen to exist, quoting Feldman, ‘in its
unstructured existence’,63 while experimental scores are seen more as ‘concepts’
or ‘directives for (specific or general) action’.64 Similarly, musical instruments
are no longer constrained by traditional function – ‘not simply as a means of
making sounds in the accepted fashion’. Instead, the instrument becomes a ‘total
configuration’: the difference, as Nyman puts it, ‘between “playing the piano” and
the “piano as sound source”’.65
One of the most important musical consequences of the experimental aesthetic
were ‘that processes [involved … were] the most direct and straightforward

58
A ‘Draft Outline’ of the book, dated ‘August 1970’, is contained in Nyman’s archives.
59
Nyman continued to contrast European avant-garde and experimental music in later
writings, such as ‘Against Intellectual Complexity in Music’. This article was delivered at a
conference on the ‘New Simplicity’ in Wansee, near Berlin, in 1977, where Nyman recalls
that all the composers present (apart from Reich and himself) were in fact representatives
of the so-called ‘New Complexity’ movement.
60
Nyman, Experimental Music, pp. 3–4.
61
Ibid. p. 4.
62
Ibid. p. 9.
63
Morton Feldman, ‘Between Categories’ (1969), in B.H. Friedman (ed.) Give My
Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman (Cambridge MA: Exact
Change, 2000), p. 87.
64
Nyman, Experimental Music, p. 14.
65
Ibid. p. 20.
 Introduction 15

means of simply setting sounds in motion’,66 but the implications of Nyman’s

study in fact go beyond the notion of process being prioritized over product. In
his foreword to the second edition, Brian Eno states that the book’s ‘revolutionary
proposition’ was the thesis that ‘music is something your mind does’,67 a notion
closely aligned with Nyman’s proposition that music’s ‘built-in obsolescence’
made it susceptible to a whole range of multiple meanings and interpretations.
One other important musical consequence of the book was that Nyman’s research
set his own thoughts in motion about the direction in which his music was to go.
In K. Robert Schwarz’s words, ‘the most important ramification of Experimental
Music was that it allowed Nyman to return to composition. It was almost as if, by
so thoroughly documenting the various stylistic paths available to an anti-serialist
composer, he had expiated his lingering bitterness – and found his own voice.’68
For Schonfield, the book demonstrated an ‘exhilarating command of every
aspect of the subject and its wider implications, and with every paragraph
overflowing with information and ideas, its authority as art history is unmistakable’.
While a number of (mainly pro-Stockhausen) reviewers on the avant-garde side
of the fence took issue with Nyman’s decision to admit certain composers into
the experimental canon at the expense of others, it is important to remember
that Nyman was writing at a time when the rift between the ‘two nations’ of
contemporary music was far more pronounced than it has become in the twenty-
first century, as summarized in the following quote from 1972:

[The] experimental … [and] the avant-garde … don’t mix, they don’t play each
other’s music, they keep themselves to themselves, and their roles and rewards
are mightily different. Avant-garde means fame, festivals, commissions, and
acceptance by the establishment and their audiences; experimental (Cage apart)
means a ghetto, repressive tolerance, a small but totally dedicated following, and
earning your living some other way.69

There were certainly composers whose music borrowed from elements common
to both movements. Feldman was the most obvious case in point, a composer who,
in Nyman’s eyes, moved ‘out of the ghetto’ in order to achieve the status of ‘a real
composer’, but sacrificed a lot as a result: ‘where previously his music seemed just
to “happen” it is now beginning to be very consciously “composed”’.70
While such differences may not appear so pronounced some 40 or so years
later, in writing Experimental Music Nyman effectively initiated a kind of modern-
day Artusian ‘Seconda Prattica’ to the avant-garde’s ‘Prima Prattica’, similar
to the break which occurred between the late Renaissance and early Baroque.

66
Ibid, p. 29.
67
Ibid. xii.
68
Schwarz, Minimalists, p. 196.
69
‘Circle Complete’, New Statesman (31 March 1972).
70
Ibid.
16 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

By producing a detailed account of a (nevertheless diverse and heterogeneous)

movement which set itself up as a credible alternative to the avant-garde, with
its own aesthetic, widespread community of composers and practitioners, its
own network of associations and manifold means of dissemination, subsequent
generations of composers could either follow the path of one or the other, or try
(as Feldman had done, and Monteverdi himself back in the early seventeenth-
century) to navigate a course in between the two streams.
If Cage was the main promulgator of the experimental ethos in the United
States, Cornelius Cardew was developing similar concepts in England. Cardew
serves as an important figure in Nyman writings, in particular the composer’s
magnum opus The Great Learning (1968–70). Nyman’s first experiences of
listening to this work only served to reaffirm his views about the European avant-
garde and its retrogressive aesthetic. The Great Learning’s profound impact on
Nyman can be gleaned from his impressions of Paragraph 2 from the work, after
a performance at the Roundhouse in May 1969. Nyman described it as ‘one of
those rare works of such power and freshness that they seem to reinvent music
from its very sources by somersaulting [over] musical history’.71 He produced a
detailed exegesis of the work in London Magazine in January 1971 to coincide
with the first performance of Paragraph 5, by which time his initial experiences as
listener/critic had been enriched by active participation as member of the Scratch
Orchestra, and even went as far as to describe it as ‘the most important large scale
vocal/instrumental work produced in England since Israel in Egypt’.72
What inspired Nyman about The Great Learning was its ability to reconnect
directly with music, to make one ‘intensely aware, as if for the first time, of
the physical intension of sound’,73 something which Cage’s music, with its
philosophical slant on ‘theatre’ and ‘life’, had fallen short of achieving. In a
comparison of the two in 1971, Nyman relates this to their differing attitudes
towards notation. Whereas ‘Cage’s notations … propose ways of organizing the
production of sounds … Cardew’s [notations] propose various ways of organizing
people to produce sounds’.74
This immediate reconnection with sound was realized through the Scratch
Orchestra, formed in May 1969 by Cardew, Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton
as ‘a large number of enthusiasts pooling their resources (not primarily musical

71
‘This Way Madness’, The Spectator (9 May 1969). Cardew’s The Great Learning,
based on texts by the Chinese philosopher Confucius (551 BC–479 BC), consists of seven
movements or ‘Paragraphs’.
72
See ‘Learning from Scratch’, New Statesman (28 January 1972), p. 123. Nyman
appeared on the first recording of The Great Learning – performances of Paragraphs 2 and
7 were recorded during 15–16 February 1971 at Chappell Studios, London, and issued later
on Deutsche Grammophon (DG 2561 107).
73
‘Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning’.
74
Ibid.
 Introduction 17

resources) and assembling for action (music-making, performance, edification)’.75

Nyman viewed the Scratch Orchestra and its activities as a credible alternative to
the Manchester School, praising its ability to combine ‘freedom and prescription’
and enable ‘diverse talents [to] flourish to the extent of their abilities and needs’.76
However, by the end of 1971, political and ideological strife and upheaval had
beset the group, and the experimental scene in Britain splintered into a number
of independent groups which nevertheless shared some common ground with the
Scratch Orchestra, such as the Promenade Theatre Orchestra (formed by John
White in 1969, which ran concurrently with the Scratch Orchestra), Portsmouth
Sinfonia (formed by Gavin Bryars and others at Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1970,
in which Nyman also played), and other groups such as the Harmony Band (led
by Dave and Diane Jackman), and Private Company, founded by Michael Chant.
Nyman’s writings from the mid-1970s onwards deal at some length with the
influence and legacy of the Scratch Orchestra in the form of ‘the new tonality’,
which characterized the compositions of English composers such as Bryars,
Skempton, White and Hobbs. The improvisational ethic of the late 1960s, with
its often arbitrary and unpredictable musical results, gave way to a far more
predetermined approach based on musical processes and patterns, which often
drew upon pre-existing music. The significance of this new wave of post-
experimental music is encapsulated in Nyman’s survey article, ‘Believe it or not
melody rides again’ where, in addition to drawing upon pulse, consonance and the
use of readymade materials, ‘system’ and ‘sentimentality’ are also described as
characteristics of this music.77
Nyman draws comparison between this music and 1960s art movements
such as Process, Systems, Op and Minimal Art.78 Indeed, a common thread that
connects experimental music to minimalism via movements such as Fluxus was
that initial ideas were inspired by developments in the art world, which precipitated
relationships with other art forms such as dance, theatre, film and later opera.
Parallels between music and art is a recurring theme in Nyman’s writings, and some
of his most important publications appeared in art-based magazines and journals,
such as Art and Artists and Studio International. Nyman was to become a more
active agent in developing music and art connections during his time as lecturer
at Trent Polytechnic and Maidstone College of Art during the mid-1970s. Many
of Nyman’s collaborators came from fine art backgrounds, most notably Peter
Greenaway, who was at South West Essex Technical College (where film director
Ken Russell and pop singer Ian Dury had studied, and where pianist John Tilbury
later taught). One of Nyman’s students at Maidstone was David Cunningham, who
went on to form punk band the Flying Lizards, and produced (or co-produced) all

75
Cardew, Scratch Music (London: Latimer Press, 1972), p. 10.
76
‘Scratch & Co’, The Spectator (13 December 1969).
77
‘Melody Rides Again’, Music and Musicians (October 1971).
78
Ibid.
18 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

of Nyman’s albums up to and including the Michael Nyman Songbook,79 providing

a distinctive edgy and visceral sound to Nyman’s early recordings through what he
recently described as ‘the “audio roughening” process’.80
While Experimental Music addresses the impact of Cage and the New York
School on contemporary music during the second half of the twentieth century,
Nyman’s writings also explore and situate a ‘pre-experimental’ experimental
tradition by detailing parallel movements that exhibited similar tendencies.
In Nyman’s book, Satie is established as the most prominent precursor to the
movement, largely due to his status in Cage’s own writings. Elsewhere in Nyman’s
writings he moves away from this view by identifying a number of peripheral
musical figures whose attitude and approach prefigure experimental tendencies.
This is most clearly shown in a paper given on Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781–
1861) for a conference on American Music at Keele University in 1975. Other
figures include Michael Praetorius in the early seventeenth century and C.P.E.
Bach in the eighteenth. Haydn’s middle-period symphonies are also viewed by
Nyman as:

[Experimental] works [which] are far more ‘interesting’ than a lot of his later
ones … [page] after page reveals quite extraordinary flashes of imagination,
and far from being just a series of variations on an established model they are
so dissimilar that it is amazing that the ‘classical’ symphony ever managed to
stabilise itself.81

The music of ‘second-rate’ composers often possesses a ‘delicious built-in time-

warp’,82 prompting Nyman to question the whole notion of ‘high peaks’ in art: ‘[it]
all depends on what vantage point you view [them] from … [to] me, the quartet
attributed to Benjamin Franklin, in which all the strings are retuned to enable
every note to be played on an open string, is a peak’.83
Such interests at times guide Nyman to quite unexpected areas, as in his
appraisal of the work of Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas in ‘Mexican
Discovery’. Another figure is Lord Berners, with whom he compares with Satie:
‘they both had a love of parody and pastiche, and were not ashamed to accept the

79
Michael Nyman Songbook (Argo 425 227-2, 1992).
80
See the essay ‘1976/1981’, in the liner notes to the 2011 CD release of Michael
Nyman LP (MNRCD123), p. 5. Other composers and performers who taught at Art
Colleges during this time included Gavin Bryars at Portsmouth College of Art and Leicester
Polytechnic, John White at Leicester, Cardew at Maidstone College of Art, and Victor
Schonfield at Walthamstow.
81
‘Papa’s Stock’, New Statesman (8 January 1971); not included in this volume.
82
‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’, The Listener (24 May 1973); not included in this
volume.
83
‘Peak District’, The Listener (9 October 1975).
 Introduction 19

musical “low life” of their times in their work’.84 Nyman was soon to embrace
the musical vernacular in his own music when he established the Foster’s Social
Orchestra while lecturing at Trent Polytechnic in the mid-1970s (which took the
popular music of nineteenth-century American composer Stephen Foster as its
starting point), followed later by the Campiello Band, set up very much in the
post-Scratch Orchestra tradition.

Minimalist Music

Having contributed a number of important articles on a wide range of subjects

from early to experimental music, Nyman’s reputation as both critic and composer
was nevertheless established largely through his connections and associations with
the minimalist movement. Although the term ‘minimalism’ held some currency as
a valid art-historical term from the mid-1960s, Nyman was the first to apply it
directly to music. But it is not so much the novelty of Nyman’s invention of the
term that makes these texts important, however, but rather what he had to say
about the movement itself.
While the music of La Monte Young and Terry Riley was becoming known by
the end of the 1960s in the UK through Cardew’s writings and performances of their
music, apart from a broadcast of ‘Come Out’ on the BBC’s Third Programme in
1970, Steve Reich’s music was relatively unknown, and Philip Glass’s music almost
completely so. This was also true, to an extent, in the United States, where the four
composers lived and worked. Nyman thus played an active role in introducing their
music to a wider audience. His interview with Steve Reich, published in 1971, was
one of the first to cast light on the composer’s early works and explain the minimalist
aesthetic. Nyman also arranged for Reich and his ensemble to perform for the first
time in the UK at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in March 1971.85
It was partly due to the positive exposure accorded by Nyman to minimalist music
in The Spectator, The Listener and Tempo magazines that its stock began to rise both
in the UK and in the United States during the early 1970s.86

84
‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’, 27 December 1973); not included in this volume.
85
See Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve
Reich, Philip Glass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 198. A letter sent
from Nyman to Reich in October 1970 states that Nyman was planning on presenting two
performances of Reich’s music; the second, which never materialized, was due to replace a
performance of Stockhausen’s Stimmung as part of the Macnaghten concert series. Nyman
also performed with Reich’s ensemble when he organised a concert of Reich’s music at
the Hayward Gallery in 1972 (see ‘SR – Mysteries of the Phase’ Music and Musicians,
February 1972).
86
Village Voice critic and composer Tom Johnson was another supporter of minimalist
music, and also adopted the term in March 1972 in an article called ‘The Minimal Slow-
Motion Approach’.
20 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Nyman’s oft-quoted ‘Minimal Music’ article, published in October 1968, does

not refer directly to those composers who became associated with the term, but it
certainly ranks as one of the first articles to introduce minimalism as a valid music-
historical designation.87 The first direct reference to the minimalist composers
appeared a year later, when Nyman alluded to ‘the microscopic processes, the
stroboscopic effects, of the new American “minimal” music’ of Riley and Reich,
which he describes as ‘[a] single idea gradually blooms, revealing a vibrating
inner life’.88
While being one of the first to coin minimalism, there is less evidence that
Nyman was keen to advocate it as a generic term. Even when writing about the
subject in 1973, Nyman still prefers to describe ‘the ritual repetitions of Steve Reich
or Terry Riley, or the unaffectedly simple melodic and harmonic progressions of
Howard Skempton and Gavin Bryars’ as the ‘new tonality’.89 Other terms, such
as ‘systems music’ are also used at this time,90 although in his 1971 interview
with Reich he does refer to the composer’s practice of working ‘with an absolute
minimum of musical material’.91
More importantly perhaps, from the very outset Nyman refines and develops
a relevant vocabulary for discussing this music, demonstrating an innate and
empathetic understanding of its forms, structures and processes. In his review of
the historic late night Prom concert in 1970 featuring music by Tim Souster and
performances by Terry Riley and Soft Machine, Nyman refers to the lack of ‘goal-
orientation’ in Riley’s musical processes – a notion that anticipates other writings
on this subject by many years – and provides one of the first analyses of the new
experience of listening to minimalist music:

As Keyboard Studies sets itself in motion, totally new relationships and patterns
are heard – a marvellous microcosmic changing of colour, of emphasis, in a
steadily unfolding, unchanging continuum; a perpetual motion in a basically
static texture … [on] the melodic side one hears this osmosis of colour shades,
while rhythmically each figure sets up its own accentuation and chain of tiny,
conflicting, eddying pulses. From time to time the sustained pitches glow
magically from inside the texture. And as the pitch range gradually moves …

87
Nyman later reflected in an interview for BBC4’s Classic Britannia series in 2007:
‘Of course I knew about minimalism – the kind in the art world – and all those kinds of
structural things connected with it. But this was just a pure description of a kind of musical
quantity … which was “minimal”.’
88
‘With Reference to Birtwistle’s Medusa’, The Listener (13 November 1969), p. 676.
La Monte Young was only admitted into the ‘group’ in 1971, while Glass does not make an
obvious appearance until his inclusion in the final chapter of Experimental Music.
89
‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’ (3 May 1973).
90
‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’, The Listener (23 August 1973).
91
‘Steve Reich: an interview with Michael Nyman’, Musical Times (March 1971);
my emphasis.
 Introduction 21

higher … the ‘lift’ one feels is of quite extraordinary power and simplicity, since
it happens so imperceptibly, over such a comparatively long period of time.92

Nyman emphasizes the significance of this music in April 1971 when he states that
‘Terry Riley … along with La Monte Young and Steve Reich has produced the most
exciting music to have come from America since Cage’,93 even going as far as to
describe it as ‘a new “classical” music of unprecedented vitality and strength of
purpose, a music that extends beyond the frontiers of the Cage-Stockhausen era’.94
In his preface to Wim Mertens’s American Minimal Music, the first monograph
dedicated exclusively to minimalism (published in 1983), Nyman reflects on the
manner in which the music’s appeal had ‘broadened’ during the intervening decade
– emerging from the private lofts and art galleries of New York to concert halls and
large auditoriums. He also points out that, ‘paradoxically, such a quintessentially
American and seemingly anti-European music has been largely supported and
fostered by European institutions’,95 a criticism that has been exacerbated since
then by a perceived lack of support for European minimalists in America.
Nyman was also one of the first writers to draw comparison between
minimalism and rock. His Prom review considers how Riley’s A Rainbow in
Curved Air stands ‘marvellously at the intersecting point of pop and straight,
without compromising either, beautiful, and untouchably different’.96 He also
identifies minimalist influences in the Velvet Undergound’s ‘Sister Ray’, which
is ‘considered by some to be the pop equivalent of some of La Monte Young’s
pieces’.97 His survey of Eno’s Obscure Records project also draws together the
areas of art and pop, and demonstrates how Eno’s association with composers such
as Gavin Bryars introduced Eno’s music to the kind of ‘serious’ music audience he
was keen to nurture and develop after his career as Roxy Music’s keyboard player
had come to an end, while the repetitive, process-driven music of the English
experimentalists was exposed to pop audiences for the first time.
One occasionally senses the influence of minimalism on Nyman’s reflections
on the music of the past in his writings. For example, in describing Berlioz as a
composer who was ‘able to free himself from the grip of a functional harmony
in which the key schemes and tonal relations circumscribe the form’, and in his
ability to build the ‘Offertorium’ from his Requiem on ‘a vocal ostinato of two
alternating notes’, such techniques not only illuminate ‘the extent to which Berlioz

92
‘Tim Souster’s Night Out at the Proms’, Tempo (Autumn 1970).
93
‘Interconnections’, New Statesman (16 April 1971).
94
‘Uncommercial’, New Statesman (20 August 1971).
95
Preface to Wim Mertens’s American Minimal Music: La Monte Young, Terry Riley,
Steve Reich, Philip Glass, trans. J. Hautekiet (London: Kahn & Averill, 1983), p. 8.
96
‘Tim Souster’s Night Out at the Proms’.
97
‘Interconnections’, New Statesman (16 April 1971).
22 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

had escaped from Beethovenian rhetoric, but [demonstrate] formal principles

which are only being realised – indirectly of course – by composers today’.98
Pop music is also studied in its own right when Nyman examines how ‘one
of [its] most fascinating aspects … is the way that a perhaps banal tune-and-
harmony is transformed, in the recording studio, into the fairly complex “sound”
we hear on record’.99 An emphasis on the studio as an effective compositional
tool for sculpting sound and layering musical material anticipates elements of
Nyman’s style. Likewise, his comments on opera and film also cast light on future
projects undertaken by him in these areas. Nyman’s early interest in French film
is suggested in references to Resnais and others, in his comparison of Kagel’s use
of pre-existing music and the ‘split-screen’ device in cinema,100 or Eisenstein’s
famous scene from October where the peasants haul the large cannon up a hill
as evoking Stravinsky’s ‘Rondes Printanières’ from The Rite of Spring. Such
comparisons suggest that film as a multimedia genre was engaging Nyman’s
creative imagination from early on in his career.101
Opera also acts as a ‘stimulus’ for Nyman’s ‘cinematic imagination’102 when
he compares the sectionalized nature of Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy with that
of film editing: ‘each action [of the opera] is broken down into a series of shots,
each shot being a short self-contained musical entity’.103 Nyman’s increasing
disaffection with contemporary opera is also articulated in his comment on the
‘aesthetic backwardness of most new serious operas which present B-feature
plots and attempt psychological and physical naturalism in a losing battle with an
artificial convention’.104

Conclusion

Nyman’s diverse and multifaceted work during the time in which he was most
active as a critic – as musicologist, composer, critic and performer – is reflected
in his ability to talk about, and draw parallels between, a wide range of musical
styles: from Berlioz to minimalism, from early music to modernism, or from folk

 
98
‘Echo Answers’, The Spectator (14 June 1969); not included in this volume.
 
99
‘New Favourites’, The Spectator (13 September 1968).
100
‘Is This a Record?’, The Spectator (3 January 1969).
101
‘Food of Love’, The Spectator (10 January 1970).
102
‘Big Screen Opera’, New Statesman (19 February 1971); not included in this volume.
103
‘Enter Birtwistle’, The Spectator (30 August 1968).
104
‘Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy’, The Listener (10 October 1968). The
notion of a post-operatic form is presented in Nyman’s short article ‘Drama and Music’
for the journal Musicanada, published in 1985, where he states that all forms aspire to
the condition of opera (such as film and music video), and represents a reaction to the
‘lumbering 19th-century operatic apparatus’, becoming ‘stripped of drama, musical, visual,
verbal or emotional’.
 Introduction 23

music to Cage and the experimental movement. What ultimately motivated Nyman
as a critic was the discovery of something new ‘hidden among the familiar acres’,
and in many respects one of his main achievements as writer was to uncover and
introduce new areas to new readers. However, when the act of writing music took
over from the act of writing about it, Nyman’s days as critic were numbered.
Having started to discover new ideas and techniques through composition rather
than criticism, Nyman could place 10 years of listening, analysing and writing
about the subject into the practice of forming and developing a musical language
from his critical language. By 1982, the year of The Draughtsman’s Contract and
the last essay in this volume, Nyman could reflect upon this time from the vantage
point of ‘a former music critic with no great fondness for the profession or its
current practitioners’. Nevertheless, from the perspective of a career that has now
spanned over 30 years of creative activity, there is much to appreciate, reflect and
admire in the essays, articles and interviews contained in this volume.
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Part I
Reviews, Criticisms and
Short Prose Writings
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Section 1
1968–1969

‘Blocks of Granite’ (The Spectator, 12 July 1968, p. 63)

At a time when anyone making the attempt to comprehend ‘new music’ is faced
with a labyrinth of seemingly mutually exclusive techniques and idioms, the
position of Olivier Messiaen is both enigmatic and paradoxical in its relationship
to tradition and renewal.
His music is traditional yet draws on many non-western musical traditions. He
is a committed composer, a devout Catholic, whose works are often unfashionably
descriptive and programmatic. He notoriously lacks a sense of humour, which
makes his organist’s fondness for chains of luxuriously chromatic chords, Delius-
fashion, the more blatant. His melodies and textures are not fragmented in the
manner of the so-called post-Webern composers, yet he creates highly coloured
and shifting patterns of sound out of birdsong, in contexts which are nothing if
not avant-garde.
This attempt to ‘explain’ the prodigious and controversial originality of
Messiaen, now in his sixty-first year, is prompted by the enlightened alternative
ending to the Oxford-based Sixth English Bach Festival which was provided for
Londoners in what amounted to a complete Messiaen sub-Festival.1 Concerts of
representative piano, organ and choral works were crowned by a truly inspired feat
of programme planning which brought together three orchestral works central to
the understanding of Messiaen’s creative development.
These three works, L’Ascension, Turangalîla-Symphonie and Et exspecto
resurrectionem mortuorum, point a not too misleading parallel, bear a relationship
to each other similar to the string quartets of Beethoven’s early, middle and late
periods, and it is not without significance that they were written at intervals of
roughly 15 years – in 1933, 1948 and 1964 respectively. In all three the musical
material is in a heightened sense descriptive, expressing the texts or titles with
which Messiaen is wont to label his movements. The music has the function
of meditation or commentary; yet it is obvious that the different languages the
three works speak do not result from a mere difference of programme, nor from
a Stravinskyan assumption of stylistic masks. The overwhelming lyricism of
Turangalîla-Symphonie – a celebration of human, not divine, love; a vast ten-
movement reinterpretation of the Tristan and Isolde legend – has its roots in
L’Ascension, just as Turangalîla uncannily foreshadows the materials, techniques
and treatment of Et exspecto. Yet one feels that the partisans who reacted so

1
The English Bach Festival was established by Lina Lalandi in 1963.
28 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

volubly to the emotional message of Turangalîla at the Festival Hall on Friday

would, had they been allowed to applaud, have expressed similar reactions to Et
exspecto at Westminster Abbey on Saturday. It would be fascinating to know how
Beethoven’s audiences reacted to Op. 132 after Op. 59.
The physical grandeur of the Abbey, with its nobly echoing acoustic, was a
near-ideal setting for Et exspecto, scored for woodwind, brass and percussion
and intended, according to the composer, for ‘churches, cathedrals, and even
performance in the open air and on mountain heights’. Yet despite the fact that
the playing of the Orchestre Philharmonique de l’ORTF under the rather detached
direction of Charles Bruck,2 actually belittled the physical grandeur of the work
(as it did also of Turangalîla), the dying-away of the pause-notes in the ‘solos’
for gong and tam-tam, and of the final tutti chords of the first, third and fifth
movements, seemed to symbolise, by making one aware of the breaking-down and
decay of sound in silence, the whole new concept of musical time and space which
is one of the most important features of recent music.
Messiaen’s innovations in this field are largely rhythmic in origin, for whereas
the forward drive of the music of, say, Beethoven, partly depends on the complex
interrelationship of basic beat, individual rhythmic patterns and harmonic
movement, Messiaen destroys one’s sense of pulse by extremely slow tempi; and
by giving equal stress and value to different note-lengths, often creates with very
fast or very slow notes the characteristic texture of an orchestrated or ‘coloured’
rhythm. This technique is present somewhat more than embryonically in the first
and last movements of L’Ascension, where the melody becomes a series of parallel
chords. Form is created not by ‘development’ but by juxtaposing blocks whose
textures move but are at the same time static and hieratic. (Church-bell sequences
give the same sort of effect.)
In Et Exspecto the blocks Messiaen handles are of granite – and one should
perhaps draw attention finally to the last movement, ‘And I heard the voice of a
great multitude’, where the whole wind band, uniformly loud, move in gigantic,
slow chords, while a series of gongs beat faster notes all with the same insistent
intensity. The effect is overwhelming. However, with less matter of fact direction,
and without lapses of ensemble disconcerting in music which relies so much for its
effect on communal rhythmic precision, the work’s true stature would have been
more manifest.

‘The Sound of Music’ (The Spectator, 9 August 1968, pp. 201–2)

There was a time when the Juke Box Jury panel passed judgment on the ‘backing’
to a particular song;3 nowadays, pop groups are distinguished by their ‘sound’. An

2
ORTF: L’Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française.
3
Juke Box Jury was a pop music panel show broadcast on television by the BBC
between 1959 and 1967. It was revived in 1979 and again in 1989–90.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 29

important word in music, surely, but not much in evidence in the public discussion
of recorded avant-garde music at the ICA last week.4 There was much talk of noise
becoming music when properly ‘organised’, and there was also the gem from Mr
Hans Keller (after Schoenberg) that ‘good’ music remains ‘good’ no matter what
instrument it is played on and that ‘good’ music, if loud, does not lose its value if
played softly.
This half-truth – reflecting a general puritanism towards sound itself – passed
through my mind at the Varèse-Stravinsky Prom later in the week. The Rite of
Spring certainly works as a piano duet (as Barenboim and Ashkenazy demonstrated
at the Brighton Festival) but a similar arrangement of any piece by Varèse is
unthinkable. Varèse, who died three years ago at the age of 79, was obsessed all
his life with sound – sound sources, sound material and the projection of sound
in space. To him music was organisation of, not in, sound. He was continuously
frustrated by existing musical systems, whether tonal – when he first learned his
scales he objected that they all sounded alike – or serial, which he described as
hardening of the arteries. Equally, he resented the tempered system, in which the
octave is divided into 12 mathematically equal semitones, and the limitations of
conventional instruments. He stopped composing in 1937, needing electronic
means to achieve his aims. His lectures of that time read like a prophetic manifesto
for today’s musical priorities and problems. His Poème Electronique, presented
at the 1958 Brussels Fair as part of a light-sound show with Le Corbusier, partly
realised his intentions of ‘liberating sound’.
His Arcana for an orchestra of 140 musicians sounds as aggressive and
uncompromising today as it did in 1927, for Varèse uses sound as a ‘hot medium’,
packed with urgent, mostly loud, information. The mind and ear are not seduced
but assaulted by masses of brash, dissonant primary colours. This is the music
of the steel and concrete age. ‘I don’t care about reaching the public as much
as I care about reaching certain musical-acoustical phenomena … to disturb the
atmosphere’, he said.5 The Prommers were not reached, partly because of the
music itself, because the Blue Meanies successfully destroyed the music in their
manipulation of the Albert Hall echo6 – this was not the right space for Varèse’s
time-scale – and partly because a conductor of the genius of Boulez appeared not
to have communicated the essence of the music to the orchestra.
This music can be understood only on its own terms and not in terms of other
people’s music, or instrumental writing – although Stravinsky himself has been at
pains to stress his ‘contribution’ to Arcana. Varèse’s forms are always the outcome

4
London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) was founded in 1947.
5
Gunther Schuller, ‘Conversation with Varèse’, in Perspectives of New Music, 3/2
(Spring–Summer, 1965), pp. 32–7, p. 37.
6
Much to Nyman’s dismay, the Royal Albert Hall’s acoustics were altered in 1969
by suspending a number of fibreglass diffusers from the building’s ceiling, prompting
him to describe it as an ‘unadaptable oversized tent’ (see ‘Saucer-shaped’, The Spectator,
2 August 1968).
30 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

of the manipulation of precision-turned sound blocks, in which instrumental

register and colour, attack and dynamics are all-important, and which are set in
motion by rhythmic dislocation. It is, in part, the rate at which these masses succeed
one another that makes Arcana sound so new. It still seemed very unfamiliar to the
orchestra – I had the impression of an expert pianist at sea with material which he
claimed to be unpianistic.
In this context, The Rite of Spring sounded like ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’. It
has suffered a change of Prom status in the past few years – whereas in the past it
was served up to end a normal ‘meat-and-two-veg’ concert, it is now pitted against
other modern ‘giants’ – last year it was Stockhausen’s Gruppen. It is still something
of a ‘cause’ – to some it proves they don’t dislike ‘modern music’ completely; to
others it shows that Stravinsky was once a composer; and for some who disapprove
of his escape to neo-classicism, it comes in handy to perform along with the recent
serial works. If it no longer shocks, it still excites and titillates, and rhythmically
it is still staggering (as Boulez himself demonstrated in a lengthy article in 1951).7
But the time-scale is so old-fashioned, with its slowly unfolding tunes, its striking
motives repeated and varied to build up a well-defined ‘section’. It’s like the silent
movies where the explanatory titles are left on the screen too long – the modern
eye is capable of faster assimilation. Varèse in the ’twenties showed a very modern
eye in the ‘tempo’ of his music.
As sub-plot, the Prom included three smaller pieces – Stravinsky’s The King of
the Stars, composed just before the Rite, a fascinating and ‘unplaceable’ work in
the Stravinsky canon; his recent Requiem Canticles; and Varèse’s Ionisation for 13
percussionists, 37 instruments. Written in 1931, this was an attempt to escape the
tyranny of fixed pitches and is a fascinating synthesis of rhythms and a new sort of
thematicism brought about by the interplay of timbres and ‘free’ pitch levels. It is
the climax of Varèse’s percussion writing (all his scores have important structural
parts for percussion) and one of the starting points for John Cage’s percussion
pieces. Requiem Canticles is unmistakably Stravinsky – the images are now sparer,
the repetitions briefer, and the texture more austere. The gestures are superb; only
to my ear all the notes are wrong.
Meanwhile, back at the ICA, we were confronted with a panel of experts all
seemingly out of their individual elements and rather bored with the whole thing.
It was a sort of unentertaining, avant-garde Juke Box Jury in which the only relief
was provided by some comically obsessive statements from the floor. I wonder
what the point of these ‘symposia’ is – although the audience made up largely
of non-musicians seemed to find this one useful since the proceedings, as the
chairman was proud to announce, lasted over three hours. This needed stamina for
some of the music was rather pointless. There were two generally acknowledged

7
A reference to Boulez’s ‘Stravinsky remains’, first published in French as
‘Strawinsky demeure’, in Pierre Souvtchinsky (ed.), Musique russe, 2 vols (Paris: Presses
universitaires de France, 1953). For an English translation, see Stocktakings from an
Apprenticeship, trans. Stephen Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 55–110.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 31

‘hits’, one of which, Morton Feldman’s King of Denmark is an extraordinary piece

in which a solo percussionist, in this case Max Neuhaus,8 creates a world of soft
and delicate textures by striking his instruments only with his fingers. As with all
Feldman’s music, one could concentrate because of the low dynamic level on the
actual sound of sounds. Unfortunately nobody asked Mr Keller if it would have
been as effective or as ‘good’ music, had the volume been raised.

‘Enter Birtwistle’ (The Spectator, 30 August 1968, p. 299)

It has been left to Harrison Birtwistle to hold the fort for ‘progressive’ English
music this week. While the Proms are indulging in a Walton mini-festival,
Edinburgh is given over to a rather superfluous Britten retrospective. Meanwhile
the two performances of Birtwistle’s opera Punch and Judy at Edinburgh (the first
since its première at Aldeburgh in June) and the first hearing of his Nomos for
orchestra at the Albert Hall on 23 August – by far the most notable of this year’s
Prom commissions – mark the arrival of Birtwistle as a composer.
If he has taken longer in the process than his so-called Manchester School
associates, Alexander Goehr and Peter Maxwell Davies,9 it is partly through
lack of opportunity, but mainly that his earlier works, though not by any means
miniatures, are cast in the form of vocal and instrumental chamber music. His first
orchestral piece, Chorales (1960), which had to wait seven years for performance,
showed that Birtwistle’s main problem – a big one – was how to control, both
technically and formally, the exuberant fertility of his imagination. Charles Rennie
Mackintosh’s borrowed dictum ‘there is hope in honest error: none in the icy
perfections of the mere stylist’ is not inappropriate here.10
It was perhaps too soon for Birtwistle to have learnt any lessons from Chorales,
when, in 1965, as a study for Punch and Judy, he composed Tragoedia. This was
an instrumental piece using as a framework ritual aspects of Greek drama, which
served to focus Birtwistle’s style by coupling a new vertical strength to his proven
lyrical flexibility. It is not uninstructive to reflect on the number of times that
Greek drama and music have been misinterpreted with positive results – after all,
wasn’t there a group of hack theorists in Italy at the end of the sixteenth century
whose errors led them to invent opera?

8
  American percussionist Max Neuhaus (1939–2009) was especially noted for his
performances of contemporary music.
9
  The term ‘Manchester School’ was applied to a number of composers and
performers who studied at Manchester University and the Royal Northern College of
Music during the 1950s, including Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Peter Maxwell Davies,
Elgar Howarth and John Ogdon. See Jonathan Cross, ‘Manchester School’, in Grove Music
Online, http://0-www.oxfordmusiconline.com.unicat.bangor.ac.uk/subscriber/article/grove/
music/49722 (accessed 27 December 2009).
10
Mackintosh was quoting the words of architect John Dando Sedding (1838–91).
32 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Nomos is Birtwistle’s first large-scale piece since Tragoedia to create

successfully its own self-supporting ‘span’ – a structure which continuously
grows and is not dependent, as many of his earlier pieces largely were, on
closed musical forms. First reactions to the dedicated performance by the BBC
Symphony Orchestra under Colin Davis, were to the aural perspective of the work
– ranging from the delicate ‘Chinese’ tinklings of harp and pitched percussion to
uncontrolled outbursts of brass and violent build-ups of the full orchestra. But
repeated listenings enable one to grasp the slow inner rhythm, and the way in
which Birtwistle builds his fascinating ‘span’ by an essentially lapidary process.
The title Nomos refers to the musical accompaniments of the Greek epics, and
it is only when one sees the piece as a heroic narrative that its formal proportions
become clear. Much as I dislike literary analogies – Birtwistle’s music always
has an archetypal feeling, so that Nomos does not tell a story but all stories –
the positioning and phasing of the caesuras suggest the end of a heavily deed-
laden paragraph, after which the tale is taken up again. The narrative themes
undergo a continual shift in meaning and the opposition of forces – the division
of the orchestra itself is rethought, into self-contained but interlocking groups of
instruments – creates an inner tension which is not completely resolved when
the music finally peters out somewhat perfunctorily. But, in the last section, we
perceive a new reality as the music has been raised one level – in that only the four
amplified wind instruments are left playing material which a non-amplified quartet
started originally.
Birtwistle has also successfully resolved the linear and vertical aspects.
The basic material is a series of thematic lines, which are coloured, like organ
registration, to form closely or widely spaced clusters, at first stated singly but
subsequently combined in evolving patterns, while the linear evolution is constantly
punctuated by complex chords and percussion fusillades. It is as though a series
of transparent perspex ‘textures’ are overlaid in ever-differing proportions, each
combination progressively giving rise to another colour complex, shot through
with brilliant shafts of light.
From ‘archetypal heroic narrative’ to ‘archetypal opera’ is a short step, for
Birtwistle and his librettist Stephen Pruslin conceived Punch and Judy as a
freezing of normal operatic situations into a sort of universal allegory. The plot
follows the familiar story in which Punch successively disposes of the various
characters and, in this version, thereby achieves his ultimate desire, his Dulcinea,
his Pretty Polly. The transfer from one area of stylisation (the puppet show) to
another (operatic stage) is effected brilliantly on the formal level and shows a
radical rethinking of operatic conventions (arias, ensembles and so forth) in
terms both of the ritualisation of the plot and of Birtwistle’s needs as a composer.
For, as with a film scenario, each action is broken down into a series of shots,
each shot being a short self-contained musical entity. These units – word games,
chorales, adding-song – gradually increase in number during the opera, as the plot
progresses, and are repeated throughout the recurrent action-cycles.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 33

But, since the opera is intended to make its effect, like Strauss’s Elektra,
cumulatively (it runs for two hours without a break), the cycles should surely get
successively shorter and not longer. In fact, conditioning of the audience by the
formalisation is so strong that it is only where Judy steps out of the charmed circle
during the third murder (by musical instruments) that one’s attention flags.
Pruslin’s libretto, in parts pretentious, has drawn from Birtwistle a surprising
wealth of music, much of it piercing and violent, but in the Quest-Love music very
tender and in the nursery rhymes and riddles attractive, amusing and singable.
We may look forward to a further hearing when the very efficient English Opera
Group production comes to town next year (at the old Sadler’s Wells Theatre in
Rosebery Avenue).

‘New Favourites’ (The Spectator, 13 September 1968, pp. 367–8)

Just picture the scene. Music critic on psychiatrist’s couch in an agony of self-
accusation. ‘My life is nothing but artistic (or journalistic) necrophilia’, he
moans. The shocked realisation that the music he has to ‘deal with’ is almost
without exception by men long since dead; the appalling necessity of adding his
condolences at the graveside of Boris Blacher’s Cello Concerto, stillborn in 1964
and given a most persuasive kiss of life by the brilliant Siegfried Palm at the
Proms last Friday; the loving embalming – to capture for all time, or at least the
following day – a performance at Hall A, by performer B, of piece C; the surgical
attempt to excise the minute amount of interpretative individuality allowed in
western music (setting aside the purely technical area that separates the good, the
bad and the superlative performance). Performers need such judgments: lovely
voice, enchanting phrasing, super vitality … One can even pick holes in Clifford
Curzon’s Prom performance of the ‘Coronation’ Concerto,11 marred for me in
places by lack of balance between left hand and right in scale passages. It’s no
secret that a note played forte in the bass, sounds louder than one played with
equal touch-weight in the treble.
But to return to the living. These past few weeks have witnessed the filling
of the ‘intellectual’ Sundays with the consecration–deconsecration of the Beatles
and the (almost) emptying of the Albert Hall by major works of Berg, Messiaen,
Boulez and Stockhausen12 – the same hall that had been overflowing both with
people and with emotion for the Dvořák Cello Concerto. There are a number of
people who disapprove of modern music solely because it does not awaken in the
listener ‘basic’ emotions – as though a good wallow was the distinguishing factor
between good and bad music. The War Requiem is very cunningly conceived
in melodic and harmonic terms, conventionally calculated to evoke the ‘right’

11
Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 26 (‘Coronation’), composed in 1788.
12
Berg died in 1935, but the other three were very much alive in 1968.
34 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

emotional response – but to my mind it is still one of Britten’s least original, most
secondhand works.
This kind of response is undeniably important in some types of music – I have
only to hear the first bar of any Sergeant Pepper song for the familiarity/emotion/
identification syndrome to come into action.13 But no amount of familiarity with
Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maître seems to induce a like mindless identification.
Fortunately, it is a work which refuses to ‘settle’, and part of its strength lies in
one’s perception on each hearing, of something new – new patterns of phrase, new
relationships between the parts, even where, as in the Albert Hall, the excellent
soprano soloist, Jeanne Déroubaix, sounded as though she were singing into a
rather repressive echo chamber.
As his experience as a conductor has developed, Boulez’s approach to this
piece has, in purely practical terms, become simplified. But to me some of the
dynamic levels are still ideal rather than actual, for by analogy with the bass–
treble of the piano, a forte guitar or pizzicato viola is less resonant than a forte
flute or xylophone, and in some places where the lines seem of equal importance
this imbalance is disconcerting. One listens to the Boulez analytically, so to
speak, whereas the ‘Epode’ movement from Messiaen’s Chronochromie is, like
pop and some primitive musics, dream-inducing. Here 18 solo strings provide a
continuous tapestry of birdsong sound, and control of dynamic levels by composer
and conductor brings out a sudden flash of sound which then instantly, thrillingly,
recedes. Listening to music like this is like staring at the crest of a fountain – you
are obsessed with the pattern, but recognise the slight changes in the arrangement
of the drops of water.
One of the most fascinating aspects of pop music is the way that a perhaps banal
tune-and-harmony is transformed, in the recording studio, into the fairly complex
‘sound’ we hear on record. What is interesting about the Beatles is that within the
framework of schoolroom harmony and phrase structure that is pop music they
come up with some very unacademic things. These tend to throw the scholars,
because, like folk musicians, their creative invention is completely ‘unconscious’.
(Where ‘musical craftsmanship’ is required, Paul McCartney, without the help
of George Martin, is left standing – witness the pathetic arrangement of ‘Yellow
Submarine’ for brass band.)
The musical system deduced from such analysis seems learned and fussy
simply because spontaneous composing obeys no written rules; whereas the
systems of Boulez and Stockhausen are highly conscious and are ‘applied’ in
the working-out of the structure. To deduce the ‘pre-compositional’ system of Le
Marteau from the musical result one needs to be armed with David Kahn’s The
Codebreakers14 – this, of course, in no way affects your appreciation of the sounds,

13
The Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in
May 1967.
14
Kahn’s comprehensive account of the history of cryptography was published
in 1966.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 35

for the system is really the composer’s own business. Messiaen, for example, takes
a semibreve, divides it into 32 different durations, arranges them in a particular
order, derives permutations in a simple way, and, in the first strophe, overlays
three of them in the form of seven- or eight-part string chords. It’s not particularly
important for the listener as the strings are more or less inaudible – they merely
serve as a discipline, a formal anchor. What is important is whether the composer
involves the listener in the audible necessity of what he writes. Whether you hear
the silences in Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X (1954/1961) as blanks or something
more; whether the 19 repetitions of the four-bar phrase at the end of the Beatles
new single, ‘Hey Jude’, are just 19 repetitions of a nice tune. On such questions
depends, partly, the life of music (and of the critic).

‘Shawms and Rackets’ (The Spectator, 27 September 1968, pp. 440–41)

For anyone interested in mediaeval music, there are a good many brands to choose
among – from the New Minstrel, with Donovan as a romantic reincarnation of the
troubadour, to the Serious Modern, best exemplified by some of the works of Peter
Maxwell Davies, which use ‘old’ music for both technical background and more
audible foreground. And, of course, there is the real thing, such as was presented
by Musica Reservata last week in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, covering thirteenth-
century French court music and the Hundred Years War.
These various approaches pose a crucial problem of perception: is it still
possible to listen to this virgin music after our ears have grown used to it in so
many sophisticated, modernised and decorative forms? Some people seem to
find the historical reorientation of the ear difficult enough with the ‘classics’,
and can’t appreciate the beauty of a Schubert key-change with ears spoiled by,
say, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. It is even more difficult when the mediaeval
world is so remote emotionally. And, if one turns to specialist groups like Musica
Reservata, their performances can of course only approximate to the original
idiom, for the indeterminate features of old music are many and complex.
It’s not just a case of using ‘authentic’ instruments like shawms, rackets,
sackbuts, crumhorns, and baffling the public with amusing names, strange shapes
and odd sounds; by all means perform Bach on the harpsichord rather than the
piano – but the perfumed harpsichords on which most modern virtuosi play are not
much like Bach’s, whose music might well be less distorted on a piano. The ‘new’
mediaeval sounds, on the other hand, present an aural world often closer to folk
music than to later instrumental refinements.
And the directors of Musica Reservata are correct in allowing the loud, unvarying
tone and stiff articulation of shawm and cornet to dictate forceful interpretations
of music which is folk-like in its earthiness and rhythmic directness. Beyond this,
the vocal style takes its cue from the instruments, adapting both in volume and the
kind of tone produced to the ‘brutalities’ of the wind instruments – as a soprano
singing a Mozart aria would match her tone to a clarinet obbligato. Thus, Jantina
36 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Noorman produces a fearlessly unladylike tone, full-throated, hard and coarse,

sounding at times like a Sicilian peasant woman, at others like a Russian Orthodox
Church cantor.
Not that this vocal style is appropriate for all mediaeval music, for the Age of
Chivalry did after all produce some highly attractive love songs, emotionally more
formal and less raving than those of later times, and which need performances of
tenderness and feeling. Here, too rigid an anti-romantic approach can be rather
destructive. The difficulty lies in singing, with a peculiar combination of flexibility
and rigidity, lines which are in themselves very flexible, often distant from the
four-bar phrases of the classics, and the periodicity of Renaissance polyphony.
Hence the need for groups like Musica Reservata – for as long as our musical
academies turn out performer after performer, with a limited proficiency in the
‘accepted styles’ both new and old music will still be cursed with uninterested and
unidiomatic performances, where Monteverdi = Mozart = Massenet = Messiaen.
On the question of evaluating mediaeval music it is easy to fall into the same
trap as with modern – that whatever is closer to the music one already knows,
seems better or at least easier to comprehend. Thus Magnam me gentes, a four-
part chanson by Dufay (?1397–1474) was more readily approachable than the
equally magnificent Plange, regni respublica, of Machaut, who was born exactly
a century earlier. The irregular phrase structure of Dufay is at least symmetrical,
and the instrumental accompaniment not very far from what we like to call part
writing, even though the idiom of the piece is, of course, pre-tonal. In Plange
the relationship between the four parts is distinctly complicated, for rhythmically
the lines are ‘out of phase’, and assimilation is difficult for both performer and
listener. Composers of Machaut’s generation were fascinated with a form of
primitive rhythmic serialism, called isorhythm, one of the many early techniques
used by Maxwell Davies. I note with interest that the BBC has juxtaposed Dufay
and Maxwell Davies in an invitation concert early in October.

‘Alexander Goehr’s Naboth’s Vineyard’ (Tempo, 86, Autumn 1968, pp. 14–15)

Goehr has thrown out a few pointers as to what kind of animal Naboth’s Vineyard
is:15 dramatic madrigal (by analogy with Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento); ‘stylised
opera of a kind’, and ‘semi-cabaret theatre with real music’. That it is both more
and less than these shows the difficulty in defining the uniqueness of this work for
‘chamber music theatre’, conceived – both for artistic and economic reasons – as
a fairly radical alternative to ‘straight’ opera, an attempt to revitalise the often
fossilised audience–performance relationship, by projecting what is a free-form
cantata in a theatrical context.

15
Naboth’s Vineyard was commissioned for the City of London Festival and first
performed on 16 July at the Cripplegate Theatre by the Music Theatre Ensemble under the
direction of the composer.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 37

Most composer-generated works of this kind (of which there is an insufficient

number) tend to become overweighted in favour of the music – the ‘theatre’ is left
to a producer to ‘fit in’ as best he can. Goehr’s piece achieves, to my mind, a more
successful balance than do Weill’s Little Mahagonny and Hindemith’s Lehrstück
– both Brecht collaborations, both presented in England for the first time recently
by Goehr, and both providing the background, conceptual, not stylistic or formal,
to Naboth’s Vineyard.16 For the Brechtian aspect of the work is important: first on
the political level, for Goehr makes the parallel between the God-pardoned Ahab,
who is allowed to retain his criminally-gained vineyard, and Alfred Krupp; and
secondly on the formal plane, in the use it makes of Brecht’s ‘montage’ methods.
By this means music and mime are combined independently, so to speak, rather
than ‘fused’ in Wagnerian or psychedelic fashion, so that different layers of
meaning implicit in the narrative are presented simultaneously and separately.
Thus the two mime-clowns offer a humorous and often slapstick parallel to
the serious musical action, in what is part interpretation, part visualisation and
part a new dimension altogether. The economy with which the mimes, in John
Cox’s impressive production, present location, with the minimum of props, and
characters, by means of masks, is a reflection of musical conception, for the
limited resources – 3 singers and 6 instruments placed behind the acting area – are
broken down and re-assembled, montage-fashion, in a series of interlocking units,
according to the context. On the simplest level, therefore, the three singers (who
do not act) function together as a chorus, and represent separately the individual
characters, with a solo instrument as a ‘foil’; the piano duet always accompanies
the mime, while various ‘tuttis’ remain constant, Bach-fashion, for the length of a
particular section.
Goehr made his own adaptation of the well-known story from the Book of
Kings and divides the action into six episodes, which run continuously, and
of which the fifth, where Ahab takes possession of the vineyard, after the very
graphic instrumental ‘Stoning of Naboth’, is in mime only. The episodes vary
widely in length and complexity, from the brief opening chorus, which draws
the spectator into the battleground, the vineyard, to the complexity of the final
‘scena’ of chorale–aria–chorus – this last a musical recapitulation of the opening
chorus. The musical technique is continuously bent with great flexibility to make
the strongest dramatic impression. In the vocal writing, for instance, the separation
of narrative and personal statement is made by means of the chorus singing in
English, the individuals in Latin. The choral style, information bearing, is very
terse, syllabic and of limited range rhythmically and intervallically, whereas the
arias for Jezebel and Elijah are violent, free in metre and span the extremes of the
register. A further telling distinction is made between Ahab–Naboth and Jezebel–
Elijah. For the former, who are after all the chief protagonists, merge vocally into
the chorus-style: Naboth’s refusal of Ahab’s offer for the vine is contained in the

16
Hindemith’s Lehrstück received its UK première under Goehr at the 1968 Brighton
Festival.
38 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

only five bars he sings, and the offer itself is a tiny varied strophic aria, revolving
chromatically around melodic pivot notes; while Jezebel and Elijah are given
elaborate arias which are musically the ‘centre’ of the score.
In these numbers the Latin has a distancing effect, as a sort of ‘frame’ set
around individual action. For while the semi-familiarity of the Latin appeals
more or less on a subconscious level, the music itself is personalised and highly
conscious. They are also the ‘philosophical’ centre of the plot, in the sense that
although Jezebel and Elijah are only agents for Ahab and God-Naboth, it is on
the actions of these secondary characters that the dynamic and denouement of the
tale depends.
Jezebel’s aria also shows the extreme effectiveness of Goehr’s montage
technique, for vocally it is an expression of the wife’s fury at her King husband’s
feebleness, and while the clarinet obbligato (for which we have to thank both
Goehr and the ever-inventive Alan Hacker) grotesquely sends up the hideousness
of this Old Testament Lady Macbeth, the mime cooingly and lovingly insinuates
herself into Ahab’s favour, in Danny la Rue style.17 The analogy with film montage
is closer in the following scene where the all-important letter writing (setting out
Jezebel’s plan for false accusation of Naboth) is seen, so to speak, from a number
of different angles: the chorus tells us of her activity; then we hear her reading as
she writes the letter, the Elders simultaneously reading what she has written, in a
less emotional idiom, while the mimes carry out the action suggested by Jezebel.
The final decision to murder Naboth is a moment of musical synthesis, as the two
hexachords of the series are presented in the form of invertible fermata chords.
Goehr is not one of those composers who write the same piece over and over
again: Naboth’s Vineyard is a world apart from the close thematic argument of the
String Quartet or from the more traditional rhetoric of the Romanza for cello and
orchestra, and the stoning of Naboth is represented without any of the expressionist
exaggeration of The Deluge. His ‘linear-motivic’ technique is here, in a theatrical
context, very effectively and resourcefully used, and points are made with very
few notes but without any hint of short-windedness. Imaginatively conceived,
with great stylistic unity, it is one of Goehr’s finest achievements.

‘Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy’ (The Listener, 10 October 1968, p. 481)18

To begin with, a sprinkling of paradoxes to outline some of the contradictions

and fascinations of Punch and Judy. It is new-fashioned, parochial, antique and
universal, sharply specified in action, yet unspecific in meaning; the popular
appeal of its model has been intellectualised, and though of primary interest to

17
Irish-born Danny la Rue was a female impersonator who worked in theatre and
television, and acted in such films as Every Day’s a Holiday (1965).
18
This review coincided with the first broadcast of Punch and Judy on BBC Radio 3
on 13 October 1968.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 39

the specialist, it is immediately accessible to anyone with an ear; at once simple,

obscure, direct and puzzling.
Second, a 40-year-old quote from Brecht: ‘Since it is precisely for its
backwardness that the opera-going public adores opera, an influx of new types
of listener with new appetites has to be reckoned with’.19 Confronted with a new
type of opera, some of the first-night audience at Aldeburgh in June found their
old appetites savaged – violence on the stage is admissible only if motivated
by melodramatic passion, it seems, and the music was too loud. Composer and
librettist preferred Peter Brook to Margaret and Hugh Williams.20
Thirdly, the most revealing recent use of the word opera is as the title of some
inflated pop songs called ‘Excerpt from a Teenage Opera’, dealing anecdotally
with the lives of everyday people. To me these highlighted the aesthetic
backwardness of most new serious operas which present B-feature plots and
attempt psychological and physical naturalism in a losing battle with an artificial
convention. Punch and Judy originates from the premise that, to beat opera at
its own game, a more or less total artificiality must be achieved – a stylisation of
word, music, gesture, structure and staging. Away with cardboard humans, on with
live puppets, for, as Stephen Pruslin, the librettist, writes in the introduction, ‘the
world of toys, dolls and puppets can be more real than the real world itself, and
through these artificial characters, statements about human nature can be made in
a more vivid and concentrated form than is often possible in realistic theatre’. In
a morally ambiguous form, too, for Punch is the archetypal anti-hero who without
conscience destroys social institutions in his search for personal liberty; he is also
the arrogant dictator who silences reason and opposition to achieve evil ends. (And
that is only one of the many possible interpretations of this open-ended allegory.)
Punch and Judy is a ‘toy opera’ in another sense, for it seems to bear the same
relation to ‘real’ opera as toys do to the real objects they imitate. It sets out to be a
‘source opera’, a blueprint of and for all opera, encapsulating in a secular liturgy
the search–conflict–resolution situations of the majority of plots. Most striking
is that while it undermines and combines an eclectic confusion of existing ritual
conventions, it creates independently a ritual convention of its own – involving the
spectator in itself as an art object, inhabiting a world as distinct as, say, Wozzeck,
evolving a new operatic time-scale – yet it remains as recognisably ‘operatic’ as
The Magic Flute. Audience-involvement is no mean feat in any opera. Here the
task is more difficult, for in realigning puppet-booth and opera stage, composer
and librettist have had to find a new centre of gravity, a substitute for the gleeful

19
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. John
Willett (London: Methuen Press, 1964), p. 33. Nyman also discusses the role of opera
in late twentieth-century culture in a later essay, ‘Drama and Music’, in MUSICANADA:
A Publication of the Canadian Music Council, 53 (January 1985), p. 6.
20
Peter Brook was a theatre and film director noted for his experimental methods,
while actor and director Hugh Williams and his wife, the actress Margaret Vyner, represented
a more traditional approach.
40 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

participation of children in the puppets’ situation, and the identification of adults

with the social–emotional predicaments of normal opera characters.
The effectiveness of this substitute lies in the structure of the work; the
effectiveness of the structure lies in the music; the music is memorable in its own
right but has been clearly delimited by Pruslin’s cryptic, riddle-ridden, word-
playing, telegram-style libretto. This combines and expands various original
show-plots, and in outline follows the familiar story. Punch, warming to his task
after throwing the Baby on the fire, successively eliminates Judy, the Doctor and
Lawyer, Choregos and Jack Ketch, the hangman who is duped into demonstrating
the efficiency of his own noose. The rope-trick provides the ultimate release, and
Punch’s repeated searchings for Pretty Polly are finally successful.
Choregos owes his origin to Birtwistle’s fondness for things Greek and doubles
as Master of Ceremonies, so to speak, Punch’s alter ego and Jack Ketch. The
death of Choregos is the most elaborate, for in a splendid conceit he represents
music itself, and is killed with the tools of his trade – in the ‘Coronation’ scene
he is crowned with trumpet, drum and cymbals, and finally bowed to death as he
sits inside a bass viol. (Shades of Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik.21) The
other murders are equally ceremonial and take place on a sort of sacrificial altar.
A further interpolation in the conventional story is the ‘Nightmare’, where the
disguised characters round on our hero in a necromantic fantasy world of tarot
games and ‘black’ symbolism.
Rather like a film script, the libretto breaks down ideas and actions into a series
of self-contained ‘shots’, to make a toy version of the usual number opera, for
Punch and Judy, which welds together over 100 short sections, is the number opera
par excellence. Just as the dramatic plot eschews a causal relationship between
the characters, so the musical plot is symphonic in the sense that Messiaen’s
Turangalîla is a symphony – it builds accumulatively, by repetition, variation and
cyclic recurrence. Birtwistle’s use of closed and refrain forms is well-known, and
in this score the outer structure reflects the inner form of the individual numbers
in being a huge strophic-variation that takes two hours to complete its cycle. By
this means an intensive charmed circle is set up within which the moves of the
action are made and which conditions the conditionable members of the audience.
This opera is a game, with clearly defined rules and set progressions, played with
immense freedom and imagination.
Thus the musical action falls into four cycles (or Melodramas) corresponding to
the four murders, of which the third is interrupted by the more or less autonomous
Nightmare episode. Each cycle begins with generally non-returnable music that
covers the individual business leading up to the sacrifice. This is celebrated in the
Murder Ensemble complex, the form of which is altered on each recurrence. Death
turns Punch to the ‘Quest for Pretty Polly’, the second verse-cycle, which the third
time round is pushed out of mechanical alignment by the Nightmare.

21
For more on Moorman and Paik, see ‘Minimal Music’ (The Spectator, 11 October
1968).
 Section 1: 1968–1969 41

The recurrences are always recognisable, although each time the ‘shots’ are
seen from a different angle, or set up in a new orchestral environment, or simply
given a new focus. Curiously, Birtwistle’s musical technique reflects the ground
plan of the opera, in being additive, in its overlaying of complex rhythms and
sound points in cumulative patterns. Stylistically his Tragoedia (1965), written
as a study for the opera, shares a common area with the opera with its ostinatos,
hypnotic repetitions, instruments playing at their piercing extremes, vivid and
high-pressure gestures and conflict through opposition of sound forces.
To this violence the world of tender lyricism acts as a foil. The lyricism of
Punch’s Serenade, Judy’s ‘Be silent, strings of my heart’ or the final love-duet has
a rhythmic tension which distinguishes it from the more improvisatory lines of
Birtwistle’s early Monody for Corpus Christi, and its hard intervallic edge sets it
apart from the usual mush which passes for ‘English lyricism’. The third musical
world is touched off by the adult nursery rhymes and riddles of the script, for which
Birtwistle uses old dance rhythms and a syllabic, upbeat, traditional cadential
style, with memorable and whistleable tunes, especially in ‘Punch’s Resolve’,
which completes each Murder Ensemble, and the ‘Adding Song’ at the end of
the Nightmare. By these we can perhaps measure the achievement of the score:
they are spontaneous, never pastiche, and totally consistent with the other stylistic
worlds. Birtwistle has arrived at this tradition through the post-Webern mill. The
music takes a similar position towards the musical old and new as towards the
operatic – fresh thinking, new solutions, yet not revolutionary or experimental.
(And at least we are spared yet another parody of Britten’s own obvious self-
parodies.)
Finally another quotation and another paradox: this time Jean-Luc Godard’s
‘the trouble with the English is that they are too rhetorical – they only invent
within fixed forms’. The irony of Punch and Judy is that Birtwistle has taken
a convention as fossilised as opera, writes in closed, fixed forms, yet creates a
structure which shows that there might be some life still left in opera, despite the
passing of the death sentence on it by Boulez, Punch-fashion.22

‘Minimal Music’ (The Spectator, 11 October 1968, pp. 518–19)

Walking home from the Fugs’ concert, organised by the Middle Earth at the
Roundhouse last week,23 I was shocked by the 4 a.m. silence – by its awesome
superiority to a lot of modern music, and by its unfamiliarity. But I listened harder
– having trained myself never to take things at ear-value – and heard a medium-

22
Boulez proclaimed the death of opera in ‘Sprengt die Opernhäuser in die Luft!’,
Der Spiegel, 40 (1967), pp. 166–74; see also Arman Schwartz’s ‘Prospero’s Isle and the
Sirens’ Rock’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 15/1 (March 2003), pp. 87–8.
23
Middle Earth was a hippie organisation founded in a Covent Garden cellar in the
mid-1960s before moving to the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm.
42 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

pitch humming in my ears not unlike the buzzing of electric fences with which the
controlling hand of man has added his audible presence to country silences. The
buzzing was the only musical memory I had left of the warm-up group, the Spooky
Tooth, whose amplification system, as is usual, acted as a physical conditioner: the
amplified pulse of bass guitar and drums striking simultaneously through ear and
floor, charging the frame with an obsessive sound transfusion.
Such crude physical involvement is, of course, disruptive in theory, habit-
forming in practice. Yet the violent political message of the Fugs is embodied in
gentle, nostalgic, even elegiac music, some of which would not be out of place
in the Burl Ives Song Book. This scatological, crass, entertaining, unconfined and
imaginative show was the climax of a fortnight’s off-the-beaten-circuit concerts,
which had led me to cultivate a receptive mindlessness, rather than the more or
less rational perceptivity that most forms of music require.
My journey to the underground has also led to the conclusion (not particularly
new) that our existing concert halls may be adequate for the classics, but not for
some types of new music which need a more theatrical setting. But there I was,
in the Wigmore Hall of all places, absolutely mesmerised by Cornelius Cardew’s
The Great Learning last week. This was the piece which caused a riot at this
year’s Cheltenham Festival – taking into account the musical backwardness of
the locals, the comparative sophistication of the London audiences and the gentle
honesty of Cardew’s music, it is not surprising that this un-English outburst was
not repeated.24 Cardew’s piece, an enlightened commission by the Macnaghten
Concerts,25 succeeded, where pop and chanting failed, in completely clearing the
mind. And with very slender means – an opening concertante passage for massed
stones; a long organ solo, brilliantly realised by Michael Chant, which created by
the persistent prolongation of held notes very delicate tensions; finally an alteration
of solos for any kind of whistling instrument (performers individually interpreting
the hieroglyphics of the score), and a speaking group who intoned a beautiful short
text of Confucius, recommending introspection and ‘watching with affection the
way people grow’. The whole was as real as a drizzly afternoon, gradually eating
away at our blinded and cluttered musical mentalities.
David Rowland’s Degrees for chorus and brass – again the Louis Halsey
singers managed brilliantly to overcome a slight fifth-form-dormness at having
to perform so many un-chorus-like activities – is based on a powerful Leroi Jones
poem and dedicated to the people of Czechoslovakia. But, since it could not make
up its mind whether to be an abstract phonetic effects piece or a sound summary
of the meaning and emotion of the poem, it failed on both counts: on the one hand,
it lacked an overall structural pattern; on the other, the imaginative but generalised
sound moods were no match for the intense imagery of the text.

24
For more on the Cheltenham Festival performance, see John Tilbury, ‘Music’, Ark
Magazine, 45 (Winter 1969), p. 45.
25
The series of concerts featuring new music was established by Anne Macnaghten,
Elisabeth Luytens and Iris Lemare in December 1931.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 43

I also deduced a recipe for the successful ‘minimal-music’ happening from the
entertainment presented by Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik at the ICA.
Simple idea, straightforward structure, intellectual control, theatrical presence and
intensity in presentation. These all contributed to Paik’s spellbinding performance
of Springen by Christiansen, a hypnotic ten-minute piece which consisted
of nothing but a series of parabolas traced by the fingers, arm and eyes of the
performer in ever-widening arcs. First from middle C on the piano to top C, from
top C to the C below middle C and so on, gradually taking in the whole stage which
became an imaginary extension to the keyboard.26 The rest of the programme by
this most famous American happening duo in the business was a celebration of the
cello of Miss Moorman, who in one piece fought with it in a large blue bag with
zippered orifices.27
This kind of act, though it uses no words, is as inventive as the Fugs in
flinging artistic insults (some rather old) at the audience. In one terrifying piece
Miss Moorman listens to a recording of bombardment and responds by violently
attacking her cello, as if to express the futility of art attempting to compete with the
horror of the ‘real’ world.28 Yet the whole performance seemed curiously muted
and polite. Perhaps the ICA was trying to ‘reach’ as large an audience as possible.
Such compromises do not work.
To Ravi Shankar we owe the introduction of Indian music to the West, yet
his concert at the Festival Hall was marred by compromises of another kind –
necessary shortening of pieces which are theoretically endless, a certain amount
of glossy packaging, and the charming but schoolmasterly manner of Shankar’s
verbal explanations. However, there were some stunning performances, notably
by two drummers, who produced a range of nuance and rhythms unthinkable in
western music.29

‘Chaconnes’ (The Listener, 7 November 1968, p. 620)

If it strikes you as odd that two (Beethoven and Purcell) of the chaconnes in next
Tuesday’s Invitation Concert are called something else, and that the Bach (finale
of the D minor Partita) and Gerhard seem to share little more than title and solo
violin, then you are participating in a ‘controversy’ which usually focuses on the
differences between the chaconne and the passacaglia. Theorists of the eighteenth
century could never agree as to which of these two, as dances, was to be played

26
Danish composer Henning Christiansen (1932–2008) was associated with the
Fluxus movement.
27
See Nyman’s Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (London: Alta Vista, 1974;
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 88.
28
Ibid, p. 88.
29
Alla Rakha (tabla) and Kamala Chakravarty (tambura) were ever present performers
in Shankar’s ensemble during the 1960s and 1970s.
44 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

the faster; while modern theorists, in attempting more technical and procedural
distinctions between these two basso ostinato variation forms, have also come to
little agreement. Chaconne à son goût.30
Nor does discussion of origins really solve the problem, for the ciacona started
life as a ‘sensual and licentious’ dance, introduced into Spain from the West Indies
or Mexico. As described by Cervantes, the dance was sung collectively, in a quick
triple time in couplet and refrain verse form.31 A cooled-down version was taken
up simultaneously in France – where it became a large-scale instrumental song
and dance movement in French opera from Lully to Gluck – and in Italy where
Frescobaldi amongst others similarly developed it as a variation form.
Curt Sachs’s suggestion that composers of the early eighteenth century turned
to dance ostinatos because they were ‘eager to replace the roving, shapeless
monody by steadfast forms, they had no models in the flowing polyphony, vocal
or instrumental, of the Renaissance’ is misleading: instrumental music for the
previous hundred years had often been written over regularly recurring basses.32
Hugh Aston’s ‘My Lady Carey’s Dumpe’ of about 1525 has a simple two-bar
tonic, two-bar dominant ostinato; there were many sets of ‘variations’ which used
‘stock’ basses derived from popular songs, and the ground bass variation was one
of the favourite forms of the Elizabethan virginalists.
But written-down variations of this kind are the tip of the iceberg, for the
improvising of ‘divisions on a ground’ was a favourite and important pastime, and
Diego Ortiz describes in 1557 such practices, which by then were more or less
traditional. This was perhaps the psychedelic pop of the times, where reliance on
a ‘ground’ is comparable to reliance on amplification systems – a sort of musical
knitting where the stitches (the bass) are defined, while the shapes and patterns
are left to the composer–performer–knitter. In the hands of the hack, chaconne-
type movements can be boring, while the more skilful composer can turn it into a
‘linear’ form of immense and sustained cumulative effect. Advice against boredom
is given by Christopher Simpson in his Division Viol, an improvisation tutor of
1667: the player and composer should, he maintained, change from one variety
of figuration to another, ‘for variety it is which chiefly pleaseth. The best Division
in the world, still continued, would become tedious to the Hearer; and therefore
you must so place and dispose your Division that the change of it from one kind
to another may still beget a new attention’ (bear this in mind when listening to the
Bach Chaconne).33
This applies, of course, to all kinds of variations on a ground: as a specific type,
the chaconne by the end of the seventeenth century had become slow and stately,

30
A play on ‘chacun à son goût’ (‘each to his own taste’).
31
See Curt Sachs’s World History of the Dance (New York: W.W. Norton, 1937),
pp. 371–3.
32
Curt Sachs, Rhythm and Tempo: A Study in Music History (New York: W.W. Norton,
1953), p. 281.
33
Christopher Simpson, The Division-Viol (London: J. Curwen, 1955), p. 56.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 45

in triple time with a noticeable stress on the second beat and a ‘characteristic’ dotted
rhythm (opening themes of Bach, Beethoven and Gerhard). Both chaconne and
passacaglia are built on continuous repetitions of basses with little rhythmic interest
of which Example 1 in its major or minor key forms is the most basic version.

Example 1 Chaconne bass (basic version)

The passacaglia itself, having similarly started life in Spain as a fastish march
song, had confusingly developed into a slow, three-time ostinato form one of
whose distinguishing features from its near relation is its general cultivation of
smoother upper parts and avoidance of dotted rhythms and second-beat stresses.
A more technical distinction between the two depends on fine and not
entirely convincing differences between a bass theme, a bass line and a harmonic
progression: the ostinato theme of the passacaglia usually appears in the bass, but
frequently wanders to the upper parts and sometimes modulates to keys other than
the tonic minor or major. The chaconne, on the other hand, tends to be based on a
fundamental harmonic progression, sometimes with an unvarying bass, sometimes
not. This distinction suffices only for the Bach–Handel period in Germany in fact
– the terms obviously meant different things to different composers, at different
times in different places.
What is more important is to see how in the chaconne, where the harmony
defines the form of each variation, the non-hack composer organises the dialectic
between tight formal restraint and free manipulation, between the limitations
of the given ‘information’ and the overriding richness of figurations. Purcell’s
G minor sonata is the most complex example of his chaconne writing and what
is most remarkable from the structural point of view is his avoidance of the five-
square implications of his theme (Example 2). This he does by creating continuous
phrases with ‘substitute’ harmonies and an immense number of ‘interrupted
cadences’ and by brilliantly breaking the symmetries with imitative points entering
at time intervals out of phase with the bass.

Example 2 Purcell’s G minor sonata (bass line)

Bach, on the other hand, does not attempt to disguise the formal and harmonic
implications of his four-bar ‘theme’ except that his 63 variations are written on
a theme which does not exist – the bass line of the first four variations is merely
one ‘version’ which is subsequently replaced by other ‘versions’. This is a true
chaconne in that discussion of themes is irrelevant – for what Bach does is to set
46 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

up a four-bar harmonic experience, an infinitely variable skeleton progression of

which the tonic in the first and the dominant in the last bar are the only ‘fixed’
elements. (Example 1 is the Ur-bass which appears in the final section.) Two other
features (amongst so many!) should be noticed: the way in which a bass form, real
or implied, set up below one figuration pattern, is retained when the superstructure
changes, and the brilliant use made of the opening melodic theme at important
structural moments.
Beethoven follows Handel rather than Bach in making a complete unit of each
variation and in his unwillingness to vary his bass and its harmonic implications.
Example 3, the bass line, shows Beethoven’s debt to the Baroque chaconne writers
in an age when it was no longer fashionable to use such restricted variation forms
– it’s as though Beethoven were carefully testing the strength of this sequence
of chords in each individual variation. Beethoven’s, like Handel’s, figuration is
rather doggedly ‘study-like’ and, like Bach, he uses his opening theme as a tune
for decorating the C major middle section.

Example 3 Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C minor (WoO. 80) (bass line)

Chaconnes crop up sporadically in more recent times and two, by Britten

and Gerhard, will serve to show how the chaconne ‘legend’ still lives, albeit in
renewed (or misinterpreted) circumstances. The Britten Chaconne (from the
Second Quartet)34 is a tonal interpretation of the form, a set of linked variations
that has little more connection with the Purcell type than the dotted ‘cliché’ rhythm
of its nine-bar theme – more a chaconne top line than a bass. Gerhard’s Chaconne
is serial, its 12 highly contrasted variations each beginning on a different note
following the order of the original series, each using the same pattern of row
forms and transpositions as the opening statement. Although each variation has an
individual shape, there are pedal points which recur in most variations. Thus the
audible symmetries of the Bach Chaconne have been replaced by almost equally
strict but non-audible symmetries in the manipulation of the row. It is a truism
that today, when harmony in the accepted sense is no longer king, chaconnes of
the Baroque type are impossible. It is to the world of jazz that one has to turn for
‘true’ applications of the chaconne principle, or at least to the sorts of jazz that still
‘vary the chords’.

34
The third movement of Britten’s Second String Quartet in C (1946) is entitled
‘Chacony’.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 47

‘About Time Too’ (The Spectator, 6 December 1968, pp. 809–10)

Stockhausen’s one-night stand at the St Pancras Town Hall35 was predictably a

staggering and welcome shock to London concert life. (Normal service was
resumed as soon as possible.) To the conservative, annoyed by a few high decibel
ratings and the concert’s apparent disregard of the printed programme, it was
perhaps an opportunity to make an early application to the Trade Descriptions Act;
to the rest it was a unique – and so unrepeatable – experience: a concert of his recent
music, about his music, which as a whole was his very newest ‘composition’.
It is, of course, the probing originality of Stockhausen’s sound-world which
draws the crowds – the concert could have been sold out three times over, which
is due recognition of the foresight of the Macnaghten Concerts in arranging his
only public appearance here in the last three years (deplorably and ludicrously a
projected tour was cancelled through lack of money). Yet the concert represents
the most recent stage of Stockhausen’s voyage of discovery, a continuous and
often circular search into the musical application of quasi-mathematical systems,
into structural and time principles, into sound itself, into the thought processes of
the performer and into methods of presenting his ideas to the public.
The last point is important, for the idea of arranging the seats in circles around
each group of performers was not intended deliberately to confuse those who
were searching for the row and seat number on their ticket, still less to disrupt
convention for its own sake. The deployment of musical and physical space,
mostly disregarded by other composers, is fundamental to Stockhausen’s musical
thinking. It works in two different ways, one external so to speak, where a musical
image is rotated round or across the hall in various directions (as in Kontakte,
performed at the Proms this year);36 and the other ‘internal’ and textural, so that a
particular series of images hits you at various degrees of closeness or distance, from
different perspectives, in different degrees of focus. This technique Stockhausen
has already used to great effect in his early electronic piece Gesang der Jünglinge
(1955–56), but far more brilliantly and subtly in his Telemusik (1966), where
the use of a six-track tape recorder enables the composer to construct a space-
spectrum ranging from the cutting immediacy of Japanese percussion instruments
to the distant, almost subliminal sounds of an oriental folk tune.
Mobility of musical images is one thing, more important in this concert
perhaps was Stockhausen’s new attitude to the mobility of a musical work as an
object. For the concert was planned as a continuous performance of two pieces
from Aus den sieben Tagen (written in May this year) into which were ‘slotted’

35
Part of the Macnaghten series of concerts, the St Pancras Town Hall concert on
25 November 1968 also featured Serbian trombonist Vinko Globokar and an ensemble
directed by Hugh Davies (see Cornelius Cardew, ‘Two trombone aces’, The Musical Times,
110/1511 (January 1969), pp. 50–51).
36
Prom concert on 12 August 1968; see ‘Britons at sea’, The Spectator (23 August
1968), p. 269.
48 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Solo, for trombone and two tapes (in a superb realisation by Vinko Globokar),
and Telemusik. This is the newest stage in Stockhausen’s evolution towards a
free, non-European, non-masterwork position – a position developing from forms
whose movements can be shuffled about and played in a number of different
orders, through pieces where a combination of signs and notational raw materials
are worked out by the performers themselves, as in Plus-Minus.
Aus den sieben Tagen takes the apparent emancipation of the performer one
stage further, for its 15 pieces consist simply of verbal directions, designed to
induce a certain state of mind in the performers before playing, to create according
to Stockhausen a more or less ‘permanent state of intuition’, so that all past musical
memories and stock responses would be avoided in favour of sounds ‘such as
had never been heard before’.37 The often brilliant music created in this semi-
improvisation by the Arts Lab Ensemble (formed by Hugh Davies, who assisted
the composer with the electronic ‘control’ of the performance) showed the extent
to which Stockhausen is now directly involved in sonic, rather than theoretical,
material.
The continuous ‘electric flux’ of this concert reflects the grandiose, perhaps
megalomaniac, creative vision of Stockhausen – which he himself described, in
reference to Telemusik, as coming ‘closer to an old dream – going one definite
step further in the direction of writing not “my” music, but a music of the whole
world, of all countries and races’ – German mystical philosophy with a touch of
the McLuhans?38 Nevertheless, each of Stockhausen’s pieces builds up a strongly
defined ‘world’ of its own, and they do so in two opposite ways, creating a
fascinating interplay between the known and the unknown: in a work like Telemusik
the composer acts as a kind of filter, incorporating ‘known’ sounds taken from
eastern folk music into a complete electronic fabric; whereas Mikrophonie I starts
from nothing, at least only a single Chinese tam-tam, from whose electronically
modified sounds is created a world so compelling that we gradually come to
perceive it almost as a compost-grown part of our natural environment.
Thus Stockhausen’s music could from one angle be viewed as a collage, in
which the ‘known’ is not used as an object in itself but as an introduction into an
unfamiliar area of experience: the use of live instruments in Kontakte, the boy’s
voice in Gesang, and more especially the national anthems in Hymnen (1967),
part of which was placed in the version of Solo heard at the concert. However,
despite the ‘religious’ or mystical inspiration of Stockhausen’s work we are not
hypnotised by the music, but on the contrary made more aware – if only because
many people find this music so repellent – of what is actually going on, for
Stockhausen’s sound structures, like Bach’s, are complex and need to be listened
to in depth. The process is helped by Stockhausen’s conception of time as existing

37
See, for example, Stockhausen’s article ‘Intuitive Music’, reproduced in Stockhausen
on Music: Lectures and Interviews (London: Marion Boyars, 1991), pp. 112–25.
38
Marshall McLuhan is best known for coining the term ‘Global Village’ – a concept
which chimes with Stockhausen’s notion of a ‘global’ music.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 49

in the continuous-present, a conception which dissolves traditional development

and recurrent forms into the ‘now-moment’, although a work like Kontakte is not
as desiccated and illogical as Stockhausen’s block-eared critics make out.
For what seems to be Stockhausen’s process of composition could be described
as the Blow-Up principle in reverse:39 his preoccupation with the chemistry of
sounds, with audible material as particles, represents the photograph at its most
magnified, while as the music builds up it becomes less and less detailed until
in its final form the microscopic chaos of the moment is composed into the
complete picture. And that after all is not very far from traditional ways of putting
music together.40

‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’ (The Spectator, 13 December 1968,
pp. 850–51)

John Cage he say: ‘And what precisely does this, this beautiful, profound object,
this masterpiece, have to do with life: that it is separate from it. Now we see it and
now we don’t. When we see it we feel better, and when we are away from it, we
don’t feel so good’.41 What then of attempted masterpieces, the near or complete
misses? We see it, certainly, but we are uneasy, and don’t feel so good. What the
hell is the composer getting at? One understands his lingo but not what he says,
nor why he is saying it. One’s ears give no answer, so one turns to the score
which can often be even more baffling – for you see far more notes than you have
actually heard. In desperation one vicariously seeks refuge in the programme note,
written by the composer or someone who is or imagines he is ‘in’ the secret.
How many reviews there must have been of programme notes, with the music
offering little more than support for the printed word. On the sole occasion that I
have provided an analytical note for the first performance of a new piece, I found
myself the morning after perhaps the most-quoted person in the country. This
was not as flattering as it might seem, as the themes and moves I had analysed
‘correctly’ on paper, were totally inaudible and irrelevant in performance – the
music moved differently and somehow the themes had got lost in an overall
pattern I hadn’t bargained for.

39
This principle relates to Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up (1966), which
according to Robin Maconie in a later article ‘expresses a kindred fascination with the
possibilities of discovery in the expansion and contraction of images of the mundane’
(Robin Maconie, ‘Stockhausen at 70: Through the Looking Glass’, Musical Times, 139
(Summer 1998), p. 11).
40
The Macnaghten Concerts series presented the first English performance of
Mikrophonie II at the Victoria and Albert Museum on 19 January 1969; see Nyman’s review
in ‘Work Projects’, The Spectator (7 February 1969), pp. 181–2.
41
Cage, ‘Lecture on Something’, in Silence, p. 130.
50 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Roberto Gerhard has obviously suffered from this sort of thing and manfully
refused to provide a programme note for his Fourth Symphony, New York, when it
was first performed in America last year, and which reached London for the first
time last week at the Festival Hall. Instead he writes for those ‘willing to stand
uncompromisingly by the sound, unexplained, as conveying its true substance fully
enough to – in its own way – add up to a valid experience’.42 It’s a relief to hear
a serious composer unashamedly talking about sound, and certainly the surface
of Gerhard’s music is iridescent, radiant and glowing with aural goodies such as
the two percussion based sections, one chanking – wood percussion and strings
played with the wood of the bow in irrational rhythms; and the other chinking –
soft sounds of pitched percussion, celesta, harp and delicate piano in long sections
revolving hypnotically round repeated figurations.
For this is a symphony not of thematic interplay, or of the striking vertical
gesture, but of the sewing together of horizontally elaborated textures, some
extensive, others brief, static or dynamic. Its ‘traditionalism’ (for it is after all a
symphony) lies in its dependence on musical causality – Gerhard does not merely
place end-to-end self-contained blocks, but arranges that in this stop–go music, the
stop passages should grow out of, balance and compensate the go sections. That
is the intention, I imagine, but in practice it’s less successful, since the dynamic
go music careers at great speed and with brilliant wind and string writing, without
going anywhere in particular, only to be swamped by lengths of rather marvellous
time-suspended stop sections. This, and the rather inexplicable return of the chink–
chank passages later on, prevented me from getting to the centre of the score, and
eventually from understanding what was going on in a large-scale sense. Perhaps
there was no centre, perhaps there was no ‘point’, but it was a pity not to find the
‘true “substance”’ the composer talked of.
Gerhard’s Third Symphony, a more successful work, is available in EMI’s
‘Music Today’ series, and I hope to review this and other new modern music
recordings in time for spending Christmas record tokens.43 As a trailer, and for
those who reckon that nature inspiration died with Beethoven’s Pastoral, I append
the following: Gerhard’s [Third] Symphony was conceived while ‘flying at
about 30,000 feet above a rolling carpet of clouds, broken only by crevasses and
chasms, he saw the sun rise: “It was like the blast of 10,000 trumpets”’:44 and, on
Stockhausen’s Carré, on DGG avant-garde: ‘the first sketches, stemming from
1958, were made in the air during a six-week long tour in America, when I daily

42
The UK première of this work took place at the Royal Festival Hall on 4 December
1968 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Colin Davis.
43
Gerhard: Collages (Symphony No. 3) / Maxwell Davies: Revelation and Fall (EMI
ASD 2427, 1968).
44
See the review of Roberto Gerhard’s Symphony No. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1972), in Music and Letters, 54/2 (April 1973), p. 249.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 51

flew great distances, experiencing above the clouds the slowest times of chance
and the widest spaces’.45
Down to earth again and to the What’s-the-point-of-all-the-notes Department
II. The first London performance of Hans Werner Henze’s Second Piano Concerto,
with Christoph Eschenbach most brilliantly and devotedly in the hot seat, took my
mind back (for my ear was fitfully and bemusedly occupied with this music which
had an undeniable professional authority about it, and my eye with the printed
score) to a system of random composition whereby the noteless composer takes
every third or fourth note from some other piece and uses them as the raw material
for his own. This is not Henze’s method, yet if a dozen composers had so selected
their material and permanently cut those chosen notes out of this score, Henze’s
rambling parade of near-common places would have been that much the better.
If it takes 45 minutes to say so little then something is seriously wrong, and the
creative crisis that Henze is said to be overcoming (at one point, the programme
note told us, he ‘even questioned the very possibility of composition itself’)
is not to be overcome by resort to such a megalomaniac exhibition of musical
garrulousness. But if the music sounded at times as though to one part Schoenberg
had been added five parts water, there was still an identifiable personal voice
speaking, even if it was one of disillusioned middle-aged petulance.
Finally What’s-the-point-of-all-the-notes Department III. Boulez seems to be
issuing his works like a Dickensian serial with excessively long gaps between
each number, which is a pity. His latest work, Livre pour cordes, is a reworking
and expansion of two movements from his Livre pour quatuor of 1948; there
might be more than two movements eventually, who knows? Yet only the first
‘Variation’ was played (by the NPO at the Royal Festival Hall),46 and knowing
Boulez’s extreme fastidiousness and craftsmanship and having had a brief glance
at the complex thematic workings of score, the end product was disappointing.
For what came out was a thick pulsing web of rather undifferentiated sound, a
sound limited in register, colour and dynamic. Fortunately the following day at the
French Institute, a brilliant performance by Claude Helffer of the ‘Constellation-
Miroir’ section of Boulez’s Third Piano Sonata restored one’s confidence, and
makes one look forward to the projected performance of the completed version of
Pli selon Pli in the spring.47

45
In Karl H. Wörner, Stockhausen: Life and Work, trans. Bill Hopkins (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973) p. 214.
46
NPO: New Philharmonia Orchestra.
47
Nyman later reviewed Pli selon Pli (see ‘Boulez in the labyrinth’, The Spectator,
16 May 1969).
52 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

‘Is This a Record?’ (The Spectator, 3 January 1969, pp. 19–20)

My Christmas was spent, ears boggling, mind splitting, in the company of Deutsche
Grammophon’s celebratory six record set, Avant-Garde. DGG’s achievement has
been to present indispensable hits of the ’fifties – Stockhausen’s Gruppen and Carré;
more recent works by composers unplayed and largely unknown here – Kagel and
Ligeti; and a number of beta plus pieces, some more avec than avant-garde.
The music is grouped according to performing medium, often round the unique
capabilities of the performers themselves: three pieces for string quartet, two (by
Stockhausen) for orchestra, four each for organ, choir and trombone, and two
by Kagel for miscellaneous chamber groups. Excluded from the encyclopaedia
are, for instance, piano, solo voice and, more important, electronic music – an
omission easy to justify, but which perpetuates an artificial distinction (as even a
most cursory hearing of the set will show) between live and electronic sound. The
international cast of 13 composers (average age 38) is similarly representative,
until you notice that the affiliations of many of them are to Cologne or thereabouts
(Stockhausen territory) and that the music as a whole has a stylistic and technical
consistency which sets it apart from the more anarchic avant-garde of Cage and
his associates.48
Nor is it carping to indicate what one loses when music often intimately
linked to its performing environment is put on disc (even when stereo is used as
imaginatively as it is here) – it merely aids the digestion and the understanding.
Thus, aurally one misses the identifiable separation of material when the three
orchestras of Gruppen have been unavoidably spread evenly over the two channels;
and, visually, there is a similar loss in Berio’s superb tragi-comic Sequenza V for
trombone, dedicated to the memory of the clown Grock, where the player ‘strikes
the poses of a variety showman about to sing an old favourite’, utters a bewildered
‘why?’ and plays the rest seated, ‘as though rehearsing in an empty hall’. More
theatrical still is Kagel’s Match – a duel between two virtuoso cellists with the
percussionist seeing fair play, and indulging in hilarious flights of his own.
Kagel also instructs the percussionist to play instruments as though he were
in the process of discovering their potentialities on the spot, and the dynamism
of much of the best music on these discs seems to lie in their sense of perpetual
self-discovery – a creative circle, in which composer ‘plays’ performer, performer
plays the music, and the musical result ‘plays’ the composer. Thus much of the
music is ‘about music’ – literally so in Kagel’s spectacular improvisation ajoutée,
for organ, which combines sounds from the everyday life of the organist with
composed music, in a sort of music equivalent of split-screen cinema. Some of
the pieces – to name a few names, Penderecki’s Quartet, Blin’s organ piece,
Mellnäss’s Succsim for chorus, Alsina’s Consecuenza for trombone – seem to be
concerned only with ‘trying out’, although the Alsina piece is redeemed by its

48
Nyman was to adopt the term ‘experimental’ rather than avant-garde to describe the
work of Cage and his followers a few years later.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 53

magnificent closing wedge-like progression: alternately lower and higher sounds,

until only breath and what seems like a rupture are left.
But if you are not especially concerned with what it all means logically, then
these are your records. For the really important thing is the indissolubility of the
musical material from the sounds and potentialities of the instruments themselves,
not only as (new) tone-producing mechanisms, but as a total physical entity, so
to speak. Thus Vinko Globokar, the trombonist, creates percussion effects with
his slide and mutes, and a wide range of colours by speaking into his instrument.
Jazz musicians have, of course, been doing this for a long time, but they were
speaking sentences, whereas here we are dealing with phonetic units – units which
Globokar, in his own Discours II, seemingly injects into space. Likewise Kagel
uses 28 different methods of tone production for the cellists in Match; and the
choral record amply demonstrates the ‘instrumental’ methods which choruses are
asked to use – most mellifluously in David Bedford’s Two Poems – although this
record suffers from a rather tedious lack of variety, since all the composers still
adopt the old-fashioned view that voices can do nothing but ‘sing beautifully’.
Nevertheless, Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna (used in the film 2001) 49 is a lovely study
in slowly changing cloud-like densities, and his two organ pieces are both cluster-
compositions. Volumina is staggering by any standards, juxtaposing clusters of
varying densities and durations, in straight lines, curves, points, and by turning on
and off the organ motor and ‘blanket’ changes of registrations. Ligeti, aided by his
co-creator, the organist Gerd Zacher, seems to be stretching and bending sound as
though it were pliable plastic.
There is not enough space here to do full justice to the riches of these records
– Lutoslawski’s attempt to fuse homogeneous cluster textures with the Bartók
string quartet tradition, Mayuzumi’s Prelude for String Quartet, which builds
a very western climax out of the opening eastern quiescence, only to prick its
own bubble, whether deliberately or not, with some pretty trite ‘effects’. But the
two discoveries of the set are Kagel’s Musik für Renaissance-Instrumente and
Stockhausen’s Carré. Kagel exploits the untouched, virgin quality of these old
instruments and gets them to scrape, bang and blow hell-for-leather in a Bosch-
like score staggering in sheer imagination, irony and exuberance.
Stockhausen’s imagination is astonishingly fertile, too, when you consider that
two so dissimilar large-scale orchestral works as Gruppen and Carré could have
been written within two years of one another. One can feel the application of his
initial forming process in the position, weight and function of almost every note in
Carré, a work of surprisingly direct emotional effect.50 Its atmosphere, of a vast,
prehistoric-sounding battle with the elements, is set in the very first low E-flats,

49
Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in 1968.
50
Cardew’s contribution to Carré was documented in a series of articles written by
him and published in 1961 (see Cardew, ‘Report on Stockhausen’s Carré’, Musical Times,
102 (October 1961), pp. 619–22, and part 2 of the report in Musical Times, 102 (November
1961), pp. 698–700).
54 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

and sustained with fragments of chanting, bare fifths, vast super-imposed chords
and terrifying climaxes; one, where a simple long soprano D revolves round the
four choirs in the midst of the chaos, has burnt itself indelibly into my mind.

‘Play Group’ (The Spectator, 17 January 1969, pp. 84–5)

It is a very cheering fact that at the present time there are a number of independent
musical groups or organisations whose concerts, apart from providing music out
of the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century rut, manage occasionally to generate an
extraordinary involvement between stage and auditorium. This has happened
at least three times in as many weeks – at Musica Reservata’s ‘Renaissance
Christmas’, a relief from the bad weather and horrid saccharine we have come
to expect at Christmas; at the concert by the sitarist Debabrata Chaudhuri whose
creative interplay with his tabla player was often very exciting; and most recently
at the London Sinfonietta’s concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last Friday – a
very clever piece of programme planning, presenting serious modern music for all
the family, so to speak.
Since their first concert about a year ago, which launched both the band and
Tavener’s The Whale, the Sinfonietta have proved themselves to be a professional,
dedicated, well-managed group, with a consistent personality which enables them
to cope with Mozart and all kinds of twentieth-century music without losing their
identity – this largely due to the talented conductor David Atherton.51 They can
afford to engage the best players, to allow more than adequate rehearsal time (both
denied to less well-off groups) and to commission pieces from the accepted avant-
garde – Birtwistle, Smalley, Bedford and the like.
The QEH concert revealed the versatility of the Sinfonietta, in splendidly
idiomatic performances of five modern works widely varied in idiom. Atherton
and the superb Yvonne Minton completely grasped the sweeping, luxurious
paragraphs of Schoenberg’s early Wood-dove Songs from Gurrelieder (although,
for my taste I could have done with a little more ecstasy), while they proved
that Henze’s Neapolitan Songs have little more to offer than an outdated and
embarrassing passionateness. There was some exquisitely delicate lyricism in the
slow movement of the Webern Concerto, while the brittle, exposed quality of the
counterpoint in the first movement gained in flow what it lost in detail.
The two most important pieces were, however, the first complete performance
in England of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Seven In Nomine and the first professional
staging in England of Stravinsky’s Renard. The Maxwell Davies work, consisting
of arrangements of sixteenth-century In Nomines and original pieces based on the
same material, reveals his very fine ear for creating out of such a schizoid division
a unity – a unity the more remarkable in that, although the complex technical
procedures (amongst other things) through which this material is passed destroy

51
Atherton was the ensemble’s music director from 1968–73.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 55

all sense of pastiche, yet an undeniable spiritual affinity remains between the two
idioms. Davies’s more recent works, such as Antechrist and L’Homme Armé, take
the techniques of distortion even further, and these In Nomines are a clear and
fascinating example of the ‘before-and-after’ in music.
The musical-theatrical principles of Stravinsky’s Renard, written in 1916, have
recently been taken up by Davies’s colleagues, Birtwistle and Goehr (for instance,
in the latter’s Naboth’s Vineyard which can be heard at the QEH on 21 January
[1969]);52 and in this performance a thing all too rare in the concert hall took place:
the music was almost completely submerged by the visual entertainment of David
Drew’s gorgeously over-produced choreography. This was an ironic gloss on a
performance of Mayuzumi’s Metamusic, at the Purcell Room two days earlier,
given by a group improbably entitled The Mouth of Hermes – both pieces also
proved how much better all concerts would be with the house lights off. Metamusic
is an (almost) silent send-up, a piece in which all the usual gestures of performance
are highly exaggerated and, when well performed (as it was here), it is an amusing
party-game variation of John Cage’s silent piece [4’33”]. But it would have been
more ‘musically’ significant if one had felt that one was really missing anything –
since the music that was played but not heard seemed no less commonplace than
the fragments that were heard.
Much of the playing of this group left a good deal to be desired – but the
concert was justified by the inclusion of two pieces by Morton Feldman, of
which Four Instruments takes Webern’s so-called pointillism to a very personal
extreme, where no two sounds are heard together, each note of very low dynamic
level being allowed to die away before the next is sounded. This is very lovely,
ultimately romantic music; it is as though Feldman had selected one tree from the
vast forest of music, and of its many branches had filmed one twig, beautifully
outlined against emptiness, in a delicate series of brief, slow fades. It is perhaps
some of the ‘purest’ music now being written – Feldman would have very little
time for Maxwell Davies’s aesthetic, for he sees in the contemporary musical
scene a ‘perpetual cultural insanity feeding itself on everything it can use, without
any feeling of obligation’.53

‘Work Projects’ (The Spectator, 7 February 1969, pp. 181–2)

Music has a built-in obsolescence, which is why there are concerts. Were music
absolutely finite, an everlasting gramophone record could seal each musical truth
for all time. This would free the performer to do new and spontaneous things

52
See Nyman’s review in Tempo, 86 (Autumn 1968), pp. 14–15.
53
Morton Feldman, ‘An Interview with Robert Ashley, August 1964’, in Elliott
Schwartz and Barney Childs (eds) Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music
(New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1967), p. 366. Four Instruments was composed in 1965
for chimes, piano, violin and cello.
56 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

on the concert platform, without attempting to reproduce a live-performance-

of-the-record. For concerts, especially of modern music, are notoriously under-
rehearsed and often too ambitious, and the impact of ‘interesting’ combinations
and juxtapositions of works is frequently negated by total lack of projection: the
point is that the performers have to communicate the music to the audience before
the music can communicate itself.
Where the music itself has nothing to put over, not even the most dedicated,
expert rendering will achieve much – even Alan Hacker’s magnificent talents
could not revive the flagging (already flagged) academicism of Boulez’s Domaines
(1968), which received its first English performance last month.54 A sad occasion,
this ICA Music Section Concert, with this once white-hopeful composer taking
20 minutes to tell us he couldn’t do it any more. Certainly the piece was neatly
packaged, too neatly – six separate ideas on six separate sheets, with the mirror
versions on the reverse, placed on six spatially separated music stands. But the
ideas themselves were unimpressive, and seemed as though they had been taken
from a manual of exercises for the modern clarinettist of a few years back. And
this lack of characterisation of the material meant that the aleatory elements –
the performer is left to choose the order of both the tunes and sheets, as a sop to
his creativity – would not produce, in another version, a meaningfully different
perspective.
Boulez, in his music and in various interviews, has adopted a very conservative
stance towards today’s avant-garde and has dismissed electronic equipment as
irrelevant to music (broadly speaking, because it has been taken from the world of
telecommunications), and the loudspeaker as alienatory, in the mistaken idea that
everything that comes out of it sounds the same. But microphones, speakers and
the variable distortion of a 12 member chorus and a Hammond organ, by means
of a ring modulator, are the very raison d’être of Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie II
– the materials of telecommunications harnessed and exploited for new modes of
musical communication.
Stockhausen’s own recording of this piece sounds definitive, but is obviously
not true-for-all-time, for the piece depends on live performance, on the adaptation
and interaction of the particular circumstances of performance. The Macnaghten
Concert, also last month, at the Victoria and Albert Museum (John Alldis and his
Singers, Roger Smalley, Hugh Davies on electronics) 55 suffered largely because
what comes over the loudspeakers did sound undifferentiated (on this occasion
Monsieur Boulez was right). This was perhaps the fault of the hall itself more
than anything else – from where I was sitting, even in Schütz and Monteverdi, the
men’s voices merged into a confused mass.

54
The UK première of Domaines coincided with Boulez’s appointment as music
director of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
55
Nyman is referring to the Macnaghten Concert at the Victoria and Albert Museum,
which took place on 19 January 1969.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 57

Thus, this first English performance was not the best imaginable presentation
of the work. It is one of Stockhausen’s lesser scores, but very rich in detail, not
only in the range of gradations of the modulated distortions – so that the here-
and-now (live sounds) is heard simultaneously with the there-and-then (processed
sound) – but also in the sheer variety of methods of voice production. These are
loosely dramatic rather than musical in origin – drunken inflections, baby sounds,
stammering, sleepy yawning – although there are also touches of the musical
‘non-U’: Swingle Singers and jazz scoo-be-doo types of singing (both performed
with obvious enjoyment). However, over-exposure to Stockhausen’s music does
leave one with the nagging suspicion that he has a fear of leaving anything out of
his scores, although his control over his widely-culled material is prodigious.
If this control of inner rhythm is Stockhausen’s strong point, ‘outer’ rhythm
(rhythm in the conventional sense) we leave to the world of pop – a world
desperately relying on the loudspeaker. With the more interesting groups, such as
The Family (also given a ‘platform’ at the ICA), commercial records are deceptive
and irrelevant, for the four-minute, no-nonsense pop songs are left behind in an
often terrifying flow of improvisation – one such lasted, convincingly and very
impressively, for about 45 minutes. Two thoughts follow from this concert: that
pop could do with an infusion, not from jazz – The Family’s saxophone player
rather pitiably attempted a few jazz breaks, which would have completely
foundered but for the solid beat underneath56 – but from the musicians who use
the telecommunications equipment (which should, incidentally, be of a standard
professional enough to re-create Mikrophonie II, and not half-destroy it). Secondly,
that ‘straight’ performers should take a leaf from the pop book and realise that
projection is the lifeblood of all performance – otherwise audiences just will not
be interested.

‘Demolition Squad’ (The Spectator, 14 February 1969, pp. 217–18)

Any dedicated anti-modernist – one of the many who condemn today’s music as
discordant, noisy and tuneless – venturing on to the South Bank last week would
have been puzzled. For there, in the first of his ‘Contemporary Pianist’ recitals,
John Tilbury was to be heard quietly playing Victorian trifles where the programme
said Stockhausen; while a ‘difficult’ composer like Peter Maxwell Davies could
entertain his audience with both his music and his analysis of the way it was put
together – such delicacies as Purcell dances, dished up in the style of twenties
foxtrots and seen through the eyes of a serious composer of the sixties. There the
chance similarity ends, for Tilbury’s ‘putting on the style’ was an idiosyncratic
interpretation of somebody else’s piece, while Davies’s ‘historicism’ is central

56
Jim King also added vocals and played harmonica, tin whistle and piano until he
left the band later the same year.
58 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

to the very fabric of his music. They do share, however, an element of musical
destructiveness.
For Tilbury’s version of Plus-Minus was displeasing to the addict through his
deliberate avoidance of the Stockhausen style – even though he kept more or less
strictly to the rules of the piece. These rules are a sort of musical recipe in which
the basic ingredients are first given, then mixed, added to and subtracted from by
the interpreter: the final meal being therefore unpredictable. Tilbury chose to spin
out the basic material as a long succession of the kind of tunes one busks for an
unwilling pubescent dancing class, and – in the unlikely context of a Stockhausen-
type time scale with a not particularly integrated tape part – he succeeded both in
deflowering this innocent material, and in destroying Stockhausen’s piece too.57
I suppose that what one makes of the jokey, eccentric, selectively eclectic,
brilliant exterior of Peter Maxwell Davies’s recent music depends to a certain
extent on one’s own personal interest in, and identification with, the musical
objects – largely mediaeval and renaissance – that he chooses to subject to his
compositional alchemy; and, on a more fundamental level, on whether these
objects are important enough to anyone but the composer to be worthy of such
destruction. To me they are, but there is an equal case to be made out for the
‘explosiveness’ of Alexander Goehr’s approach: the exaggeration of the gestures
of late romantic music – after all, this is the music that music lovers love most.
Not that Davies’s music is lacking in high romantic overtones. In fact, the key
to his musical aesthetic was his revealing and deeply committed performance,
at this lecture-recital, of numbers from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (most
movingly and ravishingly sung by Mary Thomas). Davies’s approach emphasised
the satirical, grotesque, tortured sides of Schoenberg’s vision, in which echoes
of tonal and popular music appear, perhaps as nostalgic recollections, but more
likely as a form of exorcism. (It is curious that my complaint last week about
lack of projection on the part of performers was largely brought on by a very
‘English’, polite performance of Pierrot, which I found too wayward, but, of these
two recent performances, that one – Jane Manning and the Vesuvius Ensemble –
seemed nearer to Schoenberg’s ‘light, ironical, satirical tone in which the piece
was actually conceived’, even though it seemed inadequate in performance.)
The expressionist tortured-grotesque is uppermost in Davies’s Trakl settings
in Revelation and Fall (the recording of which I hope to review separately very
soon), while the satirical-grotesque is the presiding gremlin (or gargoyle) over
L’Homme Armé, arguably one of the most brilliant scores to have come out of
England since the war. This piece seems to combine Scarfe-like caricature, Bacon-
like distortion, with a Fellini-type sense of fantasy – which, aside from the fact
that the piece is genuinely funny, is very rare in music.58 The basic material of the

57
For more on Plus-Minus, see Robin Maconie’s The Works of Stockhausen (London:
Marion Boyars, 1976), pp. 177–81.
58
Nyman is referring to Sunday Times cartoonist Gerald Scarfe (1936–), painter
Francis Bacon (1909–92), and Italian film director Federico Fellini (1920–93).
 Section 1: 1968–1969 59

work (an incomplete fifteenth-century Mass movement) is refracted by the many-

faceted distorting prism of Davies’s imagination through the media of acutely
observed historical styles and technical procedures: jazz, eighteenth century flute
sonata, out of tune organ recorded on a 78 rpm record with written-in needle
sticking, electronic working of the material, a deliberately ‘bad’ performance of
Monteverdi, and so on (this last is the very best sort of music criticism – words can
be at once too hurtful and too imprecise a method of describing terrible playing).
But this is where Davies’s music is likely to be misunderstood, for, as the
exterior becomes more immediately attractive and communicative (as it has done
since he began working with the Pierrot Players), the personal implications for
the composer become more involved.59 L’Homme Armé is a musical comédie
noire; the composer wears a hair-shirt underneath his Carnaby Street clothes.
The progressive corruption of the material in this piece is, in a way, an acute act
of self-criticism, of self-destruction, since what he is humorously but savagely
‘sending-up’ is not only external objects or styles, but chiefly his own methods
and techniques.
These elaborate canonic, rhythmic and serial techniques, derived from
mediaeval music, were fragmented, elaborated in his earlier works, where the
origins were not really audibly distinguishable: the background was repressed so
to speak. But gradually the original images themselves bubbled to the surface, and
were as ‘consciously’ presented as L’Homme Armé consciously destroys them.
Thus, in a sense, this piece represented a point of no return for Maxwell Davies –
it will be fascinating to see whether his future music will develop anything more
than a ‘localised’ preoccupation with foxtrots.

‘French Polish’ (The Spectator, 14 March 1969, p. 346)

Thirty-five years after the Italian Futurists proposed the art of bruitismo, Pierre
Schaeffer in 1948 began his experiments with montages of recorded sounds which
he called musique concrète. Last week, his Groupe de Recherches Musicales
appeared for the first time in public in England.60 The first of the Groupe’s two
presentations took place at the ICA and tried to create, in a systematic, semi-
educational format, a variable sound environment – different types of music were
to be experienced in different types of space (tiny gallery ‘theatre’, exhibition hall
and cinema). But the show was a failure since the initial freedom, of impression
rather than expression, became pretty rigid when you were (albeit willingly)
shunted from one activity to another.

59
Maxwell Davies, Birtwistle, Stephen Pruslin and clarinettist Alan Hacker founded
the Pierrot Players in 1967 as a small chamber ensemble with adaptable instrumentation
loosely based on Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.
60
See Dominic Gill, ‘Recherches Musicales’, Musical Times, 110 (May 1969), p. 503.
60 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

What was valuable was to see the way in which the planned balance and focus
of the separate activities were completely altered by real experience: the electronic
‘classics’ lost their impact in too close and confined an area, whereas the short
programmes of extracts (Webern, tabla music, the Beatles etc.), intended to be
heard as ‘wrap round’ sounds while wandering round the exhibition hall, had to
be listened to, simply because they made a very definite point in a very short
space of time. From there to the cinema, where ‘enforced’ doses of prolix French-
brand electronic music were amply compensated for by two brilliant films, made
by a painter, Peter Foldes (the Groupe works closely with film-makers), which
combined wit, intellect, the representational and the abstract, in visual images of
superb imaginative and technical quality.
The composers did, however, partially redress the balance in their Queen
Elizabeth Hall concert two days later. Technically this too was very polished; the
immediacy of sound gained by using highly professional equipment (as distinct
from the amateur toys used in English electronic music) was immeasurable.
And since there were no self-conscious attempts to treat the audience like winter
pipes and lag them with sound, this was, ironically, precisely the effect achieved.
Exciting and poetic sound waves vibrated through and around the hall out of the
four-channel stereo. Certainly these composers seem to be entirely committed to,
immersed in, the sound potential of the electronic medium.
And one’s own visual imagination worked overtime, too, inventing pleasurable
fantasies suggested by the music. That the same images seemed to recur rather often
was, I think, a deficiency in the music, and showed the Groupe limited, in their
characteristically French way, to the picturesque, the descriptive, the illustrative,
as superior ‘programme music’. The associations of the sounds, whether machine-
made or from real life, seemed to have been emphasised rather than diminished;
electronically produced ‘white noise’ sounded like surf, or aeroplanes, or wind.
Bird song noises proliferated like electrified Messiaen. Bernard Parmegiani’s
Capture éphémère became an exciting aural transcript of one of those world-
taken-over-by-giant-ant films, Francis Bayle added to the repertory of good music
for the heath scene in King Lear.
Marin Marais wrote in the eighteenth century a sonata purporting to describe
a gallstone operation. On the evidence of the Groupe’s two concerts, they are
writing equivalents for moon-flight operations, or for pictorial-mystical journeys
to the centre of the mind. The composers are trapped by the beatings of their own
ephemeral wings. For to the claim that the ‘unlimited possibilities’ of electronic
music ‘generate problems of expression of a completely new nature, for which we
must look for new solutions’, we must reply yes, but look harder, and perhaps in
a different direction. At the moment the aesthetic problem is still light years away
from a satisfactory solution, at least by the composers of the Groupe.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 61

‘Two New Works by Birtwistle’ (Tempo, 88, Spring 1969, pp. 47–50)

To the two creative activities contained in the schoolboy joke ‘Is Beethoven still
composing? No, he’s decomposing’ should be added a third: re-composing, an
activity popular in different ways and for different reasons with both directors of
the Pierrot Players. Harrison Birtwistle’s method is to work over his own material,
and in fact re-composition of such material within fixed formal limits is central
to his musical thought, which, articulated by an obsessive aural imagination and
unconcerned with historical ‘problems’, presents sound as a frontal attack, not
dressed up either as mild-mannered pseudo-argument nor as trendy tip-toeing
through the textural tulips.
Re-composition = variation = versions = Verses for Ensembles, Birtwistle’s
most recent and most completely successful work, which was at one stage called
Signals.61 It was preceded in the same week by his Four Interludes from a Tragedy
for basset clarinet and tape,62 which are reworkings of interludes (originally for
various solo instruments) from his Monodrama (1967). These are tiny, tense, spare
pieces which show the processes of Verses at work in miniature, and an awareness
of musical space unique in English music. Formally each of the four follows an
identical musical curve: a gradual increase in dynamic and note density towards
the exact centre, and a symmetrical decline. Each inhabits both its own dynamic
area (covering a total range from ffff to pppp) and its own octave area, facilitated
by the complete four-octave range of the basset clarinet (whose lowest note is a
sounding A). The first is the highest and loudest, progressing to the last, the lowest
and softest; with the detumescence each also grows in reflectiveness, the changes
of colour disguising the fact that they are re-compositions of each other, being
formed round pivot notes ‘vertically’ common to all of them. The version with
tape is more substantial, and to bridge the gap between the ‘live’ and the ‘dead’ the
envelope of the clarinet timbre is modified by means of a contact microphone and
slight reverberation, so that each piece is as a gem set on an individual electronic
cushion. The tapes were made in Peter Zinovieff’s computer studio,63 and they
show an uncanny aural sensitivity both in the rather disturbing delicacy of the
sounds and in their rhythmic phasing. And just as the four interludes present
individual tone progressions within an overall tone progression, so the addition
of the tape part adds a further progression, for the first and last consist of almost
inaudible low pulsing frequencies, while the central two present different versions

61
Commissioned by the London Sinfonietta with help from the Calouste Gulbenkian
Foundation, and first performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 12 February 1969, conducted
by David Atherton.
62
First performed by Alan Hacker at a Redcliffe Concert of British Electronic Music
at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 10 February 1969.
63
Inventor Peter Zinovieff designed the VCS3 synthesizer, which was widely used
by pop musicians such as David Bowie and Pink Floyd. Zinovieff also wrote the libretto for
Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus.
62 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

of a similar cluster combination of glissandos of attack and decay within a ‘cut-up’

glissando of pitch.
In performance the ‘Interludes’ are not played continuously but are spaced so
as to form a frame around a whole concert. Similarly, or rather dissimilarly, the
separated instrumental groups of ‘Verses’ are spatially disposed on the platform so
as to characterize the musical ideas and the dramatic interplay between them rather
than to directionalize the sound. There are seven playing positions: at the front
are two stands for ‘special occasions’, solos and the like, behind which, as two
halves of a semi-circle, are the two positions for the woodwind quintet, the left for
their ‘high’ ensemble (piccolo, oboe, B-flat and E-flat clarinets, and bassoon), the
right for the ‘low’ (alto flute, cor anglais, B-flat and bass clarinets, contrabassoon).
Behind this is a brass quintet, from which the trumpets detach themselves to play
either at the front or on two ‘stereophonic’ raised platforms at the very rear. And
in front of this there are two separate groups of unpitched and pitched percussion.
The anatomy of the piece is complex in a simple sort of way, for although it is
the clearest of Birtwistle’s pieces in outline, the relationships between the sections
are rather more subtle than a bare-bones description allows. On one level, that of
development of the instrumental writing, the work could be seen to have an overall
form similar to an individual ‘Interlude’, in that it progresses towards and away
from the musically explicit, from the totalitarianism of the unified ‘tutti’ group to
the more democratic though shortlived glory of the solos.
The arresting opening (I use the cliché advisedly, for this is not one of those
works whose arrest at the beginning is succeeded by a total cooling of the heels in
a musical cop-shop) presents, with deliberately unfocused material, the basic area
of activity of the work, the separation of the instrumental groups, the aggressive
loudness (which seems to prevail throughout but doesn’t), the tendency of the
two trumpets to break away, and two pairings of held single notes, rhythmically
articulated à la Varèse – A-flat and D (horn and oboe), E and A (trumpets) – which
recur from time to time as starting and finishing points, and which are ‘resolved’
at the end into an A–E–D chord on the final rising accelerando.
The first occurrence of this is ‘echoed’ by a fermata low wind chord which
splinters into grotesque harmonics and proceeds to serve as a refrain to the
only lyrical interest in the score, brief verses, dense, subdued and brooding. A
hocketized canon for low brass (plus percussion) resolves on a held D, a cue for
another version of the fermata-lyrical passage, this time with added percussion.
Subsequently a wild cadenza for the horn asserts its magisterial function, which
has been hinted at earlier in the piece. Just before its end, the solo is interrupted
by a ‘static’ brass ritornello, which always crops up when there are any lengthy
solos around.
There follows a ‘central episode’ in which chordal blocks in rhythmic unison,
at first short and antiphonally arranged between high woodwind, low brass, three
xylophones and three glockenspiels, gradually become longer and are combined
and superimposed in ever-increasing complexity. (This passage sounds like
Messiaen at first hearing, but Birtwistle applies the principle far more ruthlessly,
 Section 1: 1968–1969 63

and to very personal ends.) In the midst the trumpets from their ‘stereo’ position
sound out with Tippett-like criss-crossings. A three-part canon for high woodwind
mirrors the one for low brass, the static ritornello appears, to separate each of the
woodwind instruments as they come forward to the ‘solo’ position. These solos
are built over a variable horn ‘ground’ and in their inexorable way are cumulative
overall. The low wind fermata-lyrical material follows the last brass refrain, the
whole ‘central episode’ recurs, the high and low canons are combined, and the
work ends abruptly on the rising accelerando already mentioned.
Thus the progression of the work is both geometric and circular, for while each
block of material occupies its own clearly defined area, symmetries and opposites
existing within the block take on a wider formal significance when juxtaposed
against other symmetries and opposites. Despite the fact that the work lacks a
linear plot (and without pushing the ‘circular’ relationships analysis too far) it has
an outstanding unity, for the music is constructed in such a way that each cell-like
rhythmic and melodic shape is projected, so to speak, on to a large screen which is
the ‘end’ of the piece, containing everything in a sort of total musical recall. After
27 minutes a resolution, if not a solution, of the materials is reached.
The verse aspect of the piece speaks for itself – as a ‘cool’ straight-jacket to
contain the ‘hot’ sounds – and is the key to the projected title Signals: the held
notes, pauses, repeated unisons, cadences and ‘rhyme endings’ serve throughout
as signals for a new musical event to happen, whether it be another verse, a
consequent phrase, or a completely new idea. And by extension recurrent refrains
are merely glorified cadences, signals of a more elaborate kind. The formation
of a new and entirely convincing cadential ‘language’ is one of the most original
features of the score (and Felix Aprahamian would therefore have to find other
irrelevant grounds on which to condemn it).64
A similarly important feature, marking a significant advance for Birtwistle, lies
in the mildly indeterminate passages which, seen from a different angle, are verses
to the ritornellos of the completely notated portions. In a discussion with Michael
Tippett at Wardour Castle Summer School some years ago Birtwistle said that he
could rewrite his music using different pitches without doing any damage to it
(hence serial-type analysis, as Roger Smalley attempted in his review of Nomos
in Tempo 86, is futile with Birtwistle’s music).65 Verses contains his first attempts
at this sort of ‘re-composition’, for in the horn and woodwind cadenzas and the
low wind passages, alternative passages or methods of performance are left to
the players or conductor to select, with superb results in the case of the brass

64
Felix Aprahamian (1914–2005) was an outspoken critic of the so-called Manchester
School. In an obituary on 20 January 2005, The Telegraph wrote, ‘Questioned once about
whether the music of Peter Maxwell-Davies [sic] and Harrison Birtwistle would last,
[Aprahamian] replied, to the approval of Bernard Levin: “Frankly, no”.’
65
Birtwistle, along with Goehr and Maxwell Davies, held a composition Summer
School at Wardour Castle in 1964 and 1965, with Tippett as its President. For Smalley’s
review of Birtwistle’s Nomos, see Tempo, 86 (Autumn 1968), pp. 7–10.
64 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

ritornellos, where the use of different mutes and dynamic levels provides sharply
varying shifts of colour on each recurrence.
It seems with this piece that Birtwistle has solved the problem of the over-
elaborate vertical and melismatic density which at times threatened to stifle
Nomos, and on the evidence of the tape part of the Interludes one feels that at last
there is some hope for the cause of poor benighted British electronic music.

‘Not Being Done’ (The Spectator, 25 April 1969, p. 553)

John Cage’s most recent (1966) thinking on concerts runs as follows:

I doubt whether we can find a higher goal, namely that art and our involvement
in it will somehow introduce us to the very life that we are living, and that we
will be able, without scores, without performers and so forth, simply to sit still to
listen to the sounds which surround us and hear them as music. At that point we
won’t need concert halls, but we will be able nevertheless to enter …

– in this case, the Purcell Room, and hear and see ‘Thirty years of the music of
John Cage’.66
Tim Souster who devised the concert, presented by the music section of the
ICA, is to be congratulated for allowing us direct contact with the sounds of Cage’s
music, vintages 1938–66 – a rare enough opportunity considering the vast amount
of print spilt on Cage, his philosophies, innovations, methods and influences. Yet
in order to understand the special character of Cage’s achievement, to place his
music in its context, one must see what form his reaction against centuries of
western music and musical practice took, and why. He threw overboard traditional
pitch relations and employed fixed rhythmic structures, often derived from
Indian music; he employed random methods of composition – tossing of coins,
observation of the imperfections on paper – to remove himself from his music,
so that sounds can exist for themselves, without the taste, memory or desire of
association, in compositions whose skeletal directions leave more creative work
for performers than ever before. His comprehension of silence led to a new
experiencing of time, in a music where gestures and physical happenings are often
as important as sounds.
Quite often the experience of the music of Cage and his followers is more
rewarding than the music itself – thus Dream (1948), a five-minute piano piece
written in the rhythmic structure of a dance by Merce Cunningham (with whom
Cage has frequently and very fruitfully collaborated), was played by John Tilbury
off stage on the greenroom piano, while Cornelius Cardew sat, immobile, at the
grand on the stage. What was important was not so much the distant swirls of

66
Cage, ‘Two Statements on Ives’, in A Year from Monday (London: Calder and
Boyars, 1968), p. 42.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 65

what sounded (at ‘first glance’) like a Chopin nocturne, but the way in which
one’s ears had to become accustomed to the semi-silence (and to other people’s
ears becoming, etc.) as one’s eyes do gradually to the dark. (A friend sitting a
few rows nearer the stage heard only the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra from the
neighbouring hall.)
The performance of Radio Music (1956) in which eight players played eight
radios – the momentary coming into focus of music one knew out of the prevailing
mists of radio static – not only discovered something new and unrepeatable, but
reassembled to some extent our musical responses. Beethoven’s sounds had been
dispossessed of their birthright, so to speak, and thrown into the public area of
experience, having no cultural priority over non-composed and non-pitched
sounds. 34’46.776” represented another technique which Cage employed from
about 1954–56 – that of writing separate pieces based on the same rhythmic
structure, which could be performed either separately or in combination (in this
performance, two prepared pianos, and percussion played by Christopher Hobbs).
Humourlessness and bemusement were combined in the right Cage proportions,
and the gentleness of the performance, its positive lack of aggressiveness – of the
feeling of ‘pushing the audience around’ – was perfectly in tune with Cage’s plea
for people to ‘realise that they themselves are doing their experience, and that it’s
not being done to them’.67
Variations VI, receiving its first English performance, represents one of the most
recent of Cage’s activities, where the performer’s freedom of choice is directed by
a barely-limiting series of signs, while Music for Wind Instruments, a serial piece
written in 1938, showed that even in his more or less conventionally conceived
and notated music, time progressions are like a whirlpool, active but immobile.
This version of Variations VI created a rich and rewarding, always entertaining
sound fabric – ring-modulated Moonriver and Weill from Souster, microphone
effects from Cardew, a simultaneous performance by Gavin Bryars (whose Mr
Sunshine was the joy of John Tilbury’s recent recital series) of Music for Amplified
Toy Pianos (1956) and many other lovely things.68 One would be grateful to Cage
simply for seeing his present function as a composer not as a dictator’s, but as one
that liberates the full play of the musician’s imagination in performance.
Grateful, too, to Sarah Walker who gave a marvellous, low voiced, sexy
rendering of the hypnotic three-note vocal line of The Wonderful Widow of
Eighteen Springs written in 1942, and for a reading of Aria (1958) which, even if it
relied somewhat on Cathy Berberian’s inescapable version, showed an astonishing
and amusing command of vocal technique, ranging from pidgin English with a
Japanese accent to vocalised gibbering, and from an expressive intake of breath to

67
In Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, ‘An Interview with John Cage’, Tulane
Drama Review, 10/2 (Winter 1965), pp. 50–72, p. 51.
68
Henry Mancini’s popular song ‘Moon River’ originally featured in the film
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). Bryars’s Mr Sunshine was composed in 1968 as part of a set
of three pieces for John Tilbury. It may be performed on any number of prepared pianos.
66 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

the exaggerations of grand opera. The genial spirit of Cage hovered here, as over
the whole evening from beginning to end.

‘This Way Madness’ (The Spectator, 9 May 1969, pp. 626–7)

‘Music Theatre’ is a vogue term which makes of the composer not merely a
manipulator of sounds and forms but of action, gesture, performers, instruments,
spaces and audiences. It covers a multitude of activities – scenic song-cycle
(Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire), a story with music (Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s
Tale), odd-ball cabaret routines expanded to the requisite degree of pointlessness
(the New York Sonic Arts Group, in the first Music Now concert at the Roundhouse
last weekend), or which make use of the physical properties of people and places:
the mobile performers of Christopher Hobbs’s Voicepiece (second Music Now
concert), employing all imaginable methods of vocal production, turned the
Roundhouse into a scene of incantatory madness.
Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King (given its first airing
a few weeks ago at the Queen Elizabeth Hall) deliberately set out to represent
madness (that of George III) by duplicating it in music, and the occasion itself was
very cunningly turned into an act of theatre. This by means of musical eccentricity,
by putting the players in cages (to represent the birds the King taught to sing,
and the very shackles around his mind), and through the extraordinary voice of
Roy Hart.69 This is a truly phenomenal vehicle – he can squeak and grunt in a
range of four octaves, and sing on his own like a four-man glee club down with
laryngitis: phenomenal in the sense of those grotesque monster babies described, in
Elizabethan street ballads, as a warning to others. There were the cries of ‘rubbish’
exactly on cue, and this exploration of ‘certain extreme regions of experience’ was
wildly applauded.
Maxwell Davies still exploits the associativeness of musical ‘objects’ – quotes
‘from Handel to Birtwistle’; but whereas in L’Homme Armé this unhealthy appetite
for consuming other people’s music succeeds simply because the music feeds on
itself, in the Mad King the merely illustrative use of objets trouvés becomes the
cheap trick of a clever undergraduate. And just as the King’s madness is not set off
by even a glimmer of sanity, so there is no ‘musical’ framework for the quotations
– the function of the music is purely onomatopoeic, whether imitating bird song,
or the sounds of madness themselves. The best passages are no more than vivid
descriptions of what I took to be the snapping of the King’s spirit, or darts being
thrown into his mind – music once meant more to the composer of the Second
Taverner Fantasia and Revelation and Fall.

69
Roy Hart (1926–75) was an actor and singer whose wide vocal register and
virtuosity inspired composers such as Maxwell Davies, Henze and Stockhausen to write
specifically for his voice.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 67

How refreshing to turn to Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning Paragraph 2 –

one of those rare works of such power and freshness that they seem to reinvent
music from its very sources by somersaulting musical history. Its pristine primary
material consists of a short text by Confucius intoned in five cycles to five groups
of pentatonic note groups, against the continuous reiterated beat of 18 rhythms
from which each drummer is allowed to choose. Performed simultaneously but
each in their own time by ten groups spread around the Roundhouse, this created
an hour-long, uninhibitedly physical sound spectrum which, by its very originality
and vitality, cancelled out any number of hermetically sealed and quiescent
avant-garde pieces or manic reincarnations of early twentieth-century German
expressionism.
Of the first of the two London performances by the New York Sonic Arts Group,
the two primarily musical works were intriguing: Gordon Mumma’s Hornpipe and
Alvin Lucier’s Vespers. Hornpipe depended ‘on the acoustic interaction between
the french horn and the resonance peaks of the performance space’,70 and created
an astonishing range of sounds – without ever sounding freakish – by bizarre
methods of production (such as oboe reeds) which were modified and controlled
by an electronic device on the instrument, thus creating a dialogue with itself of
feedback, echo and modulation.
Lucier’s piece explored the physical area of the Roundhouse by means of a
quartet of echo locators (these are devices which produce regular pulses to enable
the blind to detect solid areas and spaces by the alteration of the sound waves
when they come into contact). In its small way, this piece had almost everything
one expects from conventional music: rhythm, pitch (the faster the vibration the
higher the pitch) and variety of timbre and texture. Particular echo formations
gave the impression that the number of instruments had been multiplied two- or
threefold, which itself produced a tension, since one was never sure how much
‘real’ sound there was nor which direction it came from.

‘Boulez in the Labyrinth’ (The Spectator, 16 May 1969, pp. 658–9)

Pierre Boulez – conductor elect of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, leader of the
European avant-garde of the fifties, somewhat academic critic of today’s musical
scene while he temporarily lacks the wherewithal to make his own creative solution
– not untypically chose, in his ‘Meet the Composers’ session at the Queen Elizabeth
Hall a few weeks ago, to illustrate his choice of music on the piano. The piano, he
maintained, is an almost complete substitute for all the other instruments, and allows
one to concentrate on what is being said without the distraction of ‘colour’.
Such austerity ill befits Boulez on the evidence of the first English
performance of the complete Pli selon Pli, whose five ‘movements’, which have

70
From a program note by the composer; for a more detailed account of this work,
see Experimental Music, pp. 101–103.
68 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

been painstakingly assembled and tinkered around with since 1957, have been
finished for some years now. For what is immediately comprehensible is the
glowing brilliance and sensuousness of Boulez’s orchestral sound (it is amazing to
remember that the two most substantial pieces, ‘Don’ and ‘Tombeau’, were given
at one ‘first’ performance or another on, of all instruments, the piano!): a sound
one had forgotten even existed, built up by Boulez’s acute ear from inside the
orchestra itself, unencumbered with electronics or Geiger counters. Extra harps
and marimbas are used to add not weight but minute changes of colour and light,
for let us not forget that Boulez is a Frenchman.
But unlike younger French composers – Gerard Masson and to a lesser
extent Gilbert Amy,71 whose music is often sound-without-substance – Boulez’s
shimmering, endless string chords, the woodwind trills, the pastel shades
of vibraphone and the rest of the percussion are an indivisible part of the
unified complexity of sound, material, form and time feeling in Pli. This is an
unprecedented integration, radically different from the mechanical application
of total serialism in Structures I for piano duet which achieves only an artificial
unity. Pli was, in fact, a restorative experience – one was listening to a rare and
unfashionable thing: ‘real music’, undisturbed by parody, illiteracy, indeterminacy
and other ‘impurities’.
Apart from their colouring, the individual musical ideas in Pli are by any
standards nebulous and ephemeral – the listener is not permitted the comfort of
the easily made and assimilated gesture which stands outside the music. Even the
much-quoted fermata semibreves in the Second Improvisation are less striking
in performance than on paper, as they must be sung ‘as slow as possible, in
one breath’, and the breath control of the very skilled Halina Lukomska – last
Wednesday’s soloist – is not superhuman. Indeed, the only gesture still memorable,
after hearing Pli at a rehearsal, in performance and on tape, is the odd effect of four
flutes beginning a phrase with a glissando to the main note, an effect reminiscent
of an American train whistle.
This absence of gestural signposts and of repetition of ideas make for the
labyrinthine form so beloved by Boulez: ‘One creates one’s own labyrinth – one
constructs it in exactly the same way as the underground animal which Kafka
describes so well constructs his burrow’.72 And assimilation is not helped by
Boulez’s peculiar conception of time and movement which has led critics to
condemn Pli for being overlong and deficient in movement.

71
These composers have since been associated with the so-called Spectral
movement (see Julian Anderson, ‘Spectral music,’ in Grove Music Online, http://
0-www.oxfordmusiconline.com.unicat.bangor.ac.uk/subscriber/article/grove/music/50982
(accessed 28 December 2009)).
72
In ‘Sonata, que me veux-tu?’; see Orientations: Collected Writings of Pierre
Boulez, trans. Martin Cooper, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez (London: Faber & Faber, 1986),
pp. 145–6.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 69

Perhaps the explanation is that Boulez set out to do something entirely different,
for almost throughout Pli brief moments of activity are immediately frozen into
a state of suspension, and thus the total ensemble of sound events is similarly
suspended in the overall timespan. This helps in the construction of the labyrinth,
since, as a result, the specific gravity of a movement can never be discovered –
and, in a sense, this type of formal ambiguity is far more indeterminate in essence
than where decision-making is left to the performer. But in order to drag the
listener by the nose through the maze, the quality and arrangement of ideas have
to be very strong indeed – as they are in ‘Don’ and the Third Improvisation. Where
they are not, as in the Second Improvisation, the music loses itself in hermetic
diffusiveness.
But Pli has both an elusive unity – it has a single literary inspiration as a
‘Portrait de Mallarmé’ – and an equal disunity, not surprising from a piecemeal
work. One’s desire for synthesis leads one to look for a continuous ‘plot’, which
is at times perceptible, at others imaginary – Pli selon Pli will never have the
magnificent coherence of Le Marteau Sans Maître. The first number, ‘Don’, based
on a poem about the idea of creation, not unnaturally presents most of the types
of ideas of the work in embryonic form. The first two improvisations develop
a limited number of textures and are emotionally very evasive. The powerful
unaccompanied vocal melismatic opening, the sustained agitation of the two
xylophone breaks and the slowly unwinding string cantus firmus at the end of the
Third Improvisation inhabit an emotional and stylistic world rather at variance
with what has gone before.
But even this does not explain the unique character of ‘Tombeau’ – as relentless
as the earlier movements had been refined – which, although one of the most
interesting pieces of recent orchestral music, seems to represent a throwback to
the ‘Beethovenian’ style of the much earlier second piano sonata, and owes little
to either Debussy or Webern, who are the presiding ghosts behind the earlier part
of the work. There is no doubt that it is an ‘effective’ close and summation to
Boulez’s magnum opus, even though the question remains open as to whether it
makes Pli a total experience or merely a sequence of five movements of different
shapes and sizes. But there is no denying the magnificence of this sizeable chunk
of Boulez’s creative past.
Today he is taken up with re-creating brilliantly the music of other composers,
an activity he apparently justified to the American composer, Roger Sessions, on
the grounds that audiences must be familiarised with the classics of the earlier
twentieth century before any new work could be attempted. Sessions, no longer a
young man, replied that he hadn’t enough time left to wait that long.73 I hope we
do not have to wait till then for another Pli.

73
According to Andrea Olmstead, this anecdote about Sessions is probably apocryphal
(personal correspondence, 7 May 2012).
70 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

‘Skip and Run’ (The Spectator, 28 June 1969, p. 860)

‘If I play Tchaikovsky I play his melodies and skip his spiritual struggles. Naturally
I condense. I have to know just how many notes my audience will stand for. If
there’s time left over I fill in with a lot of runs up and down the keyboard’.74 After
the sudden rush to the halls of new music, which have brought to London an
impressive list of world, English and local first performances, Liberace’s words
run up and down my mind.
Incomprehensibility apart, Liberace would have to present Webern whole. Post-
Webern composers have, for good or bad, renounced the extreme preciousness
both of time and of notes, and in any case the most important developments in new
music show that it is more difficult, if not futile, to carve a work up into message,
substance and mere decoration than Liberace finds with Tchaikovsky. Even from
the point of view of physical presentation one needs more than a piano, a smile
and candelabra. The best performers, like sitar players, are indivisible from the
music’s essence – as was refreshingly shown by the brilliant professionalism of
Les Percussions de Strasbourg and of the phenomenal singer-entertainer Cathy
Berberian, at the opening concert of the English Bach Festival, And most concert
halls – the Queen Elizabeth Hall especially – are ludicrously ill-equipped for works
like Roger Smalley’s Pulses and Serocki’s Continuum, which should dispose the
instrumental groups around the hall.
But basic compositional problems remain – and Liberace, in his wrong way,
is right: in most new music there are often too few notes to justify the time taken
and the ideas are frequently sparse or uninviting; Roger Smalley, in his Pulses for
5x4 Players (London Sinfonietta, under David Atherton at the QEH last week)
takes, like Stockhausen, time as his basic preoccupation. He attempts to ‘alter
radically our perception of the passing of time’ by systematically exploring its
minute particles in the form of pulsations of all kinds – rhythms, beats, trills,
vibrato, etc. for 15 brass and five percussion instruments.
Pulses represents the most recent stage of Smalley’s rather tangential
development, and unites the Stockhausen ‘moment’ form of The Song of the
Highest Tower with the use of electronic modulation in Transformation I – both of
which were a little shaky stylistically. By lining its sights on deliberately limited
raw material Smalley has managed both to project his music outwards more
successfully than before, and to come up with some of his best sounds to date:
ranging from the cavernous opening (and ending) for low trombones (reminiscent
more of Stockhausen’s Carré than Wagner’s Das Rheingold) to the huge
superimposed climaxes, for the music proceeds by combination and overlapping
like a layer cake.
But overall there were structural deficiencies – one symptom being that each
climax was followed by a rather crude drop in volume and density, as though the

74
Liberace, quoted in Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts (London:
Hutchinson, 1964), p. 70.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 71

composer were shy of holding this head of sound as pop groups do. And it was in
places like this that the music seemed to be treading notes; that there was ‘time to
fill in’. Other performances might, of course, remedy this as the form of the piece
is variable, and performers and composer are joint creators on a fifty–fifty basis.
The rhythmic reiterations of Pulses also had its Varèse overtones; not the
Varèse of the sudden aggressive peaks of sound, but of Ionisation which was
given a stunning performance (again at the QEH) by the Strasbourg group in an
almost superhuman reduction of the original parts from thirteen players to six.
Such a performance, where the players seemed to reach inside their instruments,
of Varèse’s piece, of Monic Cecconi’s pleasant but predictable Imaginaires, and
Kazimierz Serocki’s virtuoso Continuum (which made a neat point of constantly re-
dividing its 123 instruments into homogeneous rather than mixed timbre-groups)
made all the other percussion groups I have heard sound distinctly tentative.
The Varèse-Stockhausen process of building large structures out of minute
particles which are important in themselves is a far cry from the ‘massed’ sound
of Xenakis (an architect turned composer who collaborated with Le Corbusier
on the design of the Philips Pavilion for the 1953 Brussels Exhibition for which
Varèse wrote his Poème Electronique). Xenakis proceeds by deciding the order
and constitution of the events and then, by means of ‘probability theory’ (more
recently with the aid of a computer), exploits the full range of chance combinations
of dynamics, attacks etc.
The result is usually less aurally fascinating than the theoretical concept.
Sounds are drained of everything except incessant movement and the ability
to band together, like some socially impoverished micro-organism, with other
sounds and so lose their identity. (With Xenakis it is possible, without destroying
the whole reason for the music to apply that Liberace test.) The second English
Bach Festival concert featured three of his works – Syrmos (1959) for strings came
across as drab and unfocused, more like a badly-designed pebble-dashed wall than
a piece of architecture; Achorripsis (1956–7) could not even disguise the greater
variety of tone colour available to wind instruments, while only Nomos Alpha for
cello seemed to have been written with the genuine sound of an instrument in mind.
This extraordinary piece, given an equally extraordinary performance by
Pierre Pannassou, stretches cello technique, sometimes gracefully, sometimes not,
beyond its extreme limits. It is more successful on record than in a concert hall as
the recording engineers can capture the groping savagery which is essential to the
piece, can delete the constant re-tunings which marred Pannassou’s performance
and can arrange that the unplayable ending – where the instrument is asked to tackle
slow ascending and descending scales simultaneously – can be played. There is to
be more Xenakis at the Festival – his Stratégie: Game for two orchestras, will be
given at the Festival Hall on 7 July 1969.
Finally, a rarity, a tiny but not insignificant find: the only work I have heard for
a long time which needs neither condensing nor expanding, whose material and
gestures are beautifully scaled to its modest proportions is Harrison Birtwistle’s
72 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Cantata, given its first performance by Mary Thomas and the Pierrot Players a
few weeks ago.

‘Hands Off’ (The Spectator, 12 July 1969, pp. 50–51)

Milton Babbitt’s name and music are likely to remain unknown in this country. He
is an ex-jazz pianist, expert on pre-1950 pop music, father of American electronic
music, Big White Chief of the formidable post-Schoenberg network at Princeton;
his music polarises his staggering interdisciplinary intellectual range – covering
information theory, computer science, mathematics, logic, linguistic philosophy;
he considers advanced music analogous to advanced physics – totally beyond the
comprehension of ‘music-lovers’ who should not be allowed contact with it.
Babbitt was in town last week to spread his wisdom to young composers at a
Composers’ Weekend (held by the Society for the Promotion of New Music) and,
if they cannot accept his very narrow and specific musical ‘aesthetic’, they might
at least deduce some need for a compositional discipline, a commodity spread
pretty thin amongst the young at the moment.
Babbitt introduced the concert of British and American electronic music held
at the Royal Festival Hall to launch publicly the British Society for Electronic
Music, whose projected studio would belatedly drag English music into the
second half of this technological century. Babbitt’s own Ensembles for Synthesiser
– the synthesiser is a self-contained electronic instrument which combines in itself
all the elaborate paraphernalia of the tape studio – certainly makes most other
‘advanced’ music sound like simple-minded babblings. He works with rather than
in the medium, but although traditional methods of organisation, in the shape of
rhythmic motifs, are easily heard, Babbitt’s complex serial organisation makes
maximum functional use of the ‘lesser’ musical elements, like timbre and rhythm
duration. The result – a fascinating high-density, ever-changing integrated chain
of events – makes perception very difficult, as there is little or no note wastage.
But this approach is only one of many ‘answers’ for electronic music. Vladimir
Ussachevsky’s Of Wood and Brass is built from the modifications to a small
range of wood and brass sounds, and is a sort of exploratory autobiography of the
chosen elements. This piece used laborious manual techniques which have now
been made redundant by the computer. Yet, ironically, the two computer pieces
included in the concert were stylistically more old-fashioned than Babbitt’s:
J.K. Randall’s Mudgett seemed little more than a ‘César Franck meets late
Stravinsky having overheard a conversation between Weill and Schoenberg’,75
while the workmanlike, but slightly turgid, Connolly/Zinovieff Obbligati III

75
For Randall’s piece, see Musical Quarterly, 51/iv (October 1965), pp. 689–90.
Obbligati III is discussed in Musical Times, 112 (April 1971), p. 337. For a review of the
concert at the Royal Festival Hall, see Musical Times, 110 (August 1969), pp. 852–3.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 73

(English) played off computer-reconstituted instrumental sounds against the live

instruments themselves – a combination which sounds a little stale to my ear.
Live electronics, in which the sounds are modified electronically at the same
time as they are produced, were represented in the concert by the young English
composer, Richard Orton’s Sampling Afield. This was the liveliest piece, at its
most successful where changes of the choral timbres and textures were slowest and
simplest, allowing the ring-modulation (in the hands of Hugh Davies) to transform
the inputs with the greatest variety of distortions – most obviously where each
of the choral groups alternated a straight C major chord. On one hearing, with
dynamic levels frustratingly low, it seemed to me that perhaps Orton had made too
many samples without really defining the perimeter of the field.
This impression was confirmed by the not altogether convincing succession of
piano/cello events in Orton’s Cycle performed during the Cheltenham Festival’s
‘Aleatoric Adventure’, which Orton had devised. The still staid Cheltenham
Festival was trying to be ‘with it’ in a cheapjack production hardly calculated to
turn on the locals, though I particularly liked Tom Phillips’s quiescent Ornamentik
played by a modified tea-shoppe piano trio, presided over by the exquisite six-note
arpeggios of John Tilbury. This should have pleased discreet Saturday-afternoon
Cheltenham as a refined alternative to all those ageing ghost-composers who still
haunt the Festival’s programmes.

‘Patchwork’ (The Spectator, 26 July 1969, pp. 116–17)

Many once obscure composers, like Stockhausen and Berio, seem to be coming in
from the cold abstractions of serialism to rummage around musical second-hand,
antique and ethnic shops in search of a new kind of musical ‘realism’. Where, in the
past, tiny fragile ideas were woven together by means of a permutational system,
bold sound montages are now the rage. And our two most serious ‘collectors’ have
both had new works performed in the last few weeks: Peter Maxwell Davies’s
St Thomas Wake at the Cheltenham Festival (BBC Symphony Orchestra under
James Loughran), and John Tavener’s Celtic Requiem at the Festival Hall
(commissioned and played by the London Sinfonietta under David Atherton).
As I have said before, Maxwell Davies’s book of musical quotations has
gradually expanded – it runs from Dunstable to Handel and skips a few pages before
arriving at the foxtrots of the thirties – while the entries themselves have become
clearer, even where they are deliberately distorted. His foxtrot arrangements of
Purcell dances showed his interest in the historical double-take, whereas the triple-
take of St Thomas Wake creates a hybrid, which seems to point the way out of
Davies’s recent creative confusion.
The John Bull pavan on which the work is based appears in its entirety only
near the end, when it is heard simultaneously both as a foxtrot and in its original
form on harp. The pavan generates a series of charmingly period foxtrots (played
by a battered-sounding nine-piece band) – far and away the best foxtrots I have
74 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

heard – which account for about a third of the running time and which make up
in calculated insolence what they lack in smoochiness. These are starkly and
uncompromisingly thrown against very powerful orchestral music, derived from
the sixteenth-century dance, like two conflicting movies running together, at no
point meeting in anything other than time.
But this schizoid separation seems to represent – it is too early to be certain –
an attempt to purge the ‘heard object’ from the central body of Maxwell Davies’s
music, which is now able to close its wounds – it has been publicly struggling
with itself since L’Homme Armé – and unobtrusively assimilate what music it
needs to feed on, as it did some years ago in the Second John Taverner Fantasia.
That Davies is now moving towards an orchestral style as distinctive as, but very
different from, the Fantasia, is clear from St Thomas Wake. For he now articulates
by means of a slow brooding pace, sharp incessant rhythms and pedals, ferocious
horn and clarinet ostinatos, to create an atmosphere of grotesque violence: an
atmosphere which seems less an assumed cloak of eccentricity than a genuine
expression of Davies’s rather disturbing talent. But there are still those foxtrots to
contend with – we are told that the dance music of the thirties was the very first
music Davies heard, and their use implies an almost Mahlerian vision of a lost
childhood innocence glimpsed through adult commercially-manufactured music.
John Tavener’s Celtic Requiem reverses the process: the apparent spontaneity
of children’s rhythms and street games retains and disguises elements of death and
marriage rituals. An elaborate and cleverly collated death game is acted out and
sung, prettily but joylessly, by children (from the Little Missenden Village School)
hemmed around with adult sentiment in the form of ‘appropriate’ settings from the
Latin Requiem text, Irish poetry and a few other inaudible things. Carried out with
Tavener’s customary flair and flamboyance, it was nevertheless a sad occasion.
For Tavener has been hearing his ‘voices’ again – the same ones as in last year’s
ballot-winning Prom piece In Alium:76 soprano in trapeze register (Jessie Cash),
presumably provided with a safety net, for she wasn’t often heard; a glutinous
nineteenth-century hymn tune; wheezy harmonium sounds (or was it the Irish
bagpipes?) and sporadic vicious organ fire. Admittedly, this time there were at
least two new elements – a surprisingly undistinguished ‘expressive’ choral style,
and a magnificent part for the shrillest clarinet available to man (Alan Hacker at
his best). But, whereas in the earlier work these were laid out clearly with a good
ear for effect, in the Requiem the bag was too full and was shaken too well, with
diminishing returns.
Tavener is the Prodigal Son who has never needed to leave home, and his music
shows that the quotations game is a dangerous one to play unless the material
is submitted to a singularly powerful creative imagination. In Tavener’s hands,
unlike Maxwell Davies’s, the bric-à-brac loses whatever stature it originally had –
the children’s songs become defiled in a way they do not deserve; in other words,
in order to build one first has to cut down.

76
See Nyman’s review ‘Britons at Sea’ (The Spectator, 23 August 1968).
 Section 1: 1968–1969 75

‘Mr Birtwistle is Out’ (Music and Musicians, 18, September 1969, pp. 27, 78)

I went along to interview Harrison Birtwistle. And discovered that Birtwistle, that
most elusive of composer-interview subjects, had left me a message handwritten
into the grooves of a sheet of corrugated cardboard. This has been translated by
means of an analog computer into a self-destroying tape loop, which has been left
running for three days. Only faintly audible now, it told me to ‘invent a composite
interview in my absence, drawn from previous conversations. Remember Lord’s …’.
I, of the truly infallible memory, did in fact remember Lord’s and the second
Test Match between England and the West Indies (it’s as good a way to begin an
article as any, I thought). Birtwistle and I sat listening to black spectators advising
black batsmen – ‘Do not yield to temptation, Charlie boy’ – as we saw acted
out a theatrical situation which Birtwistle had outlined to me in connection with
a projected music-theatre piece. This would play up the ‘discrepancy’ between
action and the description of action such as we were now experiencing. What was
to us the simple activity of bowler, batsman and fielder, was being almost translated
into a new medium, elaborate and unrecognisable, by radio specialists. The theatre
piece would also combine two main features simultaneously: a learned discussion
on the theoretical origins of opera and the acting out by the instrumentalists of
their own characters in an ‘archetypal’ but practical discovery of opera at source.
This is typical of Birtwistle in many ways: not only the idea itself, but also its
immaculate conception, innocent of any ‘content’; his interest in origins, mutations
and finishings. He is not interested in ‘endings’; the combination of various
‘levels’ (a word always used with amused self-deprecation, as also ‘trendy’); and
his irresistible way of fashioning universals out of specifics.
When pointed out to him, he realises that the objets trouvés that he uses are
pretty consistent in origin and often treated with charming irrelevance – or rather
they very much become part of the idea of the work. To give a couple of examples:
the combination of three, high, melody instruments and soprano voice in Monody
for Corpus Christi of 1959 was, he says, suggested by a similar combination used
by some peasants in Devon or somewhere. And this year he was going to do a
similar thing by using the Floral Dance band in Down by the Greenwood Side,
where it was not inappropriate to the folk-mix of the textual sources – a genuine
folksong and the trad mummers players.
The mix, or pile-up, is very characteristic of Birtwistle’s mind, whether of
different rituals (as in Punch and Judy) or of the diverse elements which made
up Linoi II. This began life as Linoi I for clarinet and piano insides; the clarinet
was then amplified, a derived electronic tape added and so was a dancer. That
the media-mix was not very successful he doesn’t mind – he’s more interested in
trying and failing than in precisely pre-ordaining everything.
He cannot visualise what paths his music will take in the next ten years, just as
he could not have imagined when he wrote Monody that he would now be flirting
(to employ correct journalistic jargon) with electronics and indeterminacy. Both
are the result of inner compositional need rather than with-it-ness. The amplified
76 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

wind quartet was absolutely central to the structure of Nomos, and the tape part
added to his Four interludes from a tragedy grew out of his interest in creating
very distinct aural ‘areas’ into which more specific material can be fitted. In fact
he says that he is now giving thought to the invention of a new kind of continuo
(perhaps ‘continuum’ would be a better word) which would act as a permanent
backing to a projected large-scale orchestral work.
His recent adoption of variable notation – where choices are left to performers
and conductor, enabling particular passages to sound very different on each
occurrence – in his recent Cantata and Verses for ensemble shows his interest in
setting up (fully notated) norms around which can revolve these passages whose
whole point is to avoid setting up any norm. His approach to form seems to be
more visual, architectural and literary than musical, and he will readily quote
the theories of Paul Klee whose idea of the ‘juxtaposition of opposites’ is very
relevant to Verses.
Quite often form and medium are indissoluble. He points out that Nomos –
probably his most important work to date, and one which replaces verse–refrain
structure with a more narrative plan – is concerned not only with the transformation
of material from the ‘beginning of the musical world’ of its opening to the
considerable complexity of its end, but that in the process the amplified wind
instruments ‘take over’ the material originally stated by an unamplified quartet.
The piece could, according to Birtwistle, now begin again on a higher plane with
perhaps an electronic tape taking the place of the amplified quartet, while all the
other instruments are amplified. The principle of cyclic renewal is always there
in a Birtwistle, whether in the formal idea of Punch and Judy or the death-rebirth
content of Down by the Greenwood Side.
All these ideas are in a way connected with the physical state of music, and
will come together in the version of Orpheus he is writing for London Weekend
Television. This promises to be exciting in many ways: it will be the first television
production of any sort by Peter Hall;77 it will use the techniques of film editing,
and get further away from the implied opera-house proscenium than other TV
opera; the close collaboration at all stages between producer and composer,
cutting out the ‘dead’ stage where the completed opera is handed to the producer
who ‘does what he can’ with it, often to the dismay of the composer who has
more or less lost control over the work; and it will also cut down the verbal to a
minimum, and rely on the communicative powers of visual and sound imagery.
More important, it will stress an aspect of the Orpheus legend which is so obvious
that to my knowledge nobody has ever pointed it out: that the whole thing is about
the very power of music itself. This has been merely incidental in all other operatic
versions, but apparently Orpheus’ music will get out of hand and destroy him. And
Birtwistle speaks of that Bosch mirage where a man is strangled by the strings of
his own harp …

77
Peter Hall founded the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1960. He was director of
the Royal Opera House for a year before taking up the directorship at the National Theatre.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 77

‘Purcell in his Cups’ (Music and Musicians, 18, October 1969, p. 30)

As the art of drinking has declined over the years, so too has its musical consequent,
the drinking song. Two hundred years ago there was outlined in Wits Interpreter
(this and similar volumes were the equivalent of today’s Open University) a
thorough analytical study: ‘Bacchus his School, wherein he teaches the Art of
Drinking, by a most learned method … The Eighth liberal Science is called the
art of Drinking … The Degrees attained in this School are these: A fat corpulent
fellow, a Master of Arts. A lean drunkard, a Bachelour.’ And so on running through
every conceivable manner and state of drinking, with titles drawn from education,
law and the forces – ‘He that pisseth under the table to offend their shoes or
stockings, Vice-Admiral. He that can win the favour of his host’s daughter to lie
with her, Principal Secretary.’78
Equally serious their drinking songs. Not for the seventeenth century the
cumulative ditties adapted by barrackroom composers to well-known tunes, but
three-part settings of texts not all without literary merit, by the best composers of
the time, sung by gents of standing and respectability for their own after-dinner
amusement or in the confines of specially organised Catch Clubs. Purcell wrote
over 50 catches, some of considerable complexity which could only have been
sung by the musically literate and the not-too-stoned.
Very few catches of the late seventeenth century actually employ the double
entendre technique which is wrongly considered to distinguish the catch from the
round. The method is outlined in a catch by an earlier composer, one Cranford:
‘Mark how these knavish rests / Good earnest make of jests.’ An innocent enough
text when read through consecutively can, by careful arrangement of rests bring
about new meanings when the parts are sung simultaneously. In Purcell’s ‘Jack,
thou’rt a toper’ the first voice begins ‘Jack, thou’rt a toper’ and the second ‘None
but a cuckold’, which together produce ‘Jack, thou’rt a cuckold’. Less feeble is
‘Tom making a manteau for a lass of pleasure’ where in bars 4 and 5 the three-
voice counterpoint produces ‘pulled out / nine inches / yet all too short’.
This is performers’ music with a vengeance and it is not surprising that the
majority of catch texts are about the pleasures of social drinking. For these hard
musical drinkers would turn on with and get high on liquor to induce the requisite
state of escapist oblivion: ‘Come let us drink / ’Tis in vain to think / Like fools
on grief or sadness / Let our money fly / And our sorrows die / All worldly care
is madness’. The Macedon Youth is to be emulated: ‘His mind did not run / Of
what ought to be done / For he thought of today, not tomorrow’. The whole thing
is summed up in the following: ‘If all be true as I do think / There are five reasons
we should drink / Good wine, a friend, or being dry / Or lest we should be by and
by / Or any other reason, why.’

78
See James T. Henk, Gutter Life and Language in the Early ‘Street’ Literature of
England: A Glossary of Terms and Topics (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1988), p. 276.
78 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

When not preoccupied with their self-congratulatory toasts, our musical

drinkers would occasionally raise their glasses to their less fortunate compatriots
fighting their wars. On one occasion wine is actually denounced: ‘Down with
Bacchus / From this hour / Renounce the grape’s tyrannic power / Rouse loyal
boys your forces join to rout the Monsieur and his wine’. Elsewhere the political
sentiments are loyalist, royalist, Protestant and Tory and rather lightly-held (in
this context): ‘Now England’s great council’s assembled / To make laws for all
English-born freemen / Since ’tis dangerous to prate / Of matters of State / Let’s
handle our wine and our women’.
Where women are concerned Brome’s dictum is followed: ‘There are two
states of women – in bed and in the grave.’79 They occasionally even spare a timid
thought for their wives: ‘Once in our lives / Let us drink to our wives / Though
their number be but small / Heaven take the best / And the devil take the rest /
And so we shall get rid of them all.’ If their wishful thinking never succeeded in
consigning their wives to the grave, they were sometimes equally unsuccessful
with the Other Woman: ‘Once, twice, thrice, I Julia tried / The scornful puss as
oft denied … Good claret is my mistress now.’ But otherwise the seduction is
successful as in this little bedroom drama: ‘Since time so kind to us does prove /
Do not, my dear, refuse my love / ‘What do you mean? Oh fie! Nay! What do you
do? / You’re the strangest man that e’er I knew / I must, I must, I can’t forbear / Lie
still, lie still my dear.’ Considerable interest is shown in the sex act itself, covered,
not very equivocally, in alien imagery – there is much play on wind and water,
cleaving of beams and the like.
Purcell invests these trifles with a considerable amount of craftsmanship,
sophistication, characterisation and sympathy. The aching suspension in ‘A health
to the nut-brown lass / With the hazel eyes / She that has good eyes / Has also good
thighs / And a better knack’ are, for all their slightness, as tenderly erotic as much
music that has been over-written before or since.

‘Brass Tacks’ (The Spectator, 1 November 1969, p. 613)

Let the Music Section of the ICA shine, if only for this week, as a beacon to
England’s musical insularity. While they failed, through last minute financial
bickering, to arrange three concerts by Stockhausen and his merry minstrels, they
did succeed in introducing to this country one of the best-established contemporary
music groups, the Domaine Musical, a mere 16 years after it was established in
Paris by Barrault and Boulez.80

79
A likely reference to the poet and attorney Alexander Brome (1620–66), who was
renowned for composing drinking songs and Royalist poetry.
80
The Domaine Musical was a new music concert society established in 1954, which
ran until 1973.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 79

Now directed by Boulez’s successor, Gilbert Amy, the Domaine’s Queen

Elizabeth Hall session was arranged like a chapter, at the head of which had been
lovingly inscribed Intégrales by Varèse, and which went on to elaborate some
of the implications of his music 40 years on. Amy’s reading of the Varèse was
massive and processional, carefully balancing the thrusting, petulant lines against
aggressive chordal blocks which, however, emphasised the very modern rawness
of the brass and percussion at the expense of the finer shading necessary to match
the dynamics of one woodwind instrument with another. Alas, it also stressed
Varèse’s failure of nerve (or his limited repertoire of material) when he proceeds
to soften the impact of the lines and masses of his geometrical arrangement with
tunes and rhythms from Stravinsky’s scrapheap.
I detected a similar ‘failure of nerve’ in Berio’s Chemins II (1967) for viola
and nine instruments. This was the only work in the concert whose approach to
sound was quietly revolutionary, simply because it avoided sonic abrasiveness
and increasing levels of loudness. This reworking of Sequenza VI for solo viola
projected the ‘mechanical’ continuum of, say, a Brandenburg concerto, into an
entirely new instrumental context reminiscent of electronic music in its method
of building sound masses by means of superimposed layers. It would have been
very bold indeed to keep up this momentum to the end, having made a deliberate
attempt to restore to music that neglected commodity, rhythmic continuity. But it
fizzled out, unable to sustain its own vision.
The two works best realised in their own terms (though not necessarily the most
important) were Amy’s own Relais (1967) for five brass, and Anthony Gilbert’s
Brighton Piece (1967). Both gave the impression that neither composer was entirely
certain of his own musical personality and was, consciously or not, ‘putting on
the style’, a style in essence derived from Varèse. Gilbert’s work was severe, well
controlled, and effectively exploited both a narrow and always audible interval
structure (perhaps too narrow and too audible) and the simple extremes of sound
and silence, high and low, slow and fast and the magic possibilities of the percussion.
Relais was certainly the most positive, and the least merely sophisticated, of
Amy’s pieces that I have heard. Each movement was an intense, kaleidoscopic
study in different styles of ‘trend’ brass writing and showed great sensitivity
towards the subtleties of weight and colour, pulse and articulation of the inner and
outer movement of brass sound. Towards the end it was fairly obvious that Amy
had discovered the lack of any real material in the piece – a deficiency it was too
late, if not out of place, to make good.

‘With Reference to Birtwistle’s Medusa’ (The Listener, 13 November 1969,

p. 676)

A little modesty is not unbecoming: we should not forget that music is the foreground
activity, writing about music an inferior background occupation. (If music had not
existed, would music critics have invented it?) So here is a conundrum to solve
80 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

while this background article passes before your very eyes: what is the connection
between a hiccup, jellyfish, a padlock, tombstone inscriptions, Medusa and an
encyclopaedia degutted to substitute direct experience for learning?
Here is the first answer already: ‘I had another dream the other day about
music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had
stepped out of a painting by Goya.’81 Now the reason why the padlocks are (still)
there is simple: composers don’t use keys any more. No, punning apart, it’s true:
where there were keys, there were themes. A theme was something you could
hang onto, familiar both in its immediate and its long-term aspects. Music always
had a happy ending: ‘“O Brad,” she sighed, “you’re back”’. (Roy Lichtenstein’s
bird would have been happy in those days.82) It was like a tube journey: you know
where you’re going because there’s a map.
But the map became useless when new stations, new routes, were opened:
keys and themes went overboard (the rodents left the sinking ship first, of course).
They all had survival kits built into their padlocks, so they could flounderingly
protest against ‘atonality’. That no longer being a realistic target, the war cry is
now ‘aleatoric’ – the composer ‘can’t be bothered to write it all down’.
And that’s not all. Composers are actually using other people’s tunes in their
works (as he tunes himself in to all possible musics of all possible cultures). Cage
may have uncaged, but he has certainly not unpadlocked, the critics. As prissy old
granny avant-garde lifts her skirt for the first time (was there ever anything there,
we have been asking?), what do we see: lots of ‘musical objects’, some of our
hundred best tunes, but horribly mutilated, and in what company. Just imagine my
dear … the things you hear nowadays. So poor old Stockhausen can’t win. On the
one hand, he can’t be bothered (or is unable) to write everything down (leaving it
to those poor overworked performers to ‘make up’) and when he does write it all
down he hasn’t got any ideas of his own so he throws together a lot of national
anthems. (But we are, of course, looking forward to Malcolm Arnold’s Last Night
of the Proms potage pourri.83)
Similarly the padlock – sensitol-lubricated, maybe, but totally unperceptive –
quivers as soon as it sniffs out the microscopic processes, the stroboscopic effects,
of the new American ‘minimal’ music. A single idea gradually blooms, revealing
a vibrating inner life (especially in Terry Riley and Steve Reich). No structure,
they cry. (Varèse: form is the end-result of a process; Cage: ‘form is the expressive

81
This oft-quoted line by Igor Stravinsky originally appeared in the Evening
Standard on 29 October 1969. It also appears in Josiah Fisk (ed.) Composers on Music:
Eight Centuries of Writings (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), p. 284.
82
Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein (1923–97) created a series of paintings based on an
American white male stereotype named Brad.
83
A likely reference to Arnold’s Tam O’Shanter overture, Op. 51.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 81

content, the morphology of the continuity.’84) A padlock brought up on sonata form

cannot take this, since tonality gave us a false perspective of musical ‘naturalism’.
But the padlock does use his brain. He knows, for instance, that Harrison
Birtwistle is partial to chorales. Tell them that his latest piece, Medusa, introduces
a chorale, and the rust will fly: he cannot solve the problems of post-Webern
continuity. Mention that it is a straight quote of a Bach chorale and Birtwistle’s
name will be duly entered in the black book devoted to the Musical Theft Set.
What he does with the chorale will not interest them.
It undergoes two processes. It starts off in B minor about 16 times faster
than its original. As it slowly works round to its proper tempo and rhythm, its
intervals gradually widen: at the beginning, it is recognisable harmonically and
melodically but not rhythmically; by the end it is recognisable rhythmically but
not harmonically and melodically. This process is very typical of Birtwistle.
He used a similar device in Tragoedia – two instruments starting together and
growing more and more out of phase with each other. The idea came apparently
from setting off two metronomes at different speeds. (He envisages an electronic
piece which would act as a musical trough for all machine sounds and rhythms, all
the mechanisms of mankind.)
In context the Bach chorale sounds startling, alien even. It is meant to sound
alien, something different and opposite to jar against what precedes and follows
(rather like one of the ‘negative’ events in Stockhausen’s Plus-Minus). Even
Padlock Ears would have no trouble in hearing and comprehending the raw
material of Medusa, which is not the ‘secret’ result of some secret musico-chemical
processing method but a series of hard-edged, clearly defined, carefully disposed
artefacts. (The work also uses other ‘public’ artefacts. The wind quintet and string
quartet in Tragoedia were ‘found objects’: in this case, there is a synthesised tape,
a taped soprano sax and a shozyg – Hugh Davies’s collection of amplified metal
knick-knacks inside the covers of an encyclopaedia, SHO-ZYG.85)
Like Birtwistle’s Nomos, Medusa begins with musical rudiments. But unlike,
say, Cardew’s The Great Learning Paragraph 2, whose drum rhythms and
pentatonics are built (just) into a cumulative continuous statement of themselves
(there is an analogy with op and kinetic art),86 with Medusa the material grows
rather like a natural organism (and is arranged in a severely Constructivist manner).
This is where the jellyfish comes in: medusa is the name for the species of
jellyfish whose body is divided into eight symmetrical parts, each an image, in
small, of the whole. It reproduces itself by detaching one segment, which then
grows into a life-sized jellyfish. Similarly with Birtwistle’s materials: placed in a

84
See Cage’s article on ‘Indeterminacy’, in Silence (London, Calder and Boyars, 1961),
p. 35.
85
For a more detailed explanation of the Sho-zyg see ‘Strange Interludes’, The Spectator
(21 February 1969).
86
For an analysis of Cardew’s work, see ‘This Way Madness’, The Spectator (9 May
1969).
82 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

particular context, detached from it, placed in another, they retain their contours
while they expand and contract, ebb and flow. Some ideas can only expand
vertically, others only horizontally. And as these clear-cut ideas are disposed in a
particular sequence, even old Padlock will realise that the tube journey is different,
the time-travelling new.
Such ‘obviousness’ allows for deviations from this state of high definition:
the amplified cello solo in the opening section (which erupts into the life of the
organisms) creates a very striking continuum (which, as John Peel87 would say, has
some nice sounds). The middle section (Medusa is in three parts, not eight) uses
the extremes of register and duration. The calculated slowness of the rising piano
bass notes is apposite, considering that the same Invitation Concert also features
the slowest performance ever of Satie’s Gymnopédies.
The final section, which introduces the chorale, is like the first, but at a more
advanced state of evolution, and it contains a final gathering together of the material
in a huge unison around a wailing saxophone heard against a distorted version
of itself. But the evolution is left open-ended. The opening clarinet oscillation
between C and B has become something, but as the end of the work recedes into
infinity, there is no reason why it should not become something else in due course.
What has happened in the work is that a geometric spatial kind of narrative
has taken over from the accepted arithmetic linear narrative form. However, the
geometry of Medusa is very different from Messiaen’s, whose ‘masses’ are all
more or less of the same size, the same density, Birtwistle has realised that if
you magnify an object (or a timescale), you also magnify the details, so that the
proportions remain exactly the same. If the timescale is large while the details can
become large or remain small, then the relationship of the parts to the whole is
very different.
This remarkable Invitation Concert, taken as a whole, is also in the process
of becoming a ‘composition’. The two halves of the concert are framed by
Birtwistle’s Four Interludes for basset clarinet and tape, so that one single ‘image’
seen in four different lights is spread over the whole duration of the concert. The
filling in this sandwich is provided by two earthy intrusions from the Middle Ages,
both of which elaborate a deliberate, artificial technical device – Machaut the
hocket (hiccup) and Ockeghem a cantus firmus tenor – and three ‘timeless’ works:
Birtwistle’s Cantata on Greek tombstone inscriptions and two Satie works.

‘Scratch & Co’ (The Spectator, 13 December 1969, p. 845)

New ensembles seem to surface so frequently these days that many people
would deny that the stream of musical life in this country is stagnant. But the
new groups rarely have anything new to offer – often it appears to be nothing
more than an endless game of musical chairs where the available players turn

87
John Peel (1939–2004) was a radio presenter and music journalist.
 Section 1: 1968–1969 83

up in different combinations but on the same platforms, playing much the same
music in much the same way. Some groups, like Ruggiero Ricci’s City of London
Ensemble, specialise in the baroque, while others, like Justin Connolly’s London
Contemporary Chamber Players, perform mildly interesting young English
moderns and socially acceptable Cage. Only superlative performances of out-of-
the-ordinary programmes could possibly justify this duplication.
But there is a group which is in many ways one of the most important
developments in English music since the ‘Manchester School’ and which,
unheralded and unnoticed, has plunged into the stream even though the ripples
have not yet reached a very large audience. But even so the Scratch Orchestra,
brainchild of Cornelius Cardew, which plays, amongst other things, ‘Music you
Love to Love’, not on the South Bank,88 but in Town Halls up and down the
metropolis, has given five concerts and has already been canned up by BBC TV
trend spotters. Next spring, the Scratch Orchestra intends (perhaps emulating the
globe-trotting LSO 89) to hire a train from Cheltenham to St Ives and stop off at
various stations to regale the locals with impromptu concerts.
Had you attended a Scratch Orchestra concert you would have been reminded
more of a workshop or schoolroom or market place or even farmyard than of a
concert hall. The first concert in Hampstead Town Hall found a large number of
participants spread generously over stage and floor engaged, mostly individually,
in activities aural, visual and ambulatory. Sitting in your seat, you might have heard
nothing but a recording of ‘The Nun’s Chorus’ from Casanova 90 (which because
it was amplified tended, unfortunately, to colour everything else – otherwise their
performances are blissfully free from electronics, from the attitude which dictates
that everything that sounds be amplified or ring-modulated). But had you wished to
sample all the wares you would have found a very carefully prepared and executed
performance of Cardew’s The Great Learning Paragraph 6, early rock records
and ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, sound poetry from Bob Cobbing, a lone cello, toy
instruments, home-made instruments, games of patience and many other things all
happening independently and innocently of each other and structured according to
the particular ‘scores’ that the performers had chosen to realise.
The second concert (Islington Town Hall) had a totally different flavour. There
were more group activities – chanting remote cabbalistic rituals or playing in
trios or quartets of oddly assorted instruments. There were also striking ‘solos’
– especially Cardew’s musical ponds, lined with manuscript paper, from which
he fished, with magnets and balloons on lines, manuscript fish. The third concert
was devoted to George Brecht’s vast speculative Journey of the Isle of Wight,
Westwards, by Iceberg to Tokyo Bay, which I missed as date and venue had been

88
The Southbank Centre was originally built in 1951 and includes the Royal Festival
Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, Hayward Gallery and National Theatre.
89
The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) was founded in 1904.
90
Ralph Benatzky arranged music by Johann Strauss II for the operetta Casanova
in 1928.
84 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

changed (presumably they were considered to be more propitious to the success

of the journey). The fourth concert (Ealing) was a more clear-cut affair – the Bach
Toccata and Fugue in D minor, a number of single events each simultaneously
stretched over an hour (producing some remarkable slow-motion effects) and an
adequate performance of Terry Riley’s In C (a work which proves Stravinsky’s
dictum that there is still a lot of good music to be written in C major).
What then is the Scratch Orchestra, this seemingly anarchic organisation,
intensely proud of its written constitution, whose origins are by the English
tradition of amateur music-making out of John Cage? It might be called a
democratic musical commune whose repertoire, in the form of improvisation
rites, accompaniments of any kind, popular classics and composed works, is both
communally added to and selected (each member has to keep his own Scratch
Book in which he notates and stores his personal contributions). In a format which
imaginatively combines freedom and prescription, diverse talents seem happy to
flourish to the extent of their abilities and needs.
Such an approach takes music-making down from the tight-rope it walks on the
South Bank where the qualities of stress, permanence, competitiveness, ambition,
originality, the need for a ‘good notice’ can smother any genuine creative impulse.
The Scratch Orchestra is not concerned with these things. Its members are mostly
not trained musicians, yet professionals like Cardew and John Tilbury play happily
and comfortably, and if some of the activities seem a little aimless perhaps, you
should remember that the plant is very young and tender but its growth is already
strong and purposeful.91

‘Drums & Symbols’ (The Spectator, 20 December 1969, p. 877)

Musical instruments are made more fascinating by their many in-built properties.
Some people find it difficult to listen to modern music written for conventional
instruments because they cannot rid themselves of the memories of the same
instruments playing nineteenth century music; their responses are clouded. For
this reason they may like electronic music whose sounds, they maintain, are new,
and have no history. It was John Cage who made possible the massing of all sound-
producing means, respectable or otherwise, into a vast potential instrumentarium,
in which a three-penny plastic snake-whistle is as ‘valid’ as a trumpet, a bowed
rubber band no less worthy than a cello.
That is why all sorts of oddities crop up in the Scratch Orchestra (about which
I wrote last week).92 It is not, however, the reason why in Peter Maxwell Davies’s
new work – Vesalii Icones, for dancer, cello and Pierrot Players, first performed at
the Queen Elizabeth Hall last week – you could have heard, amongst other things,

91
For more by Nyman on the Scratch Orchestra, see ‘Cage/Cardew’, Tempo, 107
(December 1973), pp. 32–8.
92
See ‘Scratch & Co’, The Spectator (13 December 1969).
 Section 1: 1968–1969 85

such eccentricities as a typewriter, an out-of-tune piano, a huge bellows and a set

of Sanctus bells. These are used not for their intrinsic sound qualities but because
they mean something (it is a rare pleasure to be able to answer the question ‘What
does music mean?’) to Davies personally and in the context of the work.
On the out-of-tune piano, for instance, the dancer plays an oily chromatic
Victorian hymn which, in context (the work is a fusion of the Stations of the
Cross with the representation of 14 anatomical illustrations by Vesalius of 1543)
represents the Mocking of Christ in a manner which the composer finds to be
‘almost the ultimate in blasphemy’.93 He had used a similar technique in Eight
Songs for A Mad King (performed in the same concert)94 which ends with a
splendid image of a bass drum hit with what appears to be a cat-’o-nine-tails,
which appositely combines the idea of flagellation with a funeral drone.
To Davies’s allusive mind, music has become a vast game of private symbolism,
where objects are not used as objects but as symbols. This is nothing new.
Mediaeval composers were taken up with larding their music with obscurantist
symbols, inaudible musical puns; Schweitzer discovered, wrongly or rightly, a
whole host of illustrative symbols in Bach;95 Schumann’s music is riddled with
cyphers and codes, and about 15 years ago composers became so obsessed with
the number 12 (the number of chromatic notes in a serial tone row) that it took
on a mystic significance and was imposed for no other reason on other elements,
rhythms, colours, dynamics.
But a Maxwell Davies musical plot is a more complex allegory, exploiting
both the ambiguity between the old and the new, and literary or visual analogies.
As an example, let me quote the following in which the composer relates his music
to the analysis of Vesalius’ drawings:

The raw material … is then bent to resemble a Schenker analysis, but instead of
stripping off layers of music to expose ultimately a ‘common’ skeleton below,
the ‘skeleton’ is heard first, and levels are added … but when it would just about
become clear to a perceptive ear that the analysis concerned is of the Scherzo
of the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven, the flute twists the Ecce Manus fragment
into a resemblance of the Scherzo of the Ninth – it is a related but false image.96

(This is for the eighth station, St Veronica wipes his face.) Such sophistication
was lost on my ear at first hearing (which is of no importance for composers fold
all sorts of ingredients into their puddings and soufflés which are not perceptible
to the taste). But I got the impression that, in the network of reference and cross-

93
See Davies’s note on the work in Paul Griffiths, Peter Maxwell Davies (London:
Robson Books, 1982), p. 153.
94
See Nyman’s review of this work in ‘This Way Madness’, The Spectator (9 May 1969).
95
Albert Schweitzer, J.S. Bach, trans. Ernest Newman (New York: Dover Publications,
1966 [1911]).
96
Griffiths, Peter Maxwell Davies, p. 154.
86 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

reference, too many ingredients can be self-cancelling, for the actual sound of the
music was very simple, straightforward, easy on the ear. It seemed to tap a vein
of lyricism reaching back to the Leopardi Fragments and String Quartet of distant
memory, a vein which I felt had been filled to bursting with injections of foxtrots
and calculated hysteria in the last few years.
In layout the work is a sort of cello concerto, with the soloist, Jennifer Ward
Clarke, swathed in the folds of an abbess’s white habit, and the tuneful cello writing
frequently yearns back to the good old days when cellos sang rather than scraped
or shrieked – this in the original music as well as in the deliberate pastiche where
exquisitely intoned cantilenas were lapped by washes of arpeggios. Occasionally
these were broken into by flurries of all-systems-go music of no great complexity.
I found this overall blandness very odd as Davies has chosen the cello ‘because
that instrument with its taut strings and shape suggested one of those awful torsos
stretched out in the quite terrifying Vesalius illustrations’.97 The illustrations are
terrifying, the music deliberately not. Davies’s approach in this work is thus
diametrically opposed to the Mad King. For in that work some rather harmless
poems, noddy-headed but not mad, were blown up to proportions of a frightening
hysteria (at least in the first performance), whereas the explosive Vesalius drawings
have somehow been defused and rendered harmless.
I am not sure of the reasons for this, but it did put a very great burden on the
astonishing dancer, William Louther, from the Martha Graham Company (whose
presence drew a star-studded audience from Nuryev downwards).98 Louther’s
black body, when motionless at the beginning of each tableau, presented precisely
those outlines of muscle and sinew that one sees in the stripped down carcasses of
Vesalius. His performance was virtuoso – feline and virile, graceful and grotesque,
sylphlike and spastic; with a subtlety of control as delicate as a hairspring, he
seemed to change direction in the fraction of a second on a pinhead. For about
half a dozen numbers this was fascinating, yet one waited in vain for something
significant to happen in this series of static tableaux: the presence of this big
black image gradually destroyed itself, unsupported by anything so crude as
‘background’ music. This, again, is the reverse of Mad King where I felt that the
King and his music were, if anything, too close, too graphic.

97
Andreas Vesalius (1514–64) was author of De humani corporis fabrica (‘On the
Fabric of the Human Body’, 1543).
98
A reference to ballet dancer Rudolf Nuryev (1938–93).
 Section 2
1970–1971

‘Old Master’ (The Spectator, 3 January 1970, pp. 23–4)

Imagining myself immune from novelty, wrapped up against surprise in the dying
embers of the sixties, I was hardly prepared to be left gasping with astonishment
by, of all things, a work based on In dulci jubilo at, of all things, a Christmas
concert (Queen Elizabeth Hall two weeks ago). It was not, perhaps, so surprising,
since the concert was given by Musica Reservata – although the work in question
was not by Stockhausen or Maxwell Davies, but by an early seventeenth-century
composer who, so far as our musical experience is concerned, doesn’t even rate an
IHF (Tovey’s Interesting Historical Figure1).
Michael Praetorius is, however, a name to reckon with. In a quiz – with a huge
amount of prize money – we might dredge up some information about him: that he
introduced into Germany the technique of opposing sound masses, made famous
by Giovanni Gabrieli at St Mark’s, Venice; that he was overshadowed by the three
S’s Schein, Scheidt and Schütz; that he was the author of the Syntagma Musicum,
three indispensable volumes on the musical customs and instruments of the time,
and that he is known to the discerning record buyer only as the composer of some
entertaining but not very adventurous dances drawn from a vast collection called
Terpischore (which is something like knowing Bach only by his four-part chorales,
or Mozart by his German Dances). The small print in the history book tells us that
Praetorius made an important contribution to the development of works based on
the Lutheran chorale, of which he himself distinguished three types: one like the
imitative technique of the previous century, another presenting the tune in long
notes (like a Bach chorale prelude), while the most radical, ‘madrigal fashion’
divides the tune up into motives among different instruments and groups.
So far so good, but this is little preparation for the shock of Praetorius’ In dulci
jubilo, which revealed a volatile imagination unhampered by convention, and
whose structures uncannily foreshadow the juxtaposition and collage techniques
of today (now that music has escaped from the sequential narrative forms which
it has employed day in, day out, since not long after Praetorius’ time). The
work sounds (though Praetorius, unlike Birtwistle, would not consciously have
conceived it in this way) as though a number of different settings of the tune were
going on simultaneously except that they are constantly interrupting one another.

1
Donald Francis Tovey (1875–1940) was a music analyst and editorial musicologist,
best known for his Essays in Musical Analysis and editions of Beethoven and Bach.
88 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Thus, the slow, slightly sentimental first half phrase for solo singers is
completed, with delightful illogicality, in a much faster tempo by a lively boys’
choir. This in turn is followed by another short passage for soloists, into and away
from which a brilliant choir of four trumpets and timpani gallops. And so the
work proceeds, following no regular arrangement but perpetually shocking and
upsetting its own formal premises. In modern terms, it is as though the tune were
played on a gramophone, first at 33 rpm then at 78, and so on, to reveal a sort of
schizophrenic attitude toward the expressive content of the tune, which is unable
to make up its mind whether to be respectful or bumptious.
Three other large-scale, chorale-based works were included in the concert
(I hope a sensible record company will snap them up), showing that Praetorius
had any number of resourceful and witty tactics up his sleeve when dealing with
the chorale – making the most of discontinuity of speed, texture, and the contrasts
of colour and material. In Ein Kind geborn, the more or less regular verses (for
soloists) are repeatedly and irreverently shattered by a savage repeated note refrain
(sung with great panache and a lethally straight tone by the boys and men of
Wandsworth School). In Wachet auf, pairs of vivid cornets (Don Smithers and
Michael Laird) or violins (Frances Mason and Duncan Druce, the latter of Pierrot
Players fame) shoot like lightning through the prevailing heavier textures, while
the opening of Ach mein Herr maintains a consistent tempo as three sopranos
intertwine with each other, in seemingly ever-changing echoes and imitations.
Apart from providing more than the prescribed amount of sheer enjoyment,
Musica Reservata’s gargantuan programme – so vast in scope that at times detail
and polish went by the board – presented varying aspects of this conflict between
continuity and discontinuity which characterised the early seventeenth century, as
it has the middle of our own. There were examples of the smoother, less eventful,
older type (Andrea Gabrieli and Marenzio), and the beginnings of disruption in the
works of Giovanni Gabrieli. One superb ten-part canzona (also very ‘modern’ in its
systematic exploitation of the highest and lowest registers), showed that Gabrieli
created diversity within a single ‘mood’ or overall content, whereas Praetorius, 20
years or so later, created the context out of the diversity of his materials and moods.
Between these two Monteverdi, whose madrigal ‘Con che soavita’ was sung with
great poise by Jantina Noorman, provided the mean – suave and lyrically dramatic
where Praetorius is rough-edged and violently theatrical.
A Dutch group, under Kees Otten, has named itself Syntagma Musicum after
Praetorius’ book, although their forces are too limited to perform his and other
people’s large-scale works. However, their two-volume Music of the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance (HMV HQS 1195-6 stereo) would make a welcome belated
Christmas present for anybody who needs a ‘History of Music in Sound’, a kind
of sampler of musical idioms and forms from the thirteenth century up to the
seventeenth. The choice is well made from the point of view of both instrumental
and stylistic, or for that matter geographical, variety, and the works are performed
for the most part with polish and liveliness.
 Section 2: 1970–1971 89

‘Food of Love’ (The Spectator, 10 January 1970, p. 53)

Having been weaned on Toscanini and Ansermet, Boulez’s performance of Debussy’s

La Mer, which I first heard at the end of my teens, was a revelation to me. It was as
though he had shone a light through the score, had scraped away all the furry residue
that had gathered around its lines and more or less put the work together afresh. I
imagined that where other conductors had looked at a page of the score, ‘seen’ the
texture and then realised it in sound, Boulez had ‘seen’ every individual idea, etched
them, polished them, and built up the work by combining them.
Last Saturday, Boulez conducted the National Youth Orchestra in La Mer.
I should perhaps confess that I was both apprehensive and prejudiced beforehand –
apprehensive lest even Boulez should fail to achieve his extraordinary fluency
with what, in my prejudice, I thought of as a none too competent band. But my
apprehension almost immediately dwindled away. The delicacy of the opening
bars, with almost inaudible drum rolls and low strings gradually rising from the
primeval depths (reminiscent of Mahler’s First Symphony), might have been
a fluke, the playing might have been merely tentative. But when the violins
entered securely on their coldly shimmering high B, and the oboes and clarinets
presented the snappy two-note motive which is heard throughout the work (less as
a Wagnerian leitmotif than as a kind of persistent but always changing memory),
it became clear that this was no fluke.
There was no need to make allowances for this vital and professional
performance which, in freshness of response, was far superior to the routine
professional reading even though it seemed as though the orchestra had been
playing Debussy since the cradle. In some way – and it remains a mystery to
me exactly how – Boulez had succeeded in communicating his commitment to
the work, not only in delineating the precise shape and character of each musical
fragment, but in weaving them together with beautifully controlled ebb and flow
into an organic, flexible whole. The ‘water music’ of the first movement was
admirably clear, the theme for 16 cellos rich and firm; the ‘Jeu des Vagues’ with
its nebulous sparkles flowed, throwing off delicate multi-coloured spray with
uncommon subtlety and pace; and the last movement effectively played out the
contrast between gruff storminess and the César Franck-type ‘big tune’.
Of course, there was one dimension lacking – that of sheer sensuality,
partly through Boulez’s ‘cool’ approach, partly on account of the youth of the
players. One missed the sensuousness of the flowing curves of the tunes, and the
‘withdrawn’ intoxication of the textures. But a performance as pristine as this one
made up in charm and spirit what it lacked of adult emotions; and from another
standpoint, Boulez’s analytical approach reveals far more of what is technically
special and innovatory about Debussy by emphasising the phenomenal precision
of his writing, perhaps at the expense of his ‘impressionism’.
The Rite of Spring in the second half of the concert provided an opportunity
to hear the similarities and differences between Debussy and Stravinsky. It
showed how much of Debussy there is in Stravinsky’s score, and also how the
90 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Russian had extended the principles of arabesque, irregular ostinato repetition,

and turned them to entirely personal use. Nor was there any softness about this
performance – one was literally swept along by sheer excitement, animal vitality
and refreshing crudeness (which made it far superior to the BBC Symphony
Orchestra performance with Boulez a couple of summers ago, which I remember
reminded me of ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’).
It was odd to think that the players were the same age as the participants in
the ritual, but perhaps this accounts for the fact that the complex rhythms held
no mysteries for them, and for the way in which they revealed the savagery,
tenderness, magic and thrills of this still contemporary classic. Certain things were
too much for the orchestra: the opening didn’t add up to very much, and the off-beat
chords at the beginning of the ‘Danse Sacrale’ lacked bite. But there were many
superb things, not least the heavy tutti version of the ‘Rondos Printanières’ which
had exactly the same feeling of upward struggle as that sequence in Eisenstein’s
October where the peasants are seen dragging their weapons uphill.2
Invidious though it is to single out individuals in this very evenly balanced
orchestra, I was particularly impressed with the unusual assurance and hardness
of the timpanist and the trombone section (I speak as a trombonist manqué), who
played throughout with a courage and synchronisation of which many professional
sections would be proud.

‘Six to One’ (The Spectator, 17 January 1970, pp. 85–6)

A question in the Christmas Quiz might have run as follows: If you take one from
DGG’s six why is something less than one and a half left? Answer: because a
record of Stockhausen’s Mixtur and Telemusik (which I shall review shortly) is the
only one worth having from Deutsche Grammophon’s six-record ‘annual’ Avant-
garde Vol 2.
What baffles me is the shakiness of the criteria of selection. Not that the set is
unsystematic: every attempt has been made to plug the gaps left by Avant-garde
Vol 1.3 A place has been found for John Cage; there are two records devoted to
electronic music, one to new ‘religious’ music and two works each by ‘deserving’
Germans. So far so good, but now we begin to listen. The electronic music is drawn
from the Utrecht Studio whose director, Gottfried Michael Koenig is represented
by two very dull pieces;4 Rainer Riehn’s Chants de Maldoror, while slightly less
academic, still miserably fails to realise the promise of its opening.
Riehn turns up on another disc as director of the Ensemble Musica Negativa,
which shows that the Dutch, like the Germans, lack the temperament for performing
Cage. Their serious, cluttered realisation of Atlas Eclipticalis (simultaneously with

2
Sergei Eisenstein’s film October: Ten Days That Shook The World, was made in 1927.
3
See Nyman’s review of Vol. 1 in ‘Is This a Record?’, The Spectator (3 January 1969).
4
The works referred to by Nyman are Terminus II and Funktion Grün.
 Section 2: 1970–1971 91

Winter Music and Cartridge Music) may make interesting listening but, alas, it has
little to do with Cage. On the same record comes Glossolalie by Dieter Schnebel,
deserving German, evangelist pastor and, apparently, composer. There is no
denying the historical importance of this work which, as early as 1960, exploded
the domination of pitches and rhythms in European music by building up a mainly
vocal piece out of scraps of multilingual conversation and quotation (intentionally
not ‘sung’) and naïve instrumentalisms. Pioneering it may be, unmusical or rather
pre-musical it certainly is.
Schnebel’s ‘fur stimmen’ (… misa est), a portentous assemblage of
overwhelming triviality, is coupled with Kagel’s Hallelujah (1967) a virtuoso
choral piece of acute originality, which shows what a real composer (gifted
with a genuine sense of the absurd) can do with raw material not very distant
from Schnebel’s. Quite apart from its novel methods of articulation, Hallelujah
has a very strong and convincing shape: solo voices are at first heard against a
background of a kind of discontented pulsating murmuring from the chorus and as
the climax is reached the roles have been imperceptibly reversed.
One whole record is devoted to ‘deserving cause number two’, Bernd Alois
Zimmermann, pushing 60, who has, like the Pole Lutoslawski, taken over modern
methods and materials without ever getting rid of an essentially Bartókian mode
of expression. More obviously ‘modern’ are the live electronic improvisations of
the Gruppe Nuova Consonanza.5 The first side (… e poi?) is a fair example of the
increasingly important method of making music, violent and subdued by turns,
producing intriguing sounds by unfamiliar means. There is a real feeling of events
being sparked off individually and extended through spontaneous interaction. Less
good are four short uninteresting ‘genre’ pieces on side two.
As if to disprove DGG’s ridiculous claim that Nuova Consonanza is ‘the only
ensemble of its kind in Europe’, Polydor have put out a record devoted to a single
work, Friday, by the Italian-American group Musica Elettronica Viva.6 Friday is a
most impressive continuous organic growth, held together by a strong communal
creativity and by a subdued electronic ‘continuo’ and repeated trombone notes.
But the record is a pale reflection of the group’s live performances.
From the Vergo label comes a record of cellist Siegfried Palm (unfairly
marvellous on the Zimmermann disc) on which he plays, along with Webern and
Hindemith, Ligeti’s superb evanescent twilight Cello Concerto.7 Another record
is devoted entirely to Ligeti.8 It contains his Aventures, a sort of ‘opera’ without
text and context, made up of vocalised gesticulations, and his luxuriantly tactile
orchestral Atmospheres which will be familiar to all 2001 addicts.9

5
The Nuova Consonanza was directed by Ennio Morricone.
6
LP 583 769.
7
LP 2549 004.
8
LP 2549 003.
9
A reference to Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey 2001, released in 1968.
92 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

‘Ancient Monument’ (The Spectator, 7 February 1970, p. 186)

Confronted by the sombre ceremonial ring-a-ding-dings of the bicentenary,

one feels specially obliged to negotiate fresh terms with Beethoven.10 There
is no doubt that Beethoven is responsible for much that we take for granted in
today’s conservationist musical scene. His life furnishes the legendary, popular
definition of the artist, as one who fights personal misfortune and social pressures,
belligerently struggles against adversity to put his ideals into palpable form. It
is mostly to him that one owes the idea of the uniquely determined, durable,
unmistakably individualistic musical work. During his regime something which
had been comparatively humble was knighted to become Art, separate from, too
lofty and difficult for, simple life.
True there was Art before him – there was Bach. But Bach had worked
almost exclusively in the service of God rather than himself, and turned out in
the process a series of single-minded masterpieces. And there were Haydn and
Mozart who produced a continuous stream of brilliance, but with suspiciously
effortless fertility. Of course our continuing obsession with Beethoven is due,
largely to the very quality of his works. This alone, however, is not the sole reason
for the weighty awareness, embarrassing and inhibiting for some, beneficial to
others, with which the nineteenth century approached him. The list of worshippers
is long: Berlioz, Brahms, Schumann, Lizst, Mahler, Wagner – the force of the
Beethoven tradition was magnetic and has continued into this century in the form
of Bartók’s quartets, Schoenberg’s serialism, the vogue for musical analysis; in
fact all music where developmental, procedures, pitch structuring and the musical
‘idea’ is important. Even Stockhausen has recently paid his respects in the form of
a Beethoven collage tape to be used in a version of Kurzwellen.
Against this background, the first two of this year’s championship bouts,
Barenboim’s Sonata and the Guarneri Quartet cycles at the Queen Elizabeth Hall –
were at times disappointing. At the first Barenboim, even the Hammerklavier sounded
boring: the ideas undistinguished, the method pompous. The slow movement, which
Barenboim treated with a rapt, slowly unwinding stillness – played in fact, on an
objective judgment, extremely well – made surprisingly small impact.
Subsequent recitals revealed Barenboim’s articulateness and strong feeling,
both intellectual and emotional, for the music. But the clearer the playing, the
more carefully he forced the material by fluctuations of tempo, and slight
exaggerations of dynamics, the more Beethoven’s procedures seemed mechanical
and unconvincing. Perhaps Barenboim is now a trifle stale after doing so much
cycling. A completely novel approach, such as Stephen Pruslin’s weirdly
ruminating, uncomfortable, distorted, but intelligent reading of Op. 110, revealed
many things I had never previously heard in this work. That is something one
should be grateful for.

10
1970 was the bicentenary of Beethoven’s birth.
 Section 2: 1970–1971 93

The Guarneri cycle, too, began disastrously, and first impressions,

unfortunately, are those which stick. Op. 127 was played with such superficial ease
that it sounded as though Beethoven had written it when he was 20. Contrasts were
weak, attacks were fuzzy, and the first violinist scooped about unpleasantly. But
the rest of the recitals showed the Guarneri to be possessed of an astonishing range
of tone colours, a not unobtrusive romanticism – they use a fair amount of rubato
and glissando in melodic playing. The fierce, incisive, wiry tautness of the closing
movements of Op. 131 convinced me that both Wagner and Bartók must have
been very happy to find themselves in a position to realise, in their different ways,
the expressive realms towards which Beethoven was striving in these marvellous,
unsettled and unsettling works.

‘Flowerpot Men’ (The Spectator, 14 March 1970, p. 346)

There is small doubt that at the moment, and in some circles at least, music as
an art is being energetically invaded by life, in the form of chance happenings,
‘free’ scores, indeterminacy and what one could call the unfettered functioning
of the behaviour patterns of composer-musicians. It takes someone like Harrison
Birtwistle, with his ironically-titled ‘Spring Song’, to remind us, forcibly but
charmingly, that art is still essentially an artificial product. Birtwistle had obviously
‘composed’ his concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last week with as much care
as he expended on his new work Medusa.11 Which is not a bad idea considering
that so many concerts are a fairly haphazard collection of ‘interesting’ pieces,
thrown together by promoters and calculated as likely as not to negate the effect
of anything really striking: sturdy but exotic plants like Birtwistle’s music need
special soil in which to flourish and show themselves to best advantage.
The concert as a whole was perhaps the most provocative that London has
seen since Stockhausen’s notorious November 1968 presentation; and the contrast
between the two could not be more instructive.12 Stockhausen set out deliberately
to confuse, and hopefully to reorientate, his audience, by rearranging the seating
in an unconventional way and allowing one piece to flow over, around and into
another, without prior warning. Birtwistle, on the other hand, took as his starting
point the conventional ‘artificial’ sequence of separate items, and pursued it to its
logical extreme of artificiality (he has done the same with opera in Punch and Judy)
by tightening it up, cunningly calculating the effect of each item, both individually
and in the overall symmetrical structure, by its quality, placing, the use of dramatic
lighting effects, and by cutting out applause-pauses between numbers.

11
See Nyman’s review of an earlier version of this work in The Listener (13 November
1969).
12
For a review of the November 1968 concert, see ‘About Time Too’, The Spectator
(6 December 1968).
94 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Take, for example, the opening short clarinet piece (the first of the Four
Interludes from a Tragedy which acted as the cornerstones of the evening): piercing,
strident, with a disturbingly pulsating tape part, played by Alan Hacker, stage
right, bathed in a ghoulish green light. As the tape murmurs into nothingness the
centre of the stage lights up to reveal under a silver stelloid structure (reminiscent
of the Mad King cages) the Pierrot Players, who immediately strike up a Hacker-
arranged Czardas.13 This is done very stylishly (suggesting perhaps a new role for
the PPs, as a professional wandering gypsy band), its genuine jokiness emphasised
by its seemingly endless unvaried repetitions and very ‘correct’ cadenzas.
There follows the central work of the first half – David Bedford’s Sword of
Orion, inspired by his own observations of stellar configurations. Not a heavy
piece, but genuinely witty and certainly the best Bedford I’ve heard for a long
time, since he has at last abandoned the simplistic combinations of endless long
notes with bursts of short ones, which had recently become so very mannered.
Instead, a surprisingly wide range of effects were held together with unerring
delicacy, from the opening where each player played to independently ticking
metronomes, through multiple glissandi and the light-hearted eroticism of a lady
and gentleman simultaneously playing one cello, to the final ring-a-ring-a-roses in
which all the players walk round in single file tapping the chains of toy percussion
– tuned flowerpots and milk bottles.
The back of the stage lights up to reveal Mary Thomas – done up as a Beardsley
Salome of 1920s flapper vintage, and prostrate on a chaise longue – who proceeds
with skilful and entertaining exaggeration (as comic counterbalance to her equally
fine Pierrot Lunaire) to speak the text of Satie’s Sports et Divertissements; to
Stephen Pruslin’s admirably discreet piano accompaniment. All this, of course,
was merely a foil to the serious events of the second half: namely, the 50-minute
Medusa, a puzzling and impressive work, which progresses with a fiery, throbbing,
meditative, slow energy, played over by a wailing two-note motif heard from the
very outset on saxophone and by disturbing desolate electronics.
If its time-scale was impressive, so was the genuineness of its material and
the way in which it constantly sent up its own pretensions, whether with joky
sub-Hindemith or with a shattering electronic outburst which sliced through one’s
head after a particular passage had lulled itself to sleep. What was puzzling was
the fact that, in a previous incarnation, the piece contained a lot of attractive ideas
which Birtwistle had inexplicably deleted, so that what he did retain had to carry a
weight slightly too heavy for it; and almost equally puzzling was the concentration
on a somewhat tiring mood of brooding, full-blooded desolation, a mood always
immanent in Birtwistle’s music, but usually set off by marvellously violent, sharp-
edged images, which were conspicuously absent from Medusa.

13
Czardas is a traditional Hungarian folk dance.
 Section 2: 1970–1971 95

‘Stockhausen and David Bedford’ (The Listener, 30 April 1970, p. 593)

Cage tells of a conversation he had with Stockhausen about ten years ago. The
German asked the American: ‘If you were writing a song, would you write for the
singer or would you write music?’ Cage said he would write for the singer. ‘That’s
the difference between us’, said Stockhausen: ‘I would write music’. Stockhausen,
Cage continues, ‘was at the time thinking about writing a song for Cathy Berberian
and he wanted to make use of as many ways of vocal production as he could think
of. He was interested in African clicking, and she was able to do that, so he put
it in. He was also interested in whistling. It didn’t occur to him that she couldn’t
whistle. She’s absolutely incapable of whistling. So he gave her things to do which
she was unable to do.’14
In such stories some of the ‘truths’ uttered about (and especially by)
Stockhausen are circumscribed by their vintage, while others change or develop
only their exterior manifestations. One truth, unchallengeable in the minds of the
American ‘originals’ like Cage and Feldman, is that Stockhausen is a revisionist
who ‘takes things from that mysterious region of originality and gives those things
a manmade rationale’.
The nub of Cage’s cautionary tale is not the primacy, in 1960, of the idea over
the medium (a relationship which has become more balanced since that revelatory
day in 1964 when Stockhausen took a microphone to the tamtam in his garden),
but the phrase: ‘as many ways of vocal production as he could think of’. This is
the key to Stockhausen’s phenomenally integrative, totalistic approach to writing
music, the product of an obsessively encyclopaedic mind which launches a two-
pronged attack on what it senses around it: on the one hand, it consumes everything
it finds useful in its path, and on the other, subjects what it finds or invents to a
microscopic scrutiny of which the results are so rich and relevant to the whole that
at the final analysis seemingly nothing can be left out.
Such thoroughness is fascinating in, say, Mikrophonie I (1964), where the
‘biography’ of the tamtam is so exhaustive that a whole sound-world was revealed
where none was before, and it is now virtually impossible to amplify and filter
the instrument without being plagiaristic. Self-plagiarism is a built-in feature of
Kurzwellen (1968) and Prozession (1967), which employ the techniques of the
earlier piece. But he gilds the lily in Mikrophonie II (1965), where the possibility
of up to 18 independent layers of sound (12 voices, four loudspeakers, organ and
tape) would make for textural overloading even without ring modulation.
The manipulative aspects of this often desperate all-inclusiveness are a
legacy from total serialism. In more recent somewhat study-like works, such as
Solo (1965–6) and Adieu (1966), Stockhausen seems to make a deliberate, if
not pedantic, feature of maximum irregularity in the treatment of more or less

14
Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, ‘An Interview with John Cage’, Tulane
Drama Review, 10/2 (Winter 1965), pp. 50–72; see also Mariellen Sandford (ed.)
Happenings and Other Acts (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 52.
96 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

regular, simple material. In Adieu he runs through all the possibilities of articulating,
modifying and decorating sustained pitches. In Solo – a composition to be realised
from separate staves of material, alternative form schemes and rules of application –
the complexes formed by the recurring loops of tape are to be built together by
the realiser in such a way that no combination of variables will be the same as
the next. (It is interesting to note that Electronic Study No. 12 of 1954 uses very
similar structuring processes.)
This maximum exploitation of a single technical process – the tape-loop system
of Solo – or of a single generating idea – the electronically-produced pulses of
Kontakte – brings about a complex, concentrated oneness which is characterised
in a poem Stockhausen wrote in 1968:

Confuse not, if you live with me,

Oneness with sameness,
Oneness with uniformity,
Oneness with indifference.

This oneness is part and parcel of Stockhausen’s revisionism. Feldman: ‘All

revisionists are fanatics.’15 Stockhausen: Telemusik ‘goes one step further in
the direction of writing not “my” music, but a music of the whole world, of all
countries and races’.16 ‘But what they are fanatic about’, Feldman continues,
‘is always amazing to me, because they have created nothing new’.17 Have the
majority of Stockhausen’s ideas been perverted from ‘that mysterious region of
originality’ – serialism from Webern and Messiaen, spatial music from Henry
Brant, indeterminacy, shortwave radios, live electronics, montage from Cage,
tape loops from Terry Riley, Stimmung from La Monte Young, word scores from
Christian Wolff?
Cynical puritanism is pointless on this question: origins are one thing, usage
and transcendence another, and the internal development of a composer something
else. For example, the principle of montage was employed as early as 1956 in
Gesang; the use of sustained sounds has grown steadily from the revolving brass
groups of Gruppen through Carré to Adieu, Stimmung and Aus den Sieben Tagen;
and live electronics grew from Stockhausen’s experiments with the tamtam to the
establishment of his regular performing group, for which Prozession, Kurzwellen
and Aus den Sieben Tagen were specially written.
It is this direct contact with real, live music-making which has led Stockhausen
away from the intellectual and speculative preoccupations of his earlier works
to ‘open-content’ and ‘intuitive’ music. The whistling mistake seems unlikely to

15
Morton Feldman, ‘An Interview with Robert Ashley, August 1964’, in Elliott
Schwartz and Barney Childs (eds) Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music
(New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1967), pp. 363–4.
16
Stockhausen, Telemusik, DGG 137 012.
17
Feldman, ‘An Interview with Robert Ashley’, p. 364.
 Section 2: 1970–1971 97

occur again: in Spiral the event succession is specified while the actual invention
is left to the player and his shortwave radio. In a way Stockhausen has reached the
position Cage reached after their 1960 conversation, when he left Theatre Piece
unspecified: ‘I didn’t want to ask anyone to do something he couldn’t do’.18 But not
quite the same, as Spiral is strictly for the virtuosos. (Heinz Holliger wryly noted
that whereas poor Hindemith had to write a separate sonata for each instrument,
Stockhausen has written one all-purpose sonata.)
Stockhausen is ‘making the scene’ today, passing off indeterminate scores
and live electronics as if they were his invention. David Bedford got over such
performance-participation some years ago when, again in Feldman’s words, he,
Tilbury and Cardew were ‘making their own scene in England, very much as
Cage and the rest of us made ours here in America back in the Fifties’.19 (Bedford
now plays organ in a pop group.20) His music has always had what Stockhausen’s
has for a long time lacked: lyricism, purity of ideas, sensuousness, simplicity,
modest scope and scale and no desire to ‘push the sounds’. His music has not
changed radically since Piece for Mo (1963) except that it has grown in subtlety
and confidence. He has subscribed to no system or school, has had no need to
convert anyone, nor has his career been a sort of purgative growth away from the
implications of his environment and tradition, as Stockhausen’s has been.
Bedford’s method, derived in part from Feldman, in part from the Polish
texturalists, varies very little: its main features – extended athematic lines, tiny
non-motivic fusillades or separate individual sound points, the creation of textures
of greater or lesser density by means of overlaying similar melodic patterns
simultaneously in different rhythms, his unaffected but effective use of the
expanded instrumental syntax – remain constant from work to work, except that
each inhabits its own enchanted sound-world.
Until recently his music has existed as a sort of sustained spontaneous lyrical
impulse. It is towards such spontaneity that Stockhausen is moving, while Bedford
is turning to more formalistic methods of structuring. In Pentomino for wind
quintet, for example, he uses a rather obvious alternation of tuttis and solos. The
Tentacles of the Dark Nebula employs a kind of variation technique, appropriate to
the allegory of the story, and cultivates a suitably severe and deadpan monochrome
far removed from the fantastic shifts of colour of the more expressionistic Albion
Moonlight. None of these small-scale lyric pieces quite accounts for the success
of Gastrula, an orchestral piece written nearly two years ago. Considering the
limitations of Bedford’s repertoire of gestures, this is a remarkably successful
work – among the five or six best British orchestral pieces of the Sixties.

18
Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, ‘An Interview with John Cage’, p. 52.
19
Morton Feldman, ‘Conversations without Stravinsky’, London Magazine 6/12
(March 1967), pp. 86–94, p. 88.
20
A likely reference to Bedford’s appearance on Kevin Ayers’s second solo album
Shooting at the Moon, released in 1970. Ayers was a member of progressive rock band Soft
Machine during the late 1960s.
98 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

‘Birtwistle’s Rituals’ (The Listener, 27 August 1970, p. 285)

Like it or not, the procedures, materials and effects of a lot of today’s ‘advanced’
music are more deliberately obvious, direct, less obscurantist, than they were even
ten years ago. Looking at the scene purely from the point of view of structure (Cage:
‘division of the whole into parts’21) we see two extremes: Messiaen–Birtwistle at
one pole, Riley–Reich at the other. ‘Architectural’ (to adopt a traditional term) as
against ‘straightline’ structures (for which there are no historical precedents). Each
carries with it its own expressive characteristics: Birtwistle’s is a ritualistic bag,
Riley’s a hallucinogenic.
Architectural music has a severe and undisguised block-type construction,
a deliberate sectional discontinuity. It’s like putting together children’s brick
buildings: each brick tends to be sharply differentiated from the next; relationships
are set up, by recognisable repetition, over wide distances. To adopt journey
symbolism, the structure of Birtwistle’s Verses for Ensembles (or, to a lesser
extent, Messiaen’s Et Exspecto) is a series of memorably landscaped blind alleys.
Down one, leap over to another, and return from time to time to some you have
been down before.
On the other hand, a straightline structure is the nearest music ever gets to
genuine organic growth (an analogy which has been made in connection with the
music of Palestrina, Bach, Beethoven, Varèse, Boulez and others, but which, in the
light of Reich and Riley, like most musical analogies, is to be found wanting). This
music is rather like rolling out a mixture of different-coloured plasticines, which
fuse into one single colour, leaving specks of the originals visible. It proceeds as an
unbroken continuum with no really discernible discrete steps: once set in motion
it drives itself along almost of its own accord. An incessant motorway journey of
uninterrupted momentum, telegraph-poles flashing past (in the form of a stated or
implied rhythmic pulse), while the landscape changes but remains the same.
Between these apparent extremes – the one all hard edges, the other no edges
at all – Stockhausen’s ‘spiral’ forms present a sequence of discrete steps, for each
event builds on (i.e. develops) the one that went before. This is an impulsive trip
along country lanes in which each burst of activity needs subsequent refuelling
and another glance at the map (in Spiral and Kurzwellen the shortwave radio is
the recharging agent). The Aus den Sieben Tagen pieces (hallucinogenic in that
they are about turning on and tuning in) are, like Hymnen, slowly but persistently
striving towards resolution, towards ‘coming together’.
Although these pieces result from (and in) structural processes rather than
divisible structures, they differ from the Riley process in that they are goal-
orientated. Riley’s music, though accumulative, is not. Nor are architectural
structures. Verses for Ensembles shows that no attempt can or should be made
to ‘resolve’ monolithic slabs of music. The architecture makes itself perceptible
by asymmetrical balancing over an extended period of time, relying for its effect

21
See Cage, ‘Indeterminacy’, in Silence, pp. 35–40.
 Section 2: 1970–1971 99

on the art of suggestion by sledgehammer. The sledgehammer is necessary for

Birtwistle because music as it passes in time tends to flatten out the sharp outlines
one might ‘see’ with a frontal elevation/cross section-type analysis on paper.
What makes Verses ritualistic is its reliance on repetition, on a structural
periodicity – the ritual of the recurring seasons (a common enough metaphor
in Birtwistle’s music). This form of ritual is in effect anti-hallucinogenic in that
one’s involvement is constantly interrupted and jerked into another direction.
Yet the rhythmic momentum and repetition of Riley and Reich is nothing short
of ritualistic – an apparent contradiction which makes necessary more critical
distinctions if we use the word ‘ritual’ for a music which lacks its social function.
Thus Stravinsky’s music employs ritual gestures, Messiaen’s and Birtwistle’s
ritual forms and gestures, Riley and Reich seem to imitate ritual in music, whereas
a Scratch Orchestra ‘improvisation rite’ is ritual itself.
The outer shell of ritual has an important role in Verses. The ensemble of 12
players is subdivided into a number of self-contained smaller ensembles, each
with its own function, each with its own distinctive material, its own sounds. The
spatial distribution of these groups on the stage strengthens the delineation and
separation – the ‘recognisability factor’ never far from the surface considering
Birtwistle’s mannerisms – needed to make the architecture felt. Each ensemble –
high-pitch woodwind quintet, low-pitch woodwind quintet (same players), brass
quintet and two separate groups of percussion (pitched and unpitched) – has its
own performing area.
The journey down the blind alleys is a kind of shuttle service: in musical terms,
an extensive verse, with its own refrains, serves in its turn as a huge refrain to
the next verse. In addition to the interlocking verse forms Verses proceeds by
the clear articulation of opposites and mirror images: high–low, verse–refrain,
fast–slow, individual–mass, monody–polyphony, stasis–movement, colour–
pitch, ‘aggressive’–‘reflective’. As if these were not enough to increase structural
discontinuity, the whole score is littered with a network of signposts, in the form
of cadences of various shapes and sizes, yet Birtwistle’s calculation of the overall
momentum of Verses is startlingly successful.
Whereas the structure of Verses presents nothing really new from Birtwistle,
the method (Cage: ‘note-to-note procedure’) does.22 Birtwistle’s music is largely
dependent on variation technique and Verses has built-in variations within
variations, in the form of alternatives which the performers are allowed to choose
from. This introduction of a modest element of indeterminacy has led to a controlled
randomness of both method and structure in the realisation of Birtwistle’s most
recent work, Signals.
Roberto Gerhard shares with Birtwistle a similar timescale and feeling for
instrumental density and space. There the similarity ends. Leo has nothing in
common with the ‘exposed methods’ school. It proceeds not by calculation, but
by instinct. Its structuring has a Varèsian secrecy; its method is elusive (though

22
Ibid., pp. 35–40.
100 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

not inscrutable like Boulez’s). It has no need to be didactic, no need to prove a

structural point. Seemingly insignificant scraps of sound, a brief ostinato here,
repeated notes there, blossom into a realm of delicacy and richness.

‘Satiety’ (New Statesman, 2 October 1970, p. 429)

Although one seems not to have to hear it in order to know it, the music of Erik
Satie has always been something of a jealously guarded secret. Now that we
can actually hear the music, thanks to a very recent flood of new Satie records,
should one be apprehensive that he will now be stripped of his grey velvet-suited
exclusiveness? Not as far as the man painting in my hallway is concerned; he was
unimpressed by the melodiousness of Parade, even – it was all Xenakis to him.
Happily these nine records fresh to the English catalogues reveal the unexpected
riches of a visionary music which seems not to have been written but born fully-
formed, with the wholeness and warmth of uncorrupted childhood: a music
which divested itself of irrelevant paraphernalia – harmonic, formal, textural and
emotional – for in art, as in food, Satie preferred simplicity: ‘I applaud a well-
cooked roast more enthusiastically than I do the subtle work of a piece of meat
carefully dissimulated by the artful hands of a master of the sauce.’23 Fastidiously
leaving unbeaten the sauces of Wagner and Debussy, Satie created nonetheless a
music uniquely in accord with the temper of the times, combining a fin de siècle
wistfulness with an elemental and mischievous pop art, with many inexpressible
beauties in between.
He also invented a new art, that of phonometrics, ‘the science of cleaning
sound. It’s filthy you know.’24 Boulez has cleaned up Debussy a bit, but has so far
given Satie the brush-off. Satie’s orchestral music needs Boulez more than it needs
Maurice Abravanel and the Utah Symphony Orchestra, whose well-intentioned
two volumes (Philips Vanguard VSL 11086-7) are valuable in that they include the
three ballets and six orchestrations of piano pieces.
The Utah sound is flashy and boisterous, plugging the beefy at the expense of
the refined – as though Satie had been composer-in-residence at the Folies Bergère
and not the Chat Noir.25 Mucky rather than filthy, though. The orchestrations have
a curiosity interest in excess of their true value. Debussy’s arrangements of two
of the Gymnopedies, for example, demonstrate – by default – the fierce purity of

23
In Ornella Volta (ed.) A Mammal’s Notebook: Collected Writings of Erik Satie
(London: Atlas, 1996), p. 112; see also ‘The Table’, Almanac de Cacagne pour l’An 1922
(Paris: La Sirène, 1922).
24
See Satie’s ‘Memoirs of an Amnesiac’ (1912), in Rollo Myers, Erik Satie (New
York: Dover, 1968), p. 142.
25
Les Folies Bergère was a well-known Parisian cabaret music hall established in
1869, while Le Chat Noir was regarded as a rowdier, less respectable establishment, which
opened in 1881.
 Section 2: 1970–1971 101

the almost colourless tunes and accompaniments which are only weakened, if not
destroyed, by conventional multi-coloured, soft-padded arrangements.
Not surprisingly Parade, conducted by Maurice Rosenthal (Everest 3234),
comes closer to recreating the original excitement of the score – partly it is true by
a probably unintentional recourse to Dada. The famous typewriter and siren appear
to have been taken out of the commonplace sound-effects cupboard, cleaned up
and recorded separately closer to the mike than the band, so that they jump out of
the grooves pretty startlingly.
This disc also includes a very smooth performance of the last part of Socrate
(in which Satie renounced almost everything but time) which compares very
favourably with a re-pressing of the classic Leibovitz (complete) version (Everest
3246) which now sounds dated, if not archaic in quality and presentation, making
difficult listening even more difficult.26
Turning to piano music, I must first indulge in a little mathematics. There are
two recordings which attempt completeness, Ciccolini’s (two volumes, HMV ASD
2389 and 2603) and Frank Glazer’s three-disc set (Vox STGBY 633-5). Assuming
that HMV will soon release the third Ciccolini disc (available in the States on
Angel), both sets are matched numerically and both have six tracks not found
on the other. In Glazer’s case these are all two-handed originals, while Ciccolini
indulges in overdubbed fourhanded pieces, some of which are reductions from
small orchestra.
But as things stand at the moment Glazer’s set is obviously the better buy,
even though his approach may not be to everybody’s liking (mine for instance).
His dedication and sensitivity to Satie’s often unrewarding pianistics is very
evident, yet on the whole the quality of the recording has a distinct woolliness
and he plays an over-reverberant piano in a style which tends at times towards
undercharacterisation and a po-faced soberness.
Ciccolini tempi are more careful and ceremonial than Glazer’s, each note and
texture is carefully weighted, and he is far more alive to the wit of even the most
academic pieces (the Passacaille for instance). Significantly his choice favours
the more eccentric pieces – he is superb in Embryons desséchés with its Chopin/
Schubert send-up, and Croquis with its Españana. Equally significantly, Glazer’s
third disc is devoted entirely to the severe, less attractive music of the mid-
1890s (sombre chordal style of Quatre Preludes) and of 1913–14 (the two-part
counterpoint of Menus propos Enfantins, played rather dully).

26
French composer and theorist René Leibovitz (1913–72) studied with Anton von
Webern. His book Schoenberg and his School, originally published in French in 1947, was
one of the first principal accounts of the 12-note method and technique of Schoenberg, Berg
and Webern.
102 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

‘Anachronisms’ (New Statesman, 30 October 1970, pp. 574–5)

Pop music’s appeal to children can be attributed, we are solemnly and irrelevantly
told by André Previn, in the first place to their merciless exposure to it. Convinced
that ‘if Webern’s Piece for Orchestra were played with the regularity that the
Rolling Stones are, those kids would go off to school whistling those’, he adds that
‘the attention span does not have to be long and, of course, they can dance to it’.
An unfortunate parallel. The attention span for Webern could hardly be shorter;
he did after all ‘express a novel in a sigh’,27 whereas the Stones more prosaically
express a lyric in a song. You could play Webern’s records as often as you play the
Stones’, and Mr Previn could redress the balance by giving Webern the exposure
he’s never had. And if the kids are misguided enough to try to whistle Webern, I’m
sure they could find a way of dancing to it. Who dances to pop anyway these days?
The Odious Comparison Dept is better served by looking into questions of
‘relevance’, of two distinct musical styles which rarely come into contact, and of their
mutually exclusive lifestyles. Seen in terms of the social context of pop – the huge
PR/business exploitation – and its political significance – pop as the music of the
urban masses, the Chicago riots, the generation gap – the relevance of Stockhausen
and Terry Riley, both composers who have gathered a fairly large following (partly,
it is true, by reflecting pop attitudes) is of a comparatively minor order.
So one can’t really approach pop as music pure and simple, as separable from
the hagiography, the razzmatazz. In terms of ‘contemporary music’, pop is nothing
less than an anachronism, as it is based on a concept of tonality that was beginning
to look shaky even in Beethoven’s day, hasn’t learned any lessons from The Rite
of Spring or adopted the methods of Cage. But the basic expressive needs that pop
caters for, and which Webern and Stockhausen outgrew, have always been tied
up with melody and rhythm. And it is interesting to note that even straight avant-
garde, after years in the desert of post-Webern abstraction, is beginning to renew
itself at the well of regular pulse and tonality.
Like no other music today, pop gains enormous energy from confrontation with
a live audience. The majority of pop records are, however, products of the studio,
not the club or open-air festival, are put together meticulously, track laid upon
track, mixed and purified, and often prevented from spontaneous expansion by the
limitations of the 45 rpm single and the concept of the LP as a varied sampler of
current progress. Fortunately more and more live pop is getting recorded. This is
very much to the advantage of groups like the West Coast’s Grateful Dead, whose
records have never justified their reputation, and The Who, whose very visual
act used to culminate in a bout of guitar smashing which was the only natural
resolution of the huge wall of sound they build up (and very difficult to simulate
in the studio).

27
In an introductory note to Webern’s Six Bagatelles Op. 9, Schoenberg actually
wrote that Webern could ‘express every sigh into a novel’ (quoted in Hans Moldenhauer,
Anton Webern: A Chronicle of his Life and Work (London: Gollancz, 1978), p. 193).
 Section 2: 1970–1971 103

The Grateful Dead’s Live/Dead (Warner WS 1830) is most remarkable for

the single piece – or rather sequence of music – which impressively spans three
whole sides, demanding a very considerable attention span. This is a truly honest
performance by any standards; at times frustrating and rambling, it’s exploratory,
moving brilliantly into passages of superb, vital rock, in a style rather less
countrified than the neat songs on Workingman’s Dead (WS 1869).
Live albums are not only there to give improvisatory free forms their head but
also to document the unique atmosphere of particular concerts. With the Doors’
Absolutely Live (Elektra 2665 002) the background – teeny screams, audience
hassles, police intervention, and condescending and titillating comfort from Jim
Morrison – is often more interesting than the zippy, chromium-plated sound the
group produces.
Morrison has been cast in the role of the American Mick Jagger. The Stones’
Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out (Decca SKL 5065), apart from a single ‘provocative’ comment
from Jagger, gets down to providing the audience (and us) with some of the best
authentic rock, cruder and more elemental than the US brand, and still employing
the clichés and methods of early rock ’n’ roll, but none the worse for that. It
includes an especially fine version of ‘Midnight Rambler’.
The Who’s music is even more emphatic and more extended and subtle than the
Stones. Live at Leeds (Track 2406 001) includes rock standards and also brilliant
versions of ‘Substitute’ and ‘My Generation’, which improve on those available
on the Backtrack albums (mainly devoted to The Who and Hendrix), both through
the group’s greater familiarity with their material, and the undisguised feedback
sounds and extraordinary echo.

‘Big Screen Opera’ (New Statesman, 19 February 1971, p. 249)

Whenever I hear the word opera, I reach for the cinema, as someone might have
said,28 and Sadlers Wells’s brave new Götterdämmerung continually acted as
a stimulus to my cinematic imagination. Perhaps there was a whiff of Pasolini
about Glen Byam Shaw’s stark production and Ralph Koltai’s eclectic sets, which
covered everything from late Fifties Astral to Stone Age Modern, and Waltraute’s
and Hagen’s leatherette was definitely by courtesy of Barbarella and Brando.29
This attempt to update Wagner, visually at least, brought home to me the fact
that the more popular media are taking the varnish off Wagner, and may even be
dragging him off his pedestal. This is partly Wagner’s own fault; there must be a
Parkinson’s Law of Myths in Art, stating that the larger and more open the myth
the more possible it is both to overestimate its ‘meanings’ and to reduce it to its

28
An allusion to the words of German playwright Hanns Johst (1890–1978):
‘whenever I hear the word “culture”…’.
29
A reference to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s (1922–75) film adaptation of Euripides’
Medea (1969).
104 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Lowest Common Denominator. Wagner’s mind was so obsessively prodigious, his

images – especially the musical ones – so strong, that it is unavoidable that the
reverse of the usual folk-art process should have been set in motion – that what starts
out as an exclusive property often ends up, or parts of it end up, as common property.
I’m not thinking particularly of the opening scene with the Norns, which
irresistibly reminded me of Mrs Citizen Kane’s disastrous operatic debut (no
reflection on the singers) but that one of Wagner’s most renowned musical
achievements, the leitmotif technique, seemed to be magnificently unsubtle and
dated. On one level leitmotifs are a way of escaping from the limited time-space of
any particular moment into an endless continuum, but on another level they strike
the listener as a constant nudging, an unremitting and irritating suggestiveness
which leaves little or nothing to the imagination of the listener (unless like me he
drops out). But it also leaves little to the power of music itself, since the sounds
you hear coming from the pit are little more than a conglomeration of literary
symbols disguised as music: and we have been suffering from symbol-ridden
music ever since.
Hence on the sophisticated level composition to Wagner had become a kind
of photomontage in which a series of musical ‘characters’ were edited together,
while on the unsophisticated level these characters now belong to all of us – the
Sword Motif is heard in the milk commercial, the Ride of the Valkyries theme
has become a comic tag for silent-movie pianists, and a model for film scores as
recognisable, and as limiting, as Chaplin’s walking stick. But in The Ring Wagner
created a self-contained musical-dramatic nation unlike any other, absolutely self-
contained, with its own social organisation, its own laws and institutions, so that
maybe these tunes are merely tourists, passing comfortably from Wagner’s world
to ours and back.
In transferring this visionary city to the domestic operatic stage (and in a
domestic language – Andrew Porter’s effective translation enables us to understand,
at last, why Wagner’s characters are so boring) the producers didn’t really solve
the problem that voices and statures need to be as large as the myth itself. Rita
Hunter, though, as Brünhilde, is of an extraordinary size, and has a voice to match,
but Siegfried (Alberto Remedies) was too much like a blond Norman Wisdom for
my taste, and Gutrune (Catherine Wilson) was Susannah York when she should
have been Dorothy Malone.30
The set makers, too, could have taken a hint from the cinema, as it doesn’t
help when imitation steel and stone props shake when sat on, or that Siegfried’s
plastic sword couldn’t have cut a jam sandwich. (Apparently things worked much
better overall on the first night, which I unfortunately missed.) In fact it was just
as Siegfried was sizing up Gunther’s open-plan, open-air pad that I realised that
Wagner, had he lived today, would have been one of the greatest writer-directors

30
Dorothy Malone (b. 1925) was an American actress noted for her glamorous,
‘platinum blonde’ roles. On the other hand, characters played by English actress Susannah
York (1939–2011) were often of the friendly, ‘girl-next-door’ variety.
 Section 2: 1970–1971 105

of Westerns of all time (though they would have moved with the snail-like pace of
Dreyer). For Götterdämmerung is nothing less than one of the archetypal Western
myths: Gunther and Hagen are a couple of gringo crooks who hang out at Dead Eye
Gulch, who trick Siegfried, weak-willed, gunslinging dude lover of the masterful,
god-like Brünhilde, who, years before, rode out from her father’s homestead for
the last time, but he has now fallen on hard times and needs her help …
Gasping for the kind of operatic realism which to me spells Mozart, I thought
I would find it in Peter Hall’s new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at
Covent Garden (the first there since 1906 apparently). Expecting something more
radical, I was surprised that Hall had settled for the traditional operatic equivalent
of one of those Hollywood costume dramas, but most beautifully and authentically
observed and designed by Julia Trevelyan Oman, with sets, costumes and lighting
all russet browns, muted oranges and oatmeals. These, and the way the peasants
at the beginning moved and grouped themselves, displayed a sensitive eye for
cinematic realism, as did the two dance scenes, the Waltz and Polonaise.
To Tchaikovsky, opera was obviously half entertainment, half human-interest
story, and it is curious that, in this opera at least, he seemed to need the impetus
of the elaborate set pieces in order to get his story moving (and in order to show,
as his symphonies do, that he was primarily a composer of ballet music). But
in cutting down Pushkin’s story he has oversimplified to such an extent that all
the characters have become ciphers, lacking both motivation and credibility: and,
unlike Mozart, Tchaikovsky was no great shakes as a musical psychologist. All he
had up his sleeve, apart from the dances, was a tune or two (of which Tatiana’s
Letter Song serves as the melodic inspiration of a lot of the opera, a far cry from
Wagner’s symphonic technique) and the odd bit of ‘agitated emotion music’, with
cellos to the fore.
As Ken Russell might say, with Tchaikovsky you’ve got to play it for all it’s
worth. Hall is of the opposite persuasion; he emphasises the Mozartian qualities
of Eugene Onegin and, significantly, one of the most successful pieces of
characterisation is John Lanigan as the old Frenchman who sings a pastiche Mozart
aria. However, in scaling down the passions of all the principals, which are pretty
straightforward to start with, he has somehow removed any identification with
their problems – and if you can’t identify, what else can you do in a Tchaikovsky
opera? Ileana Cotrubas was cast as a not too sympathetic, charming, schoolgirlish
Tatiana, and Victor Braun as an unsympathetic, imperious, caddish, aloof Onegin;
so it was obvious from the very beginning that they were singularly ill-matched.
And we were not helped to care either.

‘Sign Language’ (New Statesman, 26 February 1971, p. 282)

To paraphrase, rather inelegantly, the Shredded Wheat commercial, there are two
discs on DGG 2707 045, and both are Stockhausen’s Kurzwellen. Why should
two records of the same piece, played by the same people, be made in the space
106 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

of a year and then issued together? Is it just that DGG are being as generous to
Stockhausen in the left corner as they are to Henze in the right? Actually not: the
two discs are very instructive, telling you a lot about the theory and performing
practice of so-called indeterminate music.
Kurzwellen is the first of four works which use shortwave radio sounds as
an impulse for musical activity. Unlike Spiral, which is for any solo instrument
plus shortwave, its instrumentation is (more or less) that of Stockhausen’s own
performing group: electronium, electric viola, piano and tamtam (plus radios)
with a filter and potentiometer operator (Stockhausen himself). The score of
Kurzwellen is little more than a blueprint for a composition or, more precisely, the
basic formal gambits presented in codified form: a series of plus, minus and equals
signs. If you don’t think this has anything to do with music you’d be wrong, since
the arrangement of signs is a distillation, the minimum information needed, for
Stockhausen at least, to convey a musical process.
What the signs tell you is how to set in motion a musical chain reaction, how
to develop the shortwave sounds, or what you played before, or what someone else
played. Individually the signs are applied to four criteria of quantifying a sound
event – register, dynamics, duration and rhythmic articulation, so that a plus sign
could mean either higher, louder, longer or more densely articulated than before.
You might think that, give or take a sign or two, the performers are absolutely
free; after all, nobody could predict what’s going to crop up on the radio, they have
freedom of selection and therefore of what they play, and which aspect of the sound
to apply the sign to is up to them. Again you’d be wrong; there’s no improvisation,
and Stockhausen is definitely the composer. He writes: ‘I composed the process
of transformation: HOW they react to what they hear on the radio; HOW they
imitate and modulate it’ and so on.31 And no matter how creative these players
are, it is largely because of these very carefully composed prescriptions, these
signposts, that the musical end-product can be so fascinating and richly varied, and
that the piece has an identity – which is something independent of Kurzwellen’s
characteristic sound-world, with its amplification, filtering and noise-jumble: an
identity which would ‘survive’ any number of different versions.
Now when Stockhausen stumps around the world lecturing about his music,
he somehow manages to convey the impression that all its ‘novelties’ are his own
personal invention. Radios? Well, Cage first used them as performing instruments
many years back, and he was the first to stop forcing the performer to play this
note rather than that one.32 But Cage really does give you as near total freedom
as you can have. The concept of development is alien to Cage, but what else than
‘development’ in the Beethoven sense would you call the way all the performers
seem to pounce, with undeniable relish, on the drum signal of the BBC World
Service? And to Stockhausen the radio is not merely a ‘free’ sound source, with

31
Quoted in Karl H. Wörner, Stockhausen: Life and Work (London: Faber and Faber,
1973), p. 68.
32
See, for example, Cage’s Radio Music (1956).
 Section 2: 1970–1971 107

its own typical character – morse, interference, distorted voices or music – but
a mystic symbol of some higher, supra-personal, extra-terrestrial consciousness.
The metaphysics of this ‘information-exchange’ don’t really come over in
performance, but one or two things are particularly striking, such as how much
the group improved between the first and second recordings. The later version
finds them more at home with themselves and with the piece, their responses to
‘external’ stimuli are more subtle and imaginative, and there is greater stylistic
security – or, to put it differently, the second version sounds more like one of
Stockhausen’s fully worked out pieces.
This loosening up has a lot to do with Stockhausen’s own developing belief
and trust in his own instincts. The score of Kurzwellen has a massive verboten:
‘TOTALLY UNMODULATED REALISTIC SHORTWAVE EVENTS (music,
speech, etc.) SHOULD BE AVOIDED.’33 On the first record they seem rather shy
about letting the shortwave sounds be heard, whereas in the second not only do
you clearly hear the what and the how of the transformation process, but there is
a constant stream of real music in the background, tunes we know, glimpses of
this and that, which they dwell on, rather lovingly and nostalgically. This provides
a cushion for the whole performance, changes the perspective of the piece and
charms the players into avoiding the usual ugly sounds.

‘Boulez’s Law’ (New Statesman, 2 April 1971, pp. 466–7)

Boulez on Music Today, translated by Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney

Bennett (Faber).
Don’t be misled by the packaging: the small print reveals this to be a translation
– magnificent if belated – of a book which appeared in 1963. It is not, then, a
meticulously argued demolition of today’s musical scene – and Boulez’s aesthetic
standpoint is still so unshakable that it might have made stimulating, if infuriating,
reading – but rather Boulez on Music Technique Yesterday. That is not a frivolous
point, since so much has happened in music in the intervening years as to make the
book redundant except as a historical document.
But even in 1963 Boulez was fighting a rearguard action, a defence of the
(recently established) realm of expanded serialism against the perversions and
trivialities which, in his view, were leading his colleagues off the straight and
narrow. If Boulez hadn’t been a mathematician, composer or conductor, he would
have been an ideal nineteenth-century public school headmaster: he inveighs
puritanically against the facile adoption of ‘changing fetishes’ which ‘suggest a
brothel of ideas and can hardly be considered composition’ since they arise from a
‘profound lack of intellectualism’.34 That’s a commodity which many composers
feel has been slowly and painfully stifling music of late, and which has led them to

33
Stockhausen, Kurzwellen (Vienna: Verlag Universal Edition), No. 14806 (1969).
34
Boulez on Music Today, p. 21.
108 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

seek out fresh new pastures – but this ‘escape’ Boulez would surely consider to be
part of the general ‘malaise’ he was, and is, so obsessed with.
So to Boulez intellectualism, or rather intellectual responsibility, is the keynote;
the pages bristle with such things as ‘the non-validity of certain ways of thought’35
and the necessity, for Boulez the lonely logician at least, to ‘put contemporary
musical thought on a completely and infallibly valid basis’.36 And at the end of the
book he sums up how he has, in his opinion, achieved this:

We have proceeded from the definition of the series to its description and its use;
then we studied the sound world to which serial functions are applied; in short,
we sketched out a morphology. From there, we passed to the outline of a syntax,
studying the extrinsic and intrinsic characterology of structures [and succeeded
in constructing] a coherent system by means of a methodical investigation of
the musical world, deducing multiple consequences from a certain number
of rational points of departure.37

I find it difficult to agree with such a statement as ‘methodical investigation and

the search for a coherent system are an indispensable basis for all creation’.38 That
might be fine for Boulez (though he hasn’t created very much since 1963) but
one wonders what other composers would do with all this technical baggage, and
how it would be related to composition itself. Certainly composers should not be
prey to their instincts and nothing else (are there any?); but if the Boulez method
is intended as a counterbalance to instinct, then one surely has to be pretty well
endowed in that department to bear the strain.
Taking the system Boulez proposes simply as system, separate from any
possible practical usage, it is impossible not to be impressed by its absolute
rightness in terms of its own internal logic. Boulez makes a stringent selection
from the huge world of musical possibilities and submits it to exacting, perceptive
analyses, refining the various parameters of pitch, duration, timbre and space into
an elaborate labyrinth of categories, sub-categories and sub-sub-categories, in a
way too detailed and specialised even to summarise adequately here. Scattered
along the way to technical self-knowledge are those old familiar forbidden fruits –
recognisable pulse, tonal chords, in effect everything modern music seems to lack
– which are to be avoided at all costs, as their imagery is too strong, too specific
for this patently artificial system to sustain.
One can have no doubt about Boulez’s integrity, but in the meantime his
contemporaries have been forced to find living solutions to living problems,
and have had little time to devote to sifting the sands of academic perfection.
Intellectually wrong they may have been on their ‘continued flight from

35
Ibid.
36
Ibid., p. 29.
37
Ibid., pp. 142–3.
38
Ibid., p. 143.
 Section 2: 1970–1971 109

responsibility’, as they have adopted and turned to serious use any new means
of expression that have been thrown up by creative – rather than theoretical –
spadework. European composers like Stockhausen have demonstrated, for better
or for worse, the invalidity of statements such as ‘The hierarchy of composition
demands materials supple enough to be bent to its own ends, and neutral enough
for the appearance of their characteristics to be adapted to each new function
which organises them.’39
They have done so by using a horrific amount of impure material, ‘anecdotal’
or not. And in the final analysis Stockhausen has not really renounced the kind
of techniques proposed in his book, since even a piece like Kurzwellen, with its
plus and minus notation and shortwave radios, attempts to extract the maximum
amount of differentiation from its material – which is the story of the self-same
European ‘masterpiece’ tradition Boulez so austerely, and at times shrilly, attempts
to defend.40

‘Stockhausen – The Musician, The Machine’ (Vogue Magazine, 15 April 1971,

pp. 82–3)

They had to turn people away from the doors of Camden Town Hall on the evening
of 18 November 1968. Some, as desperate as they were imaginative, managed to
bluff their way in. Afterwards opinion about the concert was divided. The music
critics dragged themselves off, screaming ‘more con than concert’, to man, yet
again, the tired barricades of English musical provinciality. For the rest of us the
word concert was indeed inadequate: we had seen, as if in a vision, a continuous
stream of brilliant white light, illuminating the new worlds of sound being mapped
out by Karlheinz Stockhausen.
This was the first appearance in London of the new look Stockhausen, his
hair longer than before, signifying a more relaxed approach to life and music.
Gone was the bristling, tempestuous German intellectual. We watched not a
rigid mathematical composer, but rather a gifted movie director, improvising,
marshalling his forces according to circumstances rather than the dictates of an
out-of-date script.
He rearranged the stereotyped seating into circles round each of the four
performing groups, and placed the four loudspeakers to get the maximum effect.
He disregarded the planned programme of separate works and spirited up a total
sound environment. He juxtaposed, crossfaded and overlaid the pieces into an
astonishingly exciting electric flux. The whole combustible process was held in
balance by a group of young British musicians playing items from Stockhausen’s
most recent and provocative score, Aus den sieben Tagen. In the centre of the hall
was the presiding magician, Karlheinz Stockhausen.

39
Ibid., p. 22.
40
For a review of Kurzwellen, see ‘Sign Language’, New Statesman (26 February 1971).
110 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

For Stockhausen the concert was a striking landmark on the long and winding
road on which he had opened up new vistas of experience and expression. He has
probed into new materials and sound sources, brought about new relationships of
time and space, invented new principles of structure, sought new responses from
audiences and inspired new relationships with performers.
November ’68 was the very first occasion on which Stockhausen had introduced
his concept of ‘intuitive’ music to musicians he was unfamiliar with. (He has his
own regular performing group.) The often inspired music he drew from them
somehow justified his adoption of a form of purely verbal score which outlines,
often poetically, only the overall progress and character of the music. Contrast this
method with the intricate web of composed detail of his earlier music, and you will
realise what sort of progression he has made.
His early fame – or, rather, notoriety – was almost solely due to the
intellectualism of his scores. In the 1950s he, along with Boulez, was seen as the
disturbing star of the European avant-garde, who demolished cherished traditions
by constructing a kind of music which seemed to have little but dizzy numerological
systems to recommend it. Total serialism was only a transitory solution to the post-
war musical void. Boulez has adapted himself to a rather old-fashioned, typically
French aesthetic, while Stockhausen has refused to stand still.
Today, in Japan, Germany or the United States, he is given huge fees to spread
his musical message – as composer, performer, lecturer, writer, conductor or
teacher. His audiences are constantly expanding. At Expo ’70 he daily confronted
a mammoth public in his circular dream concert hall in the West German Pavilion.
Nearly all his works – and often different versions of the same one – are on disc,
but he is now holding back his pieces both from Deutsche Grammophon and his
Vienna publishers as they struggle to keep up with his never-ending novelties – an
unprecedented musical and commercial feat.
This popularity is bewildering in a composer so uncompromising. His music
demands and deserves the closest attention; his language and thought-processes
are still complex and he never makes things easy for the listener. He is idolised by
pop musicians – more perhaps for his magical image as the electronic composer
than for the music itself. Yet he has never attempted a superficial and irrelevant
alliance with pop – were he to unleash the energy potential of pop into his own
music he would rule the musical world. (Stockhausen: I would like to write a piece
which lasts for ever. Boulez: That’s an old German dream.)
Stockhausen’s music today is not as insensitive to the climate of the times
as it was in the musically austere Fifties, and has many points of contact with
contemporary modes of thought, perception and behaviour. Aus den sieben Tagen,
is a special case. A couple of texts will speak for themselves:

Play a sound for a long time

until you hear its individual vibrations.
Sustain it
and listen to the sounds of the others
 Section 2: 1970–1971 111

– all of them, not individually –

and slowly move your sound
until you reach complete harmony
and the whole sound becomes gold
becomes pure, calmly burning fire.
or
Play a vibration in the rhythm of your smallest particle.
Play a vibration in the rhythm of the universe …

These pieces have been widely misunderstood. They are in no way blueprints
for improvisation. Like all Stockhausen’s work, they plot a very clearly
imagined sound-world, which is to be articulated by musicians who have opened
themselves up to an intuitive state of mind. In this state they can, according to the
composer, connect themselves ‘to the streams which flow through me, to which I
am connected’.41
The character of this music could be described by this quote of Allen
Ginsberg’s: ‘A more direct, slower, absorbing, occasionally microscopically
minute, engagement with sensing phenomena.’42 That this is a description, not of
the experience of music or poetry, but of marijuana does not make Stockhausen’s a
‘drug music’. He seems to disapprove of the monotonous beat of pop music which
he finds hypnotic. His own music is the product of intense self-awareness and he
expects it to induce a similar awareness in the listener. It is undeniable that Aus
den sieben Tagen brought one of the preoccupations of hippy philosophy – the
crucial two-way feedback between individual and cosmic ‘vibrations’ – onto an
artistic plane.
This is the most controversial – some would say ludicrous – aspect of
Stockhausen’s recent beliefs. Compare the following:

I have said this innumerable times over many years

and sometimes written it: that I am not making MY MUSIC, but
transcribing the vibrations that I receive;
that I function like a translator,
that I am a radio receiver. If I have composed
correctly, under the right conditions,
I no longer exist as MYSELF.43

with Timothy Leary’s description of an LSD trip: ‘I become more and more
conscious of vibrations – of the vibrations in my body, the harp strings giving

41
See Tim Souster, ‘Who’s Exhausted?’, Tempo, New Series, No. 87 (Winter, 1968–69),
pp. 23–6, p. 26.
42
In David Solomon (ed.) The Marihuana Papers (New York: New American
Library, 1968), p. 231.
43
Stockhausen, in an article published in Litany (10 May 1968).
112 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

forth their individual tones. Gradually I felt myself becoming one with the cosmic
vibration … In this dimension there were no forms, no deities or personalities –
just bliss.’44
The correspondence is obvious – there is a relationship between Stockhausen’s
Germanic mysticism and the quasi-religious experience of LSD. And one can only
marvel at the artist’s ability – or is it his privilege? – to achieve a state of mind
expandedness without drugs. But the musical results of Stockhausen transcribing
the world’s vibrations are to be heard as physical facts in Telemusik, a remarkable
tribute to the old-new world of Japan which he visited in 1966. In Telemusik all the
races of the world meet in electronic discourse. Into the orbit of fantastically lean
and grainy electronic sounds are floated, spun, zoomed, the folksongs and ritual
musics of the Amazon, the Sahara, Vietnam. At times they are heard distinctly, at
other times they are almost over the top of the audibility threshold, subliminal. Out
of the transformations and interactions of his electronic technique, Stockhausen
produces a highly original kind of global music.
This is part of the musical revolution of our times. Just as Stockhausen’s music,
through the gramophone record, is reaching the whole world, so through the
gramophone record we are now able to appreciate the music of the whole world.
And composers are now seizing the opportunity to create a music of synthesis,
and not limit themselves to pure puritanical music as they did in the Fifties and
early Sixties.
Stockhausen’s Hymnen is musical pop art on the grandest scale. It is one of
the few of his works which could be described as programmatic (in a visionary
kind of way). It begins with a confused jumble of radio static and out of this
become discernible national anthems: dimly lit, grotesquely splintered, mingled or
mangled sound. On a less descriptive level Stockhausen is trying to teach us about
the processes of today’s music. In his earlier works the material and its treatment
remained largely hidden, but in Hymnen, because we are familiar with the raw
material, we are uniquely able to hear what he does with it and how he does it.
This is the didact in Stockhausen at work. He has always felt the need to lead one
gently into the new by means of the old or familiar. Even in Gesang der Jünglinge
(now nearly 15 years old) a young boy’s voice is heard amongst the electronic
sounds. In Kontakte (1960) the familiar sounds of percussion and piano are used
to lure the ear into the unfamiliar electronic kingdom. In Prozession there are
quotations from his own works, in Momente and Mikrophonie II a dazzling array
of familiar vocal styles and techniques, and Spiral, Poles, Expo and Kurzwellen all
use shortwave radios. In Mikrophonie I the known and the unknown come together
in an unprecedented way. What we hear are sounds around us, jarring machinery,
the roars of wild animals. These are not produced by recording everyday life, but
by scraping or hitting a tamtam (a sort of gong) which also comes up with very
electronic-type sounds.

44
Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (London: Paladin, 1970), p. 23.
 Section 2: 1970–1971 113

This piece marked a turning point in Stockhausen’s career in 1964. He

discovered, by experimenting with a tamtam, a microphone and a filter, the world
of real, living sound, manipulated by his hand, his musicianship and his senses
rather than by his mathematical chart. His approach to the tamtam was typical
though of his compositional method. He used the mike as a stethoscope, conducted
a detailed research project on the instrument, and came up with an unprecedented
range of sounds from a source which had previously been more or less mute.
John Cage was one of the first to amplify instruments in this way, and
Stockhausen owes a lot to Cage. But the differences between the two composers
are more revealing than their similarities. Cage has opened up the contemporary
performing scene to the non-professional musician. No one but a virtuoso though
would play Stockhausen’s Spiral, a piece for any solo melody instrument and
shortwave radio. The performer is called on to imitate the sounds he finds on the
radio – that’s difficult enough. But then he must take off on flights of invention
which only a master of his instrument could manage. One of the rules is very
significant: that the player should improve his performance each time he plays the
piece; that each version should transcend the previous one.
‘Transcend’ is a key word in Stockhausen’s vocabulary. It has to do with striving,
with constant self-improvement, an increase in consciousness. Each performance,
each piece, has to transcend the one that went before; more to the point, each
piece transcends the music round about it from which it originated. This is a clue
to Stockhausen’s artistic personality. Is he, as some people think, a prophet, a
rebel, the most original composer on the scene? Or is he a charlatan, who has
perverted the meaning and sound of music, who has shirked his responsibilities as
a composer by raising the status of the performer from near-mechanical reproducer
of written notes to active participant in the forming of the music?
As to role: he respects tradition. ‘Let us not forget that everything we do and
say must be considered as a moment in a continuous tradition.’45 He is traditional
enough to write Op. 1970 to celebrate the Beethoven bicentenary when the real
innovators, Cage or La Monte Young, don’t hide their dislike of the earlier German
masters. As to avoiding his responsibilities, the November ’68 concert showed that
the players’ freedoms were pretty circumscribed; Stockhausen himself was always
the final arbiter, since all the instrumentalists’ microphones were fed through the
composer’s mixer.
Cage makes no such attempt to impose his personality on the performer. He,
like Stockhausen, is obsessed with the marvellous new channels of communication
opened up in today’s McLuhanite ‘global village’. But, whereas Cage wishes to
open the door to all the sounds around us, to let them compose themselves as they
do more or less in life, Stockhausen, like all the composers of the Great Tradition,
deliberately selects, modifies, and structures – in a word, composes – his material.

45
See Stockhausen’s liner notes to the Deutsche Grammophon recording of Telemusik,
Mixtur (DGG 643 546, 1969).
114 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

In this sense, in the musical politics of the times, Stockhausen is no

revolutionary but a very progressive liberal, no less. What he sees and hears around
him is irrevocably transcended – translated by a mind which has lost none of its
intellectual power but which has realised that the composer is not a totalitarian
dictator but a leader of men, and sounds.

‘Interconnections’ (New Statesman, 16 April 1971, pp. 539–40)

It’s interconnections week for Cult Pop. John Cale – expatriate Welshman,
participant in the extraordinary Fluxus concert at (of all places) Goldsmiths’
College in 1963,46 ex-member of The Velvet Underground (Andy Warhol’s group
originally), ex-member of La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, arranger
for ex-Velvet superstar Nico, pop singer/composer, producer for Columbia
Records – has joined forces with Terry Riley, composer, who along with La Monte
Young and Steve Reich has produced the most exciting music to have come from
America since Cage.
The result of the misalliance is enshrined on Church of Anthrax. It’s sad to
think that the pop world at large may be introduced to Riley’s music through this
near-disaster (A Rainbow in Curved Air, though promoted as a pop package, is
available only from import shops), and it’s not surprising that Riley has renounced
the world to play and study Indian music for the next two years. Riley’s music
has many features common with pop – pulse, repetition, modality; it has little
in common with the European avant-garde, Stockhausen and the machine men.
Rainbow stood marvellously at the intersecting point of pop and straight, without
compromising either; beautiful, and untouchably different.
It was always on the books that the more superficial aspects of Riley’s style
would be turned into cosy clichés and spun directly into the pop orbit. And
now it has happened; but I would not have expected Riley to have had a hand
in it himself. Such is Anthrax: a heavy rock beat is laid down by an idiotically
insensitive drummer, Cale starts up with a common-or-garden chunky pop piano
riff, which goes through a harmonic progression that has nothing to do with Riley’s
music. In the background (this is literally the most oddly-balanced recording I’ve
heard for a long time) is heard Riley’s lone, unmistakable soprano sax, which
produces little more than very characteristic doodles, in a context totally lacking
in forward momentum. This isn’t surprising considering the over-reliance on beat,
which is not the same as Riley’s pulse, and Cale’s confusion over whether he
is producing music to be chopped into the requisite neat piles for pop’s limited
consumption or to continue endlessly as Riley’s music usually does. I suppose
that if you don’t know your Riley this record makes perfectly pleasant background

46
Cardew was largely responsible for organizing the event at Goldsmiths’ College,
which took place on 6 July 1963. The evening concert included pieces by Brecht, Maciunas,
Paik and La Monte Young (see Tilbury, Cornelius Cardew: A Life Unfinished, p. 177).
 Section 2: 1970–1971 115

listening, though for the genuine article you should try to get hold of a copy of A
Rainbow in Curved Air.
If Cale comes out of the Church of Anthrax with his head bowed in shame, he
has no reason to be ashamed of his presence in Nico’s Desertshore (Warner RSLP
6424). Her first solo album, Marble Index, in fact showed Cale to be a master
of very attractive Riley-type backings, and on the new one he shows quite an
imaginative skill in integrating a variety of instruments – all but one played by him
– with Nico’s ever-present little squeezebox. Especially effective is ‘Abschied’, in
which the sound of raw folk fiddle is immensely powerful and pagan.
The latest album from Nico’s old group, The Velvet Underground, Loaded
(Atlantic 2400111), contains an attractive selection of short songs, which go
back to the roots which nourished their first album: affectionate, uncomplicated,
surprisingly full of nostalgia (in a Beatles kind of way) both in the lyrics and
music of several tracks – ‘Lonesome Cowboy Bill’, ‘Rock and Roll’ and the lovely
vocal soft shoe shuffle of ‘I found a reason’, all of which spell out a mood of
elegiac farewell. The Velvets seem to have found the line of experiment of their
White Light album unrewarding, where the lengthy accumulative ‘Sister Ray’ was
considered by some to be the pop equivalent of some of La Monte Young’s pieces.
Similarly the Soft Machine had direct contact with Terry Riley at one time,
which one could in the past hear in Mike Ratledge’s keyboard technique. Not
that there’s much Riley on Fourth (CBS 64280), since the power struggle that
seemed to be disrupting their Prom performance last year has now been resolved
and the sax player, Elton Dean, a recent addition to the original trio, now emerges
as a leader. This is a pity, as it brings about a further shift in the direction of jazz,
less interesting than their pop style, which is receding more and more into the
background. Only Hugh Hopper, the bass guitarist, is able to provide the group
with anything that rises above their now too familiar trademarks.

‘Stockhausen Kommt’ (Time Out, 18 April–2 May 1971, p. 23)

Stockhausen kommt … The hot propeller of electronics with his band of acolytes
fires off a few rounds to show his recent prowess and disappears into the mists to
wake some other self-satisfied hamlet from its musical slumbers.47 Or … London
is at last able to turn itself on, for the very first time, to Stockhausen’s latest tray of
goodies – Stimmung, Mantra and the version of Hymnen for tape and instruments
… And to witness such world famous circus acts as that percussion wizard
Christoph Caskel, those intense virtuoso duo-pianists the Kontarsky Brothers: to
soothe yourself to the beautiful tones and magic utterances of note-less scores by
Stockhausen’s own performance team.

47
Nyman’s article was written in advance of Stockhausen’s lecture/demonstration of
Kontakte at the ICA, St John’s Smith Square, on 29, 30 April and 1 May, and at the QEH
on 2 May 1971.
116 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

These concerts will enable us to catch up, live, with the astonishing variety of
what Stockhausen has turned out in the past few years, and will act as a corrective
for Stockhausen idolators who seem to be more impressed with image than by
musical product. Considering that he’s (almost) straight music’s answer to Dylan
or Leonard Cohen, his reputation is built on amazingly little of his total output: the
electronic sounds/boy’s voice mix of Gesang der Jünglinge, the three orchestras
of Gruppen, the fabulous tape (with piano and percussion accompaniment) of
Kontakte. All that barely takes us into the early 60s. So if on the one hand there’s
little more than hero worship, then on the other Stockhausen represents so much
more than the symbol of the all-purpose ‘electronic composer’. There’s no doubt
that the strength and sophistication of his technique and imagination (and Kontakte
was done with remarkably primitive equipment – a genuine triumph of mind over
materials: today’s elaborate hardware, Moogs and computers, are for those with
mental software) has produced the most impressive studio-type, tape-manipulated,
electronic music, but surprisingly apart from the two early Studies there are only
four tape pieces (and two of them have optional instrumental additions).
In the States the hero worship possibly derives from newer pieces, especially
the word scores Aus den sieben Tagen, some of which display, on the surface,
Stockhausen’s outerspace metaphysics, couched in an often desperate near-
hippy jargon: vibrations, turning on, tuning in, the integration of one’s minutest
body rhythm in the rhythm of the universe – all slightly suspect for a middle-
aged German. But under the surface these simple near-poems enshrine musical
processes that are integral to all his music, before and since.
Stockhausen as idol … Stockhausen as political figure caught up in the
crosswinds of today’s musical ‘politics’. The external imagery, the resources,
the media, used by Stockhausen still causes a lot of disquiet to those American
composers who are the real innovators of post-war music. In the 50s he was
pilloried by Cage and Feldman as being totally and inextricably system-ridden.
And when he did begin to extricate himself by tempering this system with Cage-
derived indeterminacy, he was accused on the one hand of betraying the European
tradition of the unalienable, fully-composed masterpiece, and on the other of
betraying the ‘purity’ of indeterminacy, of limiting what was deliberately limitless,
of personalising a method whose sole object was to depersonalise music. (He is
still open to change: his recent scores are full of apparent freedoms for the players,
but they are either hedged round with pages of rules, or never better than when
actively controlled by the Master!)
Where the American creative mind can be ruthlessly single-purpose, the
European is accumulative, allusive, all-comprehending (like Bach!); it takes what
it can from any available source and transforms it into yet another component
for his highly personalised expressive system. So since 1960 Stockhausen has
travelled the musical world, appropriated what was convenient for him (some said
‘ruthlessly pillaged’) and turned them into his own use. In effect Stockhausen’s
music is a comprehensive guide to all the ‘inventions’ of the new music. (He’s also
added quite a few of his own.) Four years after Cage’s Cartridge Music of 1960,
 Section 2: 1970–1971 117

for amplified ‘small sounds’, came Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie 1 for amplified/

filtered tamtam (with perhaps a nod in the direction of La Monte Young’s bowed
gong piece); tape loops in Solo, from Reich and Riley; the pop art of Hymnen
or Telemusik, from Cage’s random mixes; the live electronic group, from other
live electronic groups; word scores, by courtesy of Fluxus or Christian Wolff;
Stimmung, most clearly from La Monte … yet every time the whole is greater than
the sum of the parts, the end product undeniably Stockhausen.
The New York critic and composer Eric Salzman aptly summed up the
difference between Hymnen, with its highly involved, dramatic, recomposition,
distortion, remixing and illuminations of national anthems, with Cage’s out-of-
freedom, into-freedom Variations IV (apart, that is, from the fact that the one is a
composed piece, the other a recording of a particular performance of a particular
version …): ‘the difference is, I suppose between a Rudi Dutschke and an Abbie
Hoffman, between the German SDS and the Yippies’; and the Provos disrupted a
performance of Stimmung, dismissing it as elitist, non-participational art. Which it
is, but … what does Stockhausen’s music sound like?

‘Panethnic’ (New Statesman, 30 April 1971, p. 607)

I suppose one of the reasons I didn’t get the Radio 3 music producer’s job was
because I suggested that the western art-music boys had hogged the limelight
for long enough and that more air time should be given to ethnic music.48 The
suggestion was prompted not only by personal interests but also by significant
new trends in musical awareness (which make Ravi Shankar’s hands-across-the-
continents particularly sad). Through the inspired labours of the late Thurston
Dart, it is now possible to take a degree in any ethnic music for which there
is a teacher available at London University. At Wesleyan University outside
New York there are courses not only for studying ethnic music, but, much more
important, for playing it, under the guidance of experienced Indian, African or
Korean musicians, or whatever. Also at Wesleyan is the World Band project, a
potentially huge ethno-improvisation group led by Richard Teitelbaum, Moog
Synthesiser playing ex-member of Musica Elettronica Viva: from battery farm
to compost-grown.49 At the moment both La Monte Young and Terry Riley
are under the spell of guru/singer Pran Nath, and Steve Reich recently spent
three months studying African drum rhythms in Ghana.50 Stockhausen too has

48
It is interesting to note that BBC Radio 3 started to adopt this approach from the
late 1990s onwards, when programmes such as Late Junction were broadcast.
49
For a very positive review of Musica Elettronica Viva’s LP Friday, see ‘Six to
One’, The Spectator (17 January 1970).
50
In fact, Reich’s sojourn in Ghana during the summer of 1970 was cut short to five
weeks when he contracted malaria (see Potter, Four Musical Minimalists, p. 204).
118 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

made his electronic folk-mix, and has recently said that he prefers African and
Balinese music to ‘militaristic’ western pop.
In view of this trend (and apart from the obvious attractions of such music to
the stoned fraternity) one welcomes such ventures as Argo’s The Living Tradition
(16 records, ZFB40-55, of which I have so far heard the first eight) and Tangent’s
fabulous three-record Traditional Music of Ethiopia (TGM 101-3, mono only).
Not that they are ideal by any means. The Argo series, forced to encapsulate a
whole nation’s music, the present-day survival of centuries-long traditions and a
phenomenal number of purely local ones, on a single disc, must naturally err on
the side of variety and brevity. This travelogue approach is fine where the music
is short by nature, but where the very point of the music is made by repetition
over a long time-period, it’s less than adequate (such as the frustratingly truncated
Buddhist chants on the Himalayan disc ZFB40, the most immediately appealing
of the set).
On the whole the choice of music – an impossible task if you come back from
the field with rucksacks stuffed full of tapes – is good, and mostly untainted by
modernity; except in the case of Romania (ZFB41) many of whose tracks are
cursed, not by the Transylvanian werewolf, but by the far more insidious official
Culture Palaces.
Taken as a whole, the discs give the ear and sensibilities nourished only on
the narrow choices which art music has made over the past 400 years a need to
reorientate itself, to put music in a larger, global perspective. On a geographical
level, listening from West to East, Romania to Benares (ZFB44), one is struck by
the fact that no matter how ‘different’ Turkish music may sound (ZFB46), it is not
until you reach Syria (Music from the Middle East, ZFB42) that you perceive a
genuine difference of musical type, a totally non-western way of musical thinking.
On a more immediate level you hear some great tunes that Mozart and
The Beatles missed (the last two tracks of the Himalayas record are by any
standards intensely beautiful); or you are confronted by an unprecedented range
of unfamiliar timbres, from the raucous (the shawm-like zurna from Turkey) to
the gentle (the overlapping chords of the single-note flutes on the third Ethiopia
disc); or very fresh singing styles, from even as near home as Bulgaria (ZFB47),
where the women end their phrases with strange, irrational, upward flicks (which
makes one rather uncurious to hear the latest prima donna glitter her way through
the latest glittering Norma 51); or spontaneous, natural structures and techniques:
repetition, pulse, call and response, heterophony, principles of non-variation, as
well as more sophisticated, calibrated techniques – the maqam from the Middle
East and the raga from Benares; from elaborate solo virtuosity to the work-song
rituals of coffee grinding (Middle East), pickaxe wielding and well-water drawing
(Ethiopia Vol 2).
The Ethiopia set (Music of the Central Highlands, Music of the Dessert
Nomads, and Music of Eritrea) delves deeper – though within its confines one finds

51
Bellini’s opera Norma was first performed in 1831.
 Section 2: 1970–1971 119

an extraordinary number of seemingly separate musical traditions. Beautifully

presented and documented by Jean Jenkins, together they make possibly the most
valuable collection to have come my way for a long time, worth their weight in
gold, if only for the second side of the Nomads disc.52 Here, over a period of 20
minutes or so, a tribal chief sings from the Koran while groups of men’s voices
support with choral chants and drum-like guttural rhythms.

‘Steve Reich, Phil Glass’ (Musical Times, 112/1539, May 1971, pp. 463–4)

In the USA the music of Steve Reich and Phil Glass, like that of Cage in the 1950s,
is cold-shouldered by the musical establishment which now gives the official seal
of approval to numberless inferior composers who have safely adopted Cage’s
innovations. So, like Cage, Reich and Glass perform their music in art galleries,
museums and university art departments. Significantly, on their first European tour
they gave their London concerts at the ICA (March 7) and at the RCA (March 10).
The basic model for Reich’s music is Pendulum Music written in 1968 (and
his only piece which can be performed by anyone less dedicated and technically
disciplined than his own group). In this piece three microphones are suspended
over upward-facing speakers, and the amplifiers are turned up high. Three people
release the microphones to produce feedback phasing, which pulses according to
the speed of the swings. The piece ends as the microphone movements becomes
imperceptible. A basic model in the sense that, like Reich’s other pieces, it
audibly follows through a complete mechanical process in which all the details
can be heard, and like them is concerned (refreshingly) with pulse, uses uniform
instrument groups, and is at consistently high volume (many found it unbearable
in such a small space).
But in other ways Pendulum Music is uncharacteristic, since it makes as
much a theatrical as a musical impression, and contains strong random elements
of pitch and rhythm. Elsewhere, in Piano Phase, Phase Patterns, Four Organs
and Drumming, the process is tightly controlled (possibly more than in any other
music) and is consequently phenomenally exhilarating, especially since they all
maintain a fast tempo with a fanatical driving force.
Reich’s latest piece, Drumming – for four pairs of tuned bongos, written since
his return from drum-study in Ghana – is in no sense Afro (except that is shares
the intense logic of any spiritual music) as it follows directly in Phase Patterns,
which is ‘literally drumming on the keyboard’.53 Two players set up a rhythm of
a stark, detached energy, using only the first four notes of the minor scale. The
other two players join in with some of the resultant patterns; the lead player moves

52
Ethnomusicologist Jean Jenkins (1922–90) worked at the Horniman Museum in
South London.
53
See Nyman’s first interview with Reich, in Steve Reich, Writings on Music 1965–
2000, ed. Paul Hillier (Oxford: OUP, 2002), p. 55.
120 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

a quaver ahead, different resultant patterns are heard, and so on – a slow, subtle,
minute changing of focus in a totally static aural environment. At transition points
of greatest rhythmic complexity the overall effect is physically quite astonishing.
In Phase Patterns (for four electric organs) the music is so stripped of the
inessential that when, after 15 minutes or so of a single chord-rhythm, a second,
related, chord appears, the effect is startling, almost a self-indulgence. In terms of
sheer pent-up energy Phase Patterns has no parallels in Western music, unless it
be the fantastic piano style of Meade Lux Lewis’s rags and boogies.54
Phil Glass’s music, until now completely unknown in England, uses
instruments of mixed timbres playing extended melodic patterns in rhythmic
unison. Each melodic figure is repeated a given number of times and is succeeded
by another whose modal configuration is altered by permutation or addition or
subtraction. Music in Similar Motion – parts moving mainly in parallel 3rds and
4ths – produced a flowing music of quite beautiful resonance and richness which
seemed to bear little aural relation to the very straightforward notes on the page.
Here, too, complex results are produced: high or low melodic points emphasized
by the repetitions, drones produced by the sum of the parts.
In Music of Changing Parts – which runs for more than an hour – the drones
are picked out by some of the six players and held, while the full, often over-ripe
sound-mass flows on, its immensely slow ‘ground’ pace continuously overriding
the ceaseless quaver activity and holding in check each new level of texture as it
inevitably, and quite marvellously, is introduced.

‘Stockhausen’ (New Statesman, 7 May 1971, p. 646)

Stockhausen’s whole career has been a continuous spiral of surprise, and to some,
perhaps, of astonishment. As early as 1955, still excited by the possibility of
directly creating and rigidly controlling sound by means of electronic synthesis, he
surprised everyone by using something as human and irrational as a boy’s voice in
an electronic piece. In 1964 he finally went into live electronics, and pragmatism
seemed to have won the day against theoretical doctrine. In 1968 there were
two more surprises: Aus den sieben Tagen, with no notation, graphic, symbolic
or musical, only words; and after the multiple sound material and techniques of
Hymnen came Stimmung, a single chord running for over 70 minutes.
And now Mantra, for two pianos and electronic modification. Mantra marks
Stockhausen’s return to conventional notation, and to the constructive principles
of serialism; the mantra is for Stockhausen an all-purpose, often diatonic, kind of
tone-row, but it is also, according to Indian theory, the source and repository
of mystic vibrations. Consequently I sat for 70 minutes in a state of puzzled and
often bemused bewilderment that a piece with such a serious and lofty spiritual

54
Meade Mux Lewis (1905–64) was an American pianist and composer, known for
his boogie-woogie style of playing.
 Section 2: 1970–1971 121

pedigree should turn out to be as hefty a chunk of romantic wish-fulfilment as you

could hope to hear.
One soon became accustomed to the artificial timbre of the pianos, but not
to the obviousness of much of the writing (from a composer who usually makes
a fetish of covering his traces): the too mechanical alternation of slow and fast,
the astonishing lack of surprise with which he carried his processes through
extended sections, the bravura piano writing, Liszt crossed with Thelonius Monk,
and a whole bagful of stylistic references, real or imagined, which I find it hard
to believe that Stockhausen could actually commit to paper – Mozart, Ravel,
Gershwin, Stravinsky, jazz, silent-movie music (a long passage of ‘suspense-
stalking’), ripe old tremolos, heavy reverberation reminiscent of Hawaiian guitars,
and Beethovenian chord gestures which through the excitable alternation of the
pianists gradually swing into a comic altercation over two semitones. And pure
music hall, like the moment when both players stand up, exchange a few Japanese
sounding expletives, and sit down again.
Not all of these are passing effects; some – like the many passages of luminous,
delicate tracery, and the truly astonishing physical energy of the final stretto,
which encapsulates all the material of the whole piece –­ are allowed to spin on for
considerable periods of time. On a single hearing one is either mesmerised by the
surface audacity or alienated by it.
No enlightenment from a work we were not prepared for, disappointment from
one we were perhaps too prepared for. According to Stockhausen’s Stimmung,

surely, is meditative music. Time has stopped. One listens attentively to the
innermost depth of sound, the innermost of the harmonic spectrum, the innermost
of vocal sound. THE VERY INNERMOST.55

The innermost of vocal sound – sure, since the singers employ a means of phonetic
voice production which enables you to hear the overtones of each note. But it is
the proliferation of material, apart from the ubiquitous dominant ninth chord – the
magic names, erotic stories, joke words like Wednesday and Barbershop, various
rhythmic models – which destroys the piece. How can time stop when there is so
much heterogeneous activity? How can one meditate when the musical sounds
end abruptly and we are treated to a story spoken in cute German speechsong?
And, ironically, whereas horizontally Stimmung is too rich, vertically the texture
of six often independent voices is too thin for one ever to be able to penetrate the
‘innermost depth of sound’.

55
This is a slight rewording of Stockhausen’s liner notes for Stimmung as printed
on Collegium Vocale Cologne’s recording, directed by Wolfgang Fromme (Deutsche
Gramophon, Avant-Garde 2543003, 1970), which reads: ‘certainly Stimmung is meditative.
Time is suspended. One listens to the inner self of the sound, the inner self of the harmonic
spectrum, the inner self of the vowel, THE INNER SELF’.
122 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Stockhausen gets nearer to solving the problem of stasis and activity in the last
two regions of Hymnen where one really does get into the innermost depths. The
first two regions, with their over-complex jumble of national anthems and an almost
wilful inability to rise out of the sluggish sonic morass, are more impenetrable,
even with the addition of live instruments, which reinforce, extend, colour, define
or further obscure the progress of the music. The instrumental additions work
very well when they are at one with the tape, but trivialise when, for instance,
Kontarsky picks out the tunes of the distorted anthems.56
In the concert which featured Stockhausen’s performing group, the players
were better working together than individually. Prozession had some marvellous
things in it, whereas Harald Boje’s Spiral on the electronium was too predictable.
Perhaps we’ve had to wait too long to hear Stockhausen and his group to be
surprised any more – though this is no fault of the indefatigable Lina Lalandi, who
laid on the whole thing within her English Bach Festival.57

‘Towards Interpretation’ (New Statesman, 25 June 1971, pp. 889–90)

When Cage pointed out that the Art of Fugue is a composition ‘indeterminate with
respect to its performance’ as far as timbre and amplitude are concerned (since
instrumentation and dynamics are not specified),58 he might have added that it was
also indeterminate with respect to its performance style: Bach’s written notation
does not tell us all we need to know about how to perform the work.
Move back in time and the plot thickens as the music becomes more indeterminate;
source material becomes more obscure, scholarly interpretations are controversial,
contemporary performing evidence – if it exists – is contradictory, and written notes
did not have the shrine-like status they have since attained. Notation was a shifting,
impermanent thing, subject to the variability of what instruments were available,
who was playing them, when, where and on what occasion.
Consequently any modern performance can never be authoritative, but merely
a suggestion of what might have been – not even, perhaps an interpretation but
towards an interpretation. Michael Morrow, Musica Reservata’s indefatigable
director, scholar and performer, has outlined the problems of performance
authenticity succinctly:

All vocal and instrumental styles and techniques must be based on research
resulting in several degrees of evidence: direct evidence, written or notated;

56
Nyman is referring to the German pianist Aloys Kontarsky, who also featured on
the recording of Hymnen.
57
For another review from the English Bach Festival, see Nyman’s ‘Blocks of
Granite’, The Spectator (12 July 1968).
58
See Cage’s essay ‘Indeterminacy’, in Silence, p. 35.
 Section 2: 1970–1971 123

convincingly implied evidence; guesswork, preferably informed; or sheer

invention on the part of the modern musician.

Given, then, the inherent variability of the music, the more groups giving the
more interpretations the better. In England Musica Reservata and the Early Music
Consort have the monopoly; and though we should accept both these groups in
what Cage calls a ‘field situation’,59 when it comes to the presentation of a still
quite alien music, Musica Reservata get so much closer to its spirit and image that
comparisons are not odious but irrelevant.
The Early Music Consort cultivate a smooth, flashy, attractive, easily
comprehended stylishness, anonymously style-less, though, and lacking sensitivity
to the changing musical fashions of a period of four hundred years. Their polished
surfaces normalise a music that is patently not normal by presenting it in the
context of what we know and accept as ‘expressive’, ‘beautiful’ or ‘effective’,
even though they use old-fashioned instruments with odd-sounding names. Such
refinement, such tastefulness make them the ideal group for your Trust House
Hotel concerts: a touch of old music to be washed down with your wine.
Musica Reservata on the other hand occasionally indulge in impolite sounds,
transgress the rules of musical propriety: but their interpretations do come from
inside the music, and if the surface is sometimes rough and grainy, it does at least
make the re-creation of such a music – an odd occupation in itself – worthwhile.
Direct comparison of the two groups is possible, though, since the Early Music
Consort’s records are surprisingly similar to Music Reservata’s. The Landini
tracks common to Reservata’s two-year-old Music from the Time of Boccaccio’s
Decameron (Philips SAL 3781) and Consort’s Ecco la Primavera (Argo ZRG 642)
show the latter lively and safe, and the former taking calculated risks, choosing
ambitious but successful tempi, with a similarly experimental attitude towards
tone production.
Reservata’s involvement with what they are playing communicates by the
fact that the more interesting the music, the more vital their performance. On
their most recently released record, A Florentine Festival (Argo ZRG 602) some
large, dull wedding celebration pieces by Marenzio lack fire, whereas the shorter
pieces on the other side, especially some captivating dance songs, are done with
great verve. Even more successful is their Music from the Time of Christopher
Columbus (Philips SAL 3697), which has all the spontaneity, earthiness and truth
of some of the folk music I reviewed recently.60

59
Cage, ‘Two Statements on Ives’, in A Year From Monday (London: Calder and
Boyars, 1968), p. 41.
60
See ‘Panethnic’, New Statesman (30 April 1971).
124 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

‘Stravarese’ (New Statesman, 9 July 1971, p. 60)

I never seem to be able to write about Stravinsky without Varèse, like an

aggressive, uncompromising rebel, appearing unbidden from the nether regions
of neglect, to put in deeper perspective my views of Stravinsky’s originality and
relevance. At a Boulez Prom some years ago I wrote that, next to Varèse, the Rite
of Spring, locus classicus of musical savagery, was made to sound like ‘The Teddy
Bears’ Picnic’.61 And now, along with the CBS Memorial Box (CBS 77333) –
Stravinsky conducting four early ballets, the Symphony of Psalms and Symphony
in C, that grotesque aspidistra of neo-classicism – and an Ansermet disc (Decca
SDD 239) which includes a monumentally dull version of the same symphony,
the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, and some deliberate trivia, comes Varèse’s
earlier, shorter, safer pieces conducted by the Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha
(Vox STGBY 643).
In the accompanying booklet assembled from his own writings, Stravinsky
makes a point of stressing that there was no tradition or system behind the Rite – he
was only guided by ear and instincts – and that Pulcinella (a crucial work in that
it was a mirror both to music’s past and Stravinsky’s future) was begun ‘without
preconceptions or aesthetic attitudes’.62 Likewise Varèse, whose compositional
impulses were similarly instinctive, deriving more from observing granite
outpourings in Burgundy and the processes of alchemy than from musical tradition.
But in the music of Varèse we can hear no tradition, apart from pulverised
fragments of Debussy and some unfortunate lapses into Stravinsky, one of whose
many strengths was an astonishing ability both to poach on various traditions and
to create his own completely idiosyncratic tradition out of his poachings. Quite
obviously the more conventional parts of Rite sprouted from the lush lyrical/
colouristic Russian undergrowth, while the revolutionary rhythmic structure
sprang from nowhere (and sadly went nowhere in particular as the icy fingers of
the antique spirit took over Stravinsky’s soul).
Stravinsky’s own version of the Rite tends to emphasise its traditionality,
making it more cuddly still, though characteristically exuberant (sometimes at the
expense of individual details) in the peasant stomps. Boulez, on the other hand,
tries to drain tradition from the score, coolly paring away the richness through
linear clarity and separation, rather than synthesis: and if his tempi are sometimes
wrong, and Stravinsky’s always right, then that’s a pity, as the Boulez version
of the ‘Rondes Printanières’, for example, becomes a dignified, extra-terrestrial
funeral dirge to Stravinsky’s mere dance divertissement.
There are no two ways of ‘seeing’ Varèse, and Cerha and the ‘Die Reihe’
Ensemble get closer to the one way than did Robert Craft on the earlier CBS
record. Stravinsky could perpetually tinker about with his orchestrations; Varèse

61
See ‘The Sound of Music’, The Spectator (9 August 1968).
62
Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (London: Faber,
1981), p. 112.
 Section 2: 1970–1971 125

could not, as his sounds are indivisible from the means of production: they are
‘sculpted’ in the instrumental ensemble. Questions of balance, dynamics, accent,
are precisely calculated not because they are important to the music, but because
they are the music. One’s ear is directed to perceive subtle changes within an
essentially static, basically chordal field: changes of weight, density, duration or
emphasis. Varèse obeyed no known laws of musical progression, and it is difficult
to come to terms with the fact that Integrales and Ionisation are contemporary with
Pulcinella and the Symphony of Psalms. His fierce sound aggregates cry out for
tape editing and montage (his frustration with the primitive technology available
to him prevented him from producing anything for 20 years); he conceived of his
works as a series which explores and identifies a circumscribed area of musical
activity (as distinct from Stravinsky’s magician-like multiplicity); he is never
concerned with cause and effect, musical ‘arguments’ or body rhythm; and pitched
noise predominates over conventional ‘notes’ – which makes it more a part of our
environment, so that the fire engine screaming past is an addition to the music, not
a disruption.
Varèse removed the glue from music 50 years ago: Stravinsky did not manage
it until he discovered Webern very late in life. Even severe, reticent pieces like
Symphonies of Wind Instruments (given a rather fuzzy reading by Ansermet) have
too much padding for my taste, accept too easily the prevailing mode of narrative
continuity; a mode Satie too was unable to work with, as he pieced together
Parade with his tiny aphoristic musical toys, leaving it to the power of sound
itself to make its own inevitable connections. To me there is too much technique
in Stravinsky. Perhaps that is just prejudice – but not one so deep that it is unable
to recognise that the Symphony of Psalms could not have happened any other way,
with any other background. And as conducted by Stravinsky himself – gravely,
ceremonially, but not humourlessly – it remains a fine and enduring memorial,
limited neither by time nor circumstances.

‘Uncommercial’ (New Statesman, 20 August 1971, p. 248)

I had intended to review Steve Reich’s Four Organs & Phase Patterns (Shandar
10005). But I couldn’t get hold of a copy. Shandar is a small, imaginative but
obscure French label, said to be handled in Europe by RCA. The RCA Press Office
didn’t know about it and didn’t want to know. The record import shops couldn’t
help either. The sympathetic girl at Record Hunter disapproved mildly: ‘Surely it’s
your job to review British records’ (or was it ‘support British records’?).
One occasionally entertains the suspicion that some reviewers are little more
than the unpaid lackeys of the record industry. They may quibble about the
artistic quality of individual records, but the overall artistic production policy is
never questioned. This policy can of course be justified by the Lowest Common
Denominator theory beloved by TV companies. But with huge financial resources
at their disposal they should do more than support and reflect current trends in
126 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

music taste: they have the power to influence taste away from repetitiousness
and routine.
It’s rather odd, but only to be expected, that it is the music that has grown up
alongside the LP record that has gained least from it. European companies are
less irresponsible than British ones. DGG have backed their golden Stockhausen
down to the last groove, and made known the music of his wilder stable-mate
Kagel. The cheap Wergo label (also under the Polydor umbrella) has recently
made available over here standards from the 1950s and 1960s long since available
on the continent.
As for the more lively American scene, coverage in British catalogues is
practically non-existent. The invaluable CBS Masterworks series was, predictably,
never taken up by English CBS, resulting in lack of publicity, delay and extra
cost for anyone interested. In this series one could find earlier Reich, Riley’s In C
and A Rainbow in Curved Air, and the indispensable early piano music of Cage,
available in Germany for at least a year, but unknown over here.
Similarly Time (now Mainstream) records are not to be found in England. This
series, run by Earle Brown for the past ten years or so, covers the Cage-Wolff-
Feldman-Brown axis, but has recently devoted a whole record to English music
(Bedford, Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies and Orton), and half a record to Cardew’s
AMM improvisation group.
But then, as with everything else, the economic considerations of new music
on record take precedence: Wergo are closing down their British distribution and
the CBS Masterworks series has folded up, both through lack of sufficient financial
returns. So Reich finds himself recorded by an insignificant French company. If
you happen to be passing through Paris, buy this record: you will hear a new
‘classical’ music of unprecedented vitality and strength of purpose, a music that
extends beyond the frontiers of the Cage–Stockhausen era.

‘Melody Rides Again’ (Music and Musicians, 20, October 1971, pp. 26–8)

And what about the post-Cardew scene? I asked each of the composers involved
in the Music Now concert at the Elizabeth Hall on 18 October to write a statement,
general or specific, long or short, relevant or irrelevant to their current musical
concerns and to the pieces they are writing specially for the concert. The results
of my enquiries – as much as possible in their own words, as though that were the
only information available – are as follows. ‘Post-Cardew’ is of course a loose art-
history type cliché: John White, a guru for Roger Smalley and Brian Dennis back in
the days when he taught at the RCM, acknowledges the benign influence of Cardew
from his Piano Sonata No. 35 (1968), has since proved himself to be something of a
counterforce in new English music, and is ‘responsible’ for the concert.
All the composers included (apart from Gavin Bryars and Brian Dennis – a
recent convert) have been, or are, strongly involved in/with the Scratch Orchestra,
founded by two of them – Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton – along with
 Section 2: 1970–1971 127

Cardew in 1969. Alec Hill writes of the Scratch: ‘I consider it in the long run to be
the most important of my activities’. For many of the composers the Scratch was
of crucial importance not so much in that it provided, to a greater or lesser extent,
a direct musical stimulus, but more in that it was a practical matrix for action
and experience, a pool of communal activity. Hill: ‘Music, both composition and
performance, is for me first and foremost a social activity. Every piece I have
completed has been specifically composed for certain performer friends with
whom I had currently been working, and with a definite performance situation in
mind.’ Hugh Shrapnel is more explicit:

The impetus that led me to my present musical activities was, in common

with many other people, a profound dissatisfaction with the existing musical
establishment: not just with modern music but with the whole musical climate
which begets it. The value of the Scratch is the spirit of working together and the
mixing of musicians with people working in other fields. To work in isolation
would be unthinkable.

This had direct musical consequences:

It was (perhaps) partly this feeling of impatience and dissatisfaction that led
me to write a series of compositions in 1969 which in retrospect seem to be a
protest and reaction against the kind of music I had been involved with up till
then. These pieces are all verbal, they make no reference to musical materials
except in a deliberately crude way; some of them give performance details
(timing, spacing, location etc); others, more abstract and conceptual, consist of
the outlining of a formal scheme, sometimes without any reference to content –
musical or otherwise.

Out of the prodigiously rich, gargantuan voracity of the Scratch – encompassing

all points from total chaos to more precise programming – some of the composers
evidently ‘found themselves’ and have subsequently moved out to a more defined,
specifically musical position. Shrapnel’s testimony is characteristic:

Afterwards I felt the need for a more positive approach to sound materials.
I accordingly wrote a piece called Anthology which consists of a very large
number of verbal quotes, culled from various musical sources, which pertain
to actual sounds … Most of the verbal pieces were written with large untrained
forces in mind (the Scratch), whereas my recent pieces reflect my present
interest in disciplined music-making for chamber-sized groups [namely the PT 63
Orchestra (Shrapnel, Hill, White and Christopher Hobbs)].

63
Promenade Theatre Orchestra, sometimes abbreviated to PTO.
128 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Discipline is now the watchword, after the years of indeterminacy and

improvisation. It is expressed in its most severe form in the three sentences of
Howard Skempton’s communication:

The composer is concerned with communication of the form, and concerned

with sound as the most powerful means of communicating the form. The form is
the single idea motivating the piece; without this concentration of attention there
is no unity. And without economy there is no power; and without self-control
there is nothing.

It was Cardew’s supposedly ‘free’ works that White found ‘seemed to me to

emphasise the need for a stricter discipline in the performer, an attitude of great
chivalry towards the internal needs of the material despite the apparent loopholes
left by the instructions (or lack of them)’. (The ‘coming together’ of Cardew
and White is ironic and rich in possibilities: Cardew, with his background of
Stockhausen and Cage; White with his of ‘Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony,
Reger, Karg-Elert, Franz Schmidt, Gunther Raphael, Mahler, Janáček, Frank
Martin, Scriabin, César Franck, Nielsen, Busoni, Bruckner, Berlioz, Alkan,
Satie, Medtner, Fauré, Schoenberg, Havergal Brian, Sorabji, van Dieren, Liszt,
Schumann, Reicha, Dussek, Godowsky and Weber’). Cardew’s influence on
White’s music (and one he might least have expected):

Lay in the formulation of the Machine concept. The sound and the activities of
the performers are fed like raw materials into a machine or process and emerge
as a pattern unique to the occasion on which the particular Machine is being
performed. The sounds tend towards a sort of ragged consonance, the procedures
usually involve much repetition with changes happening almost imperceptibly
over large spans of time, and the atmosphere is usually pretty calm and unruffled
however fast the pace of the music.

This is the model of a new total determinacy, with analogies to the Americans
Steve Reich and Terry Riley, enshrined in the PT Orchestra, which for Dennis:

Has accelerated a progress towards consonant harmonies which had already

stemmed from an interest in the harmonic series which I studied in great
depth (wrote several harmonics-based works from 1967 – before Stimmung
incidentally). Had also anticipated multi-repetition as well as the use of ready-
made material in a piece called Programmes (1968). Have never had a loose
Terry Riley approach to repetition and have always specified the precise number
of repeats of a given unit (many in simple multiples).

Hill is interested in the use of structures derived from change ringing: ‘the basic
concept is simple, almost naïve, although the structure of each performance may
be extremely complex and consists of playing the bells in a series of regular
 Section 2: 1970–1971 129

permutations of order, no sequence ever being repeated. On seven bells for

instance there are 5,040 possible changes’.64 Similarly the pieces which Shrapnel
has written since his first ‘musical’ piece, Bells (February 1970) ‘are the antithesis
of the verbal pieces. Whereas the latter attempt to define a very wide field in a very
vague way, the newer pieces consist of exhaustive exploration of a single (usually
very simple) musical entity (often by means of permutation).’
During the fifties and sixties Goehr, Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle used
change-ringing schemes in their music, but they used them to generate maximum
audible variety, while the method itself remained hidden and inaudible. Dennis:
‘The simple geometry inherent in later Webern is the nearest parallel in past
music to my present work, although it is much more rigorous than Webern; not as
economical perhaps but totally rigorous. The simple geometry of my own music is
always audible, the proportions are simple and exactly measured.’
Michael Parsons emphasises a different principle is involved in these single
process-reduced material-pieces:

The idea of one and the same activity being done simultaneously by a number of
people, so that everyone does it slightly differently, and so the ‘unity’ becomes
‘multiplicity’, gives one a very economical form of notation for one thing – it
is only necessary to specify one procedure, and the variety comes from the way
everyone does it differently. This multiple interpretation of one activity seems to
follow on from La Monte Young’s ‘unitary’ activities, such as ‘Draw a straight
line and follow it’ (particularly from doing them as group pieces rather than
solos). What applies to successive attacks in the piano piece X for Henry Flint
(however uniformly you play the chords they are bound to come out differently
– this is discussed by Cardew in the Treatise Handbook) is also true of a lot of
people doing the same thing together – however much they are trying to do it the
same, they all do it differently.

Similarly it is the social aspect of change-ringing that most interests Alec Hill:

Small groups of people gathering together for an evening to perform a ritual

game lasting several hours according to very precise rules in which the technique
of performance is not so much to listen to the overall sound produced, but to
watch the movements of each of the other performers in order that one might
steer one’s path amongst them without ever colliding (i.e. so that no two bells
ring simultaneously).

Routine both as method and result is central to the PT Orchestra. Shrapnel: ‘Many
of my recent scores reflect my interest in a kind of endlessness, of something
happening in the background and not disturbing whatever else is happening.’ The
PT Orchestra’s advertisement – ‘Restful reed-organs, tinkling toy pianos, soothing

64
Using the simple calculation 1 × 2 × 3 × 4 × 5 × 6 × 7 = 5,040.
130 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

psalteries, suave swanee whistles, jolly jaws harps – NO noisy electronics. (Just
the job for that lazy Sunday afternoon.) All musical material guaranteed thru-
composed – NO hit-or-miss improvisation’ – sounds like Satie’s furniture music
come home to roost: ‘We want to establish a music designed to satisfy “useful”
needs. Art has no part in such needs. Furniture music creates a vibration; it has no
other goal; it fills the same role as light and heat – as comfort in every form.’
Other Satie-like tendencies are evident in technique – c.f. Roger Shattuck’s
description of Satie’s forms as reducing ‘to a single brief image, an instantaneous
whole both fixed and moving. Satie’s form can be extended by reiteration or
endurance. Satie frequently scrutinises a very simple musical object; a short
unchanging ostinato accompaniment plus a fragmentary melody. Out of this
sameness comes subtle variety’65 – in Bryars’ titles: Marvellous Aphorisms are
scattered richly throughout these pages; Some of the interesting places you’ll see
on a Long-Distance Flight; The Ride Cymbal and the Band that caused the Fire in
the Sycamore Trees; Serenely Beaming and Leaning on a Five-barred Gate; The
Squirrel and the Ricketty-Racketty Bridge; Golders(as) Green by Eps(ups)om(’n)
Downs – and the aims of Christopher Hobbs:

Aims? Those, I suppose, of most lazy people; to relegate my known universe to

a position where it no longer impinges on my indolence. This is slightly more
difficult than it might seem, for it involves explanation of bothersome facts …
I guess I have the desire to render unknown quantities helpless (preferably with
laughter). An instance of this: Satie’s proposed opera for dogs. (The curtain rises;
the set consists of a bone.) We musicians could still be useful in a dog’s world,
sitting in the pit blowing silent dog whistles and distributing aniseed. When the
Revolution comes, you’ll find me down at the kennels with the running-dogs.

After furniture music comes the ready-made, the concept of which came to John
White:

from C. Hobbs as a practical proposition. His Remorseless Lamb (Myra Hess out
of J.S. Bach) and First Doomsday Piece (C. Hobbs out of John Bull) brought
home to me the fact that the music one loves and cherishes can in a sense become
one’s own. C. Hobbs’s researches into Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy (realised
almost verbatim for reed organs and toy pianos) further persuade me that the
terrain of ‘machine’ procedure contains also the possibility of happily indulged
sentimentality (rather than the noble sentiment which is generally considered
superior). System and Sentimentality are the SS of my Reich.

This is a music which reintroduces diatonicism, and melody, and makes use of the
classics and the popular music of yesteryear and our own ‘sad distracted times’

65
Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Arts in France, 1885–1918 (London:
Faber, 1958), p. 111.
 Section 2: 1970–1971 131

(Thomas Tomkins): whether in the Ketèlbey revival, Scratch Orchestra Popular

Classics category, the Portsmouth Sinfonia, or Gavin Bryars’ use of Victorian songs
in his version of Stockhausen’s Plus-Minus, or rock in his new piece: ‘It is a rock
’n’ roll piece, though played by us (straight) musicians. The Portsmouth Sinfonia,
when playing classical music, can sound like rock ’n’ roll, or neo-classical music,
by way of their incompetence. We, in a different setting, will sound like neither!’
This is the musical equivalent of pop art, just as the techniques of this new
music have analogies with Process Art, Systems Art, Op Art and Minimal Art. So,
too, with Concept Art, especially in the work of Gavin Bryars:

The phenomena that a piece exhibits are of less interest than, as with most
pieces, that which is logically prior to the piece … In the recent past at least
some of the pieces I’ve done have been interesting not only because of their
aural effect (which may or may not be considerable), but also because of what
they a) imply and b) contain. The implications have been logical and hence
necessary, rather than literary, political, social, situational and hence tangential.
Their contents have tended towards perceptual incompleteness, towards excess
(of duration, number, ratio of effect to cause, of visual to aural) … The use
of simple existential facts, as distinct from developmental argument, seems
to be of considerable importance, and – to this end – a minimal amount of
purposeful action tends to take place (‘change’ being understood as a constant in
any perception of ‘fact’.) It seems to me that the propositions of music are not
expressible directly by sound, but are made manifest through sound, and for this
reason the score in notated music is of paramount importance.

‘Disciplinarians’ (New Statesman, 29 October 1971, p. 599)

While all the other contemporary-music-promoting organisations get comparatively

large Arts Council grants to put on concerts which might have happened anyway
(or shouldn’t happen at all), Music Now, absolutely indispensable and scandalously
under-supported by pennies from Piccadilly, has presented within the space of a
year concerts of the two seemingly contradictory wings of English experimental
music. Last November the QEH overflowed with the riotous musical assembly
of the Scratch Orchestra. On 18 October, on the same stage, many of the same
composer-performers sat behind music stands, playing instruments in notated
compositions which left little outlet for individual liberty.
This disciplined wing reflects the profound changes in compositional attitude
that have taken place in the last few years. The Scratch Orchestra, meanwhile,
desperate to redefine its social and musical role, is temporarily incapacitated by
ideological strife. As a whole the concert was spontaneously enjoyable. Each piece
(with one possible exception) was concerned only with making its surface apparent,
by moving through its prescribed materials with a simple, unfussy efficiency.
132 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

If the concert represented a loosely assembled ‘movement’ at a particular

moment in time, then three mutually inclusive characteristics were noticeable –
the systemic, the Sibelian and the stolen. The systemic was no surprise, since
repetitive systems, running uncomplicated material through a more or less
mechanical process, are all the rage today. English systems are less incessantly
chromium-plated than the American ones of Philip Glass or Steve Reich, but no
less severe if Alec Hill’s Annable’s London Surprise is anything to go by. Here
wind and string instruments strictly and literally follow through a series of bell-
ringing patterns. Hill sees change-ringing as England’s one entirely original and
unique contribution to music, and is particularly attracted to the fact that it is a
ritual game played according to very precise rules.
The games vary, the rules are more or less strict, the sounds more or less
attractive. More charming was John White’s Autumn Countdown Machine, where
ticking metronomes and counting-out dictated where each group placed its four-
note tune; the system has a built-in self-regulating device. More charming still
was Frame 30:30 by Brian Dennis, to whom a system is an ‘invention which
enables the activity to re-exist – like the rules of a card game, a game of patience’.
Although his piece seemed to spring from a different aesthetic climate and, with
its microtonal milk bottles, soothing psalteries and tinkling toy pianos, conformed
to the kind of identikit image other pieces set out to avoid, it was none the worse
for that. Most of the composers, like children with new toys, had grabbed all the
resources available to them and used them in a rather monochrome way.
Sibelian pieces are dense rather than open-textured, slow and dark-hued. Hill’s
was both systemic and Sibelian, Howard Skempton’s Movement for Orchestra and
Hugh Shrapnel’s Elegy both confined themselves to a succession of heavy middle
register chords or overlapping scales. Chris Hobbs’s Piobaireachd Exercise
combined the stolen with the Sibelian in overlaying a whole series of exercises
taken from a bagpipe tutor. The effect was not unlike hearing all the music ever
written for Scottish travelogues played simultaneously. Hobbs’s attitude in these
ready-mades is refreshing: ‘Most of my pieces are based on material by other
composers. I don’t see this as being parasitical; music, after all, is inanimate.’66
Two pieces stood outside these very general categories. Michael Parsons’s
Orchestra Piece, calculatedly unsystemic, recalled the dialectic between sound
and silence of bygone days. Gavin Bryars’s 1, 2, 1–2–3–4 was based on an
entirely different proposition. Players performed according to what they heard
on their rock-orientated cassette tapes. At times the results were hilarious, which
tended to distract me (as a listener) from what could have been my role – that of
‘resolving inductively the series of implications the piece presents so as to arrive
at a hypothesis as to what constitutes a set of unheard facts’.67

66
Quoted in Nyman, Experimental Music, p. 161.
67
Ibid., p. 94.
 Section 2: 1970–1971 133

‘Dart’s Epitaph’ (New Statesman, 17 December 1971, p. 872)

Masters of Early English Keyboard Music: Thurston Dart. L’Oiseau Lyre: Decca
(5 records OLS 114-8)
The very last track, played by Dart with a poignant simplicity, is Bull’s Goodnight.
A ‘“goodnight” appears often to have been the musical equivalent of an epitaph (for
instance, the Earl of Essex’s Goodnight, which was a ballad on his execution)’.68
Decca are to be congratulated that there is no hint of the Memorial Album about
this box, no urge to label the piece ‘Dart’s Goodnight’.69
But to me – and to anyone else who knew Dart – that’s how it must sound. But
sentiment should not obscure facts – this was not Dart playing his own epitaph
shortly before his untimely death earlier this year. The fifth disc was recorded
as long ago as 1963, and the other four – all of which have been electronically
reprocessed for stereo – even earlier.
On one level the records are living evidence of Dart’s invaluable pioneer
work as a musicologist (a word he was not particularly fond of), as editor and
scholar. The music ranges widely – from Anon 1325, through an early Upon la mi
re (a crazy drunken tune above a three-note ostinato), the Mulliner Book, to the
Elizabethan ‘classics’ – Byrd, Gibbons, Farnaby, Bull, and post-classic Tomkins
– and beyond, through the late seventeenth century (Matthew Locke) to the mid-
eighteenth (Roseingrave and Arne).
On a second level the discs remind us of something which tended to be forgotten
as Dart spent more and more of his time on committees, in scholarship and in the
upper reaches of musical education – that he was a brilliant performer, possessed
of a tremendous keyboard flair. His commitment to the life and music of John
Bull – which was to have come to fruition in the book he was too busy to finish
– perhaps accounts for the obvious authority he brings to Bull on the fifth record.
The bigger Pavans and Galliards are done with a weighty massiveness, intensely
musical and never ponderous (which is a danger in Bull), while the shorter lyrical
dance pieces have about them an unerring delicacy, highly controlled and sensitive,
never trivialised.
Within this ‘official’ field, Dart’s sympathies were catholic (unlike many of
his colleagues he realised that music didn’t stop in its tracks in 1750). Admittedly
when I went to study with him he told me bluntly that if I was interested in Mahler
then he was the wrong man to help me, yet he was a tireless champion of electronic
music, brought Morton Feldman in to lecture and finally realised his vision of a
musical education freed from the pointless strangulation of a system still obsessed
with harmony and counterpoint. Today, thanks to Dart, degree students at London

68
See Dart’s liner notes to Masters of Early English Keyboard Music V (L’Oiseau-
Lyre, SOL 255).
69
Thurston Dart (1921–71) was Professor of Music at King’s College London from
1964, and Nyman’s tutor and mentor.
134 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

University can ‘major’ in non-western music – a remarkable and enlightened

development.
Part of Dart’s enlightening influence was due to his belief that – like the best
of today’s music – processes are more important than objects, that the point of
writing a thesis was ‘to bring the researcher on’ and not the particular subject
researched, which was in a way irrelevant. This often went to very attractive and
unlikely extremes (as did so many other things – his ideas on the Brandenburgs
for instance). I told him that I hadn’t ever been out of England for any length of
time, so he thought it would be a good idea if I studied abroad. Where? The British
Council offered scholarships to East Europe and he knew that the Romanian quota
was not filled. Why not Romania then? What could I study there that was relevant
to the seventeenth-century bawdy songs I was then editing? It doesn’t matter –
what about folk music? (I still suspect that Dart was one of the local residents
who, in Peter Sellers’s ‘Balham – Gateway to the South’, subscribed to the fund
to send Eugene the wonderchild pianist to Paris, or Vienna … or anywhere.70)
And while I was there I received many solicitous letters from him, books, and on
one occasion, the man himself, come to ‘see how I was getting on’ and to have a
holiday ‘bear-led’ by me.
Fortunately, but not really surprisingly, Dart’s generosity, understanding
and humanity shine through his playing of even such a supposedly inflexible
instrument as a harpsichord.

70
‘Balham – Gateway to the South’ was a comedy sketch for a 1950s BBC radio
series narrated by the actor Peter Sellers, where one of the local residents helps send a child
abroad rather in the way Dart helped send Nyman’s trip to Romania.
 Section 3
1972–1977

‘Learning from Scratch’ (New Statesman, 28 January 1972, pp. 122–3)

With the first performance last Friday of Cardew’s fifth, all seven Paragraphs of
The Great Learning have now, at last, been publicly presented. The occasion had
to it a symbolic neatness and more than a touch of poignancy. The Macnaghten
Concerts had commissioned Paragraph 1 in 1968, were held by Cardew to
be implicitly responsible for the other six, and appropriately mounted this
performance of Paragraph 5. Among the large body of performers were members
of the Scratch Orchestra, which was itself born out of the first performance of
Paragraph 2 in 1969. Paragraph 5 in particular reflected what Cardew understood
to be the internal structure of the SO when he wrote it in 1970. More recently the
SO has been undergoing ideological (and hence musical) change: the thoughts of
Mao rather than those of Confucius (on which The Great Learning is based and
whose message is that if the individual sorts himself out the world will sort itself
out of its own accord) are becoming generally accepted as a guiding-principle for
the orchestra’s activities.
Paragraph 5 is an extravaganza of a type unprecedented in experimental music,
beautifully geared to the extravagant talents of the orchestra, though it suffered in
performance from a noticeable lack of extravagance. The work gives scope for
trained singers (10 elaborate Ode Machines), untrained musicians (eight verbally
notated short compositions), and for everybody in the extended improvisation
which forms the second half.
This performance in many ways told its own story about the current interests
of the orchestra. Nobody bothered to submit to the rigours of the Action and
Number Scores; notated communal versions of the word pieces had been specially
composed when previously spontaneity was the ideal; and the sheer length of the
improvisation seemed to have exhausted the players’ interest or resources some
time before it ended. Elsewhere restraint, austerity and unanimity were the rule,
though when called on to ‘blow their troubles to the winds’ they did so with the
rude vigour of old.
What impressed me most about Paragraph 5 as a composition was the way in
which in the first part, two completely independent levels of music are combined.
While the mass alternate pieces with chanted statements of the Confucius text, each
member of the ‘élite’ performs his Ode Machine. These are very strong, endless
linear lyrics, which when heard all together produced a fascinating fortuitous
counterpoint rather like, to borrow Cage’s phrase, a cable of sound. The songs
start at staggered intervals (so that they all end approximately together), but there
136 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

is no sense of competition. Even so Brian Dennis managed effortlessly to out-sing

the rest – by many decibels of volume and many trembles of vibrato. Cardew’s
scores generously – perhaps too generously – allow this kind of imbalance which
(depending on what ‘focus’ you read it in) could be interesting, frustrating or, in
this case, hilarious.
This is perhaps one aspect of what the orchestra is reacting against. Now
The Great Learning, possibly the most important large scale vocal/instrumental
work produced in England since Israel in Egypt,1 can lose its exclusively Scratch
Orchestra orientation, while the orchestra ceases to be an irritant to the bourgeoisie
(especially the Arts Council) and devotes itself to providing, in ways not yet
formalised, ‘music for the people’.

‘Causerie’ (New Statesman, 10 March 1972, p. 324)

Had you not known that both these records promote the cause of Bangladesh, I
doubt if you would gather it from the musical contents. To me they both show
(incidentally) that music may express nothing in particular and may therefore have
a magnificent number of uses, and that words and not musical intentions may make
music specific. There’s nothing really about the Ravi Shankar/George Harrison
Bangladesh concert (held at Madison Square Gardens on 1 August 1971) that links
it directly with the atrocities – not even Harrison’s punchy single ‘Bangladesh’,
since the record also includes his ‘Here comes the sun’ for instance, which could
also be used as an ‘anthem’ in a different context. Was it just the $243,418 box-
office receipts being donated to the United Nations Fund for relief of Bangladesh
refugee children that made it any different from any other big name pop concert?
Shankar’s sincerity is never in doubt on this occasion – he is a Bengali by birth
and, horrified by the suffering of his people, wanted to do something on a very
large scale that ‘might bring in a lot of money and, you know, awareness’. The first
side is taken up with a sitar–sarod duet based on a Bengali tune, and in his playing
and (especially) in his spoken introduction one feels Shankar’s aloofness from
an audience he would usually treat with informative condescension (he knows
they’re only there for the rock). Words speak louder than music: when he gets
applause after tuning the sitar, he comments acidly: ‘If you appreciate the tuning
so much, I hope you’ll enjoy the playing more’.
There’s no proof that the vast audience was in fact ‘made aware of something
very few of them felt or knew clearly – about Bangladesh and what has happened to
cause such distress’.2 There are some fine tracks – Leon Russell’s incisive version
of the Stones’ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, Harrison and Eric Clapton’s guitar work on
‘My Guitar Gently Weeps’ (the best of the Harrison songs) – yet the set is almost

1
George Frideric Handel’s Israel in Egypt was first performed in London in 1739.
2
Quoted in ‘After 34 years, The Concert For Bangladesh Just Keeps on Giving’ (see
http://beatles.ncf.ca/concert_for_bangladesh_harrison.html (accessed 8 January 2012)).
 Section 3: 1972–1977 137

worth the money just for the 1971 Dylan singing vintage numbers like ‘Blowin’
In The Wind’ and ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. His voice may have lost the lazy, acid
edge it had in those days, but his songs outstrip (in both words and music) today’s
pop as represented by the suspect (but attractive) pseudo-gospel religiosity of
Harrison’s ‘My Sweet Lord’ and Preston’s ‘That’s The Way God Planned It’ (what
a message for Bangladesh!) At least Phil Spector’s excellent production spares us
the saccharine he poured over the Beatles’ last group album, Let it Be.3
Shankar has written that the proceeds of the record will also go to Bangladesh
and that perhaps explains why the comparatively small amount of music – 83
minutes, of which 16 are by Shankar – should be spread over as many as six sides:
the last has only seven minutes of music. The accompanying souvenir handbook
must have cost money which could well have been channelled elsewhere –
58 pages of colour photos taken at the concert with (and I’m sure the irony is
unintentional) a starving child on the front cover.
By contrast the record of Bangladesh folk music (in Deben Bhattacharya’s
The Living Tradition series) makes no extravagant claims for itself. As a historical
document it is more remarkable than the Concert, since it was all recorded during
October and November 1971 in Bangladesh. The music has dignity and restraint,
is exclusively lyrical and devoid of the virtuosity one associates with North Indian
music. It would be interesting to know under what conditions the recordings
were made, how characteristic the music is of Bengal as a whole, and whether
Bhattacharya, also a Bengali, has been able to detect any influence of the times on
the music – apart from the adaptation of traditional songs to new, revolutionary
texts. Probably there has been no such influence – it’s too facile and sentimental to
equate ‘dignity and restraint’ with what the Bengalis suffered or the way they put
up with their suffering.

‘Circle Complete’ (New Statesman, 31 March 1972, p. 434)

John Tilbury put his finger on it: he mentions a piano piece by Morton Feldman in
which one high note is repeated consecutively about a dozen times. Give that to a
music student, he says, and he:

[Would] proceed quietly from nothing with the whole weight of western culture
bearing down on his shoulders, crescendoing gradually to just beyond the
halfway mark and decrescendoing, not too soon, to nothing (a discreet softness);

3
Producer Phil Spector was secretly brought in by Lennon to remix and orchestrate
the Beatles’ Let It Be album in early 1969. While Spector’s treatment of certain tracks was
‘undeniably tasteless’, Ian Macdonald concedes that ‘[his] feat of diverting attention from
how badly played the original track is can only be accounted a success’ (see Macdonald’s
Revolution in the Head (London: Pimlico, 1995) p. 271).
138 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

the circle is complete, climax achieved, destination reached. But how different
from Feldman’s intentions. How remote from the reality of this music.

Although Cardew has advised against thinking of music in the same terms as
politics, as a struggle between parties or factions, since ‘it makes us cling to our
distinguishing features’, Tilbury’s practical detail neatly distinguishes the ‘two
nations’ of contemporary music – the experimental (Cage, Feldman, Cardew,
Bryars) from the avant-garde (Boulez, Stockhausen, Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies),
the different concepts behind whose music makes different demands and breeds
a different class of performers: Tilbury, David Tudor, the Scratch Orchestra on
the one hand; Kontarsky, Holliger, the Fires of London on the other. The two
don’t mix, they don’t play each other’s music, they keep themselves to themselves,
and their roles and rewards are mightily different. Avant-garde means fame,
festivals, commissions, and acceptance by the establishment and their audiences;
experimental (Cage apart) means a ghetto, repressive tolerance, a small but totally
dedicated following, and earning your living some other way.
Feldman has until recently belonged to the dedicated. It was he who (to be
historically accurate) first used indeterminacy in performance.4 Unlike Cage and
Wolff, Feldman was not interested in devising means to avoid the shackles of
‘taste, memory, and desire’, but merely to allow the innocent sounds of his choice
to flow free of any organisation or system. And over the years the aesthetic of
his music has remained constant: an absorption with the ultimate refinement of
sound, an accumulation of sounds in stillness and quietude; succession rather than
progression, without climax, centre, drama, achievement, or destination.
Feldman is moving out of the ghetto and is beginning to achieve the status of
a real composer – but in the process a lot has been lost. I had thought that perhaps
the performers (Fires of London, augmented) might search out what’s unique
about his music which, in turn, would affect the quality of their playing. I was (of
course) wrong. For them he was just another composer to be gobbled up along
the production line; nothing special, just softer and slower than other music, and
technically undemanding. To this type of player, technical difficulty resides only
in dexterity and complexity; any music which doesn’t present such challenges is
by definition ‘easy’ since they don’t realise that Feldman presents a totally different
set of technical challenges, beginning with a scrupulous care and attention to the
production of the single note, an object in itself, charged with its own tension. Here
we had gross sounds, ill-conceived or non-existent balance, no attention to detail,
and a complete inability to produce anything below mezzo forte.
Nor is Feldman himself blameless – his new music is very open to such
misrepresentation. The rot set in with the first Viola in my life in 1970; where his
music had been totally flat, featureless and without perspective, where all things
were equal, we now had a miniature viola concerto, with fat crescendos, and the
notion of dualism – the conventional dialectic between solo and tutti. Since then

4
See, for example, the five Projections (1950–51).
 Section 3: 1972–1977 139

things have got worse, the mannerisms are tarted up with irrelevant paraphernalia
he had managed to keep his hands off before, and where previously his music
seemed just to ‘happen’ it is now beginning to be very consciously ‘composed’.
Perhaps the western cultural tradition has gained a new convert in Feldman,
Stockhausen-basher extraordinary.

‘Christian Wolff’ (Music and Musicians, 20, April 1972, p. 8)

The day – 28 March – when all the leading English new-music groups and
individuals (Scratch Orchestra, Gentle Fire,5 Intermodulation, Mouth of Hermes,
AMM, PTO, David Bedford, Brian Dennis, Gavin Bryars) get together (bury their
differences?) under one roof (Cecil Sharp House) is surely a day worthy of note.
More so when the collaboration is occasioned by the first British performance of
Christian Wolff’s Burdocks directed by the composer himself – a performance
which will introduce, one hopes, to a wider public the music of a composer held in
the highest esteem by a large and dedicated band of initiates.
The nature of Wolff’s music has perhaps not helped its wider dissemination:
small‑scale, subtle, precise and requiring specialised skills for both performer
and listener (Cage, on the other hand, is public and gregarious). Wolff’s music is
permanent proof (if proof still be needed) that absolute precision and refinement –
of thought, language and sound – and indeterminacy are not mutually exclusive. ‘In
the music of Christian Wolff, the technical problems breed an attitude of humility
and involvement. Difficulties can be beneficial if they produce involvement’
(Howard Skempton). The kind of involvement of the performer is succinctly
expressed by John Tilbury:

You are so involved with actually making the sound that you have no chance of
emotional indulgence: you have a job to do, and it takes all your concentration
to do it efficiently – i.e. musically. With this music you learn the prime qualities
needed in performing: discipline, devotion and disinterestedness.6

Wolff has in fact remained completely faithful to the principles and practices of
indeterminacy ‘laid down’ by the ‘New York School’ (even though they were not
the law‑givers: that role is left to Stockhausen) in the early 1950s – Cage, Feldman,

5
Gentle Fire was an improvisational group, formed in 1968, which took its name from
one of the hexagrams of the I-Ching. It gave the first British performance of Stockhausen’s
Kurzwellen at the 1969 Harrogate Festival. Its members included Richard Bernas, Hugh
Davies, Graham Hearn, Stuart Jones and Michael Robinson (see Hugh Davies, ‘Gentle
Fire: An Early Approach to Live Electronic Music’, Leonardo Music Journal, 11 (1990),
pp. 53–60).
6
See John Tilbury and Michael Parsons, ‘The Contemporary Pianist’, Musical Times,
110 (February 1969), pp. 150–52, p. 151; also in Ark Magazine, 45 (Winter 1969), p. 42.
140 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Brown and Wolff (who at that time was in his mid‑teens). Composers actually
contemporary with Wolff – La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier – have proceeded on
radically different lines. Wolff’s recent (1971) definition of what is a musical score
in no way contradicts the attitudes of those crucially important years: composition
(a score) is only material for performance; it should make possible the liberty
and dignity of the performer; it should equally well be able to surprise, at any
moment, all those it concerns – players, composer and listener; it should also allow
for concentration, precision of detail, effort, relaxation or collapse, virtuosity and
very ordinary playing. No sound, noise, interval etc. is, as such, preferable to any
other sound (comprising those that surround us) provided that one may (a) reject
(écarter) or approach them freely, and that (b) the sound should not be used to
force the sentiments of anybody to leave the listeners as free as the players.7
Burdocks, written at about the same time, is a comprehensive application of
these principles, and it is particularly fitting that it should be performed in England
since it seems to represent a summation of Wolff’s experiments with notation and
the experience he gained from working with English musicians when he was over
here in 1968. The immediate results of that visit were an extended interview in
M&M and the Prose Collection, a series of word scores written ‘for those who
don’t necessarily have a musical education’ (for the sort of forces that soon after
combined to form the Scratch Orchestra – though not exclusively).8
Burdocks comprises ten pieces to be combined in performance in a manner
decided upon by the interpreters. Half use verbal notation, the other five some sort
of quasi-musical notation. No specific instruments are indicated. The work thus
provides material for both trained and untrained musicians, whether able or unable
to read conventionally notated music, whether playing conventional, exotic,
home‑made instruments or found objects. The piece requires great flexibility in the
grouping and regrouping of the musicians to accomplish the highly differentiated
tasks represented by the various pieces.
Composing is one thing, performing another (as Cage so rightly said), but here
are a couple of Wolff’s notations: Piece III: orchestra of any number; each player
makes about 511 sounds, each one different in some way; or Piece IV: at least 15
players in each orchestra, each player chooses one to three sounds, fairly quiet.
Using one of these each time, play as simultaneously as possible with the next
sound of the player nearest to you; then with the nearest after him …
That’s one side of Burdocks: a wide range of proposals, materials, notations and
suggestions, from the more or less specific to the more or less general. The other
side is just as, if not more, fascinating: the attitudes taken towards these proposals,

7
Wolff, ‘“ … let the listeners be just as free as the players”: Fragments to make up
an interview’, originally published in VH 101, Revue trimestrielle, 4 (Winter 1970–71); see
also Cues: Writings & Conversations (Cologne: MusikTexte, 1998), p. 86.
8
See ‘Taking Chances: From a conversation with Victor Schonfield’, Music and
Musicians (May 1969), pp. 38–40, and ‘“ … let the listeners be just as free as the players”:
fragments to make up an interview’ (in Cues: Writings & Conversations, p. 78).
 Section 3: 1972–1977 141

materials, notations and suggestions by the players, as realised in the sounds they
make. Not only, for example, do pieces X (‘Flying, and possibly crawling or sitting
still’) and VI, a near pentatonic tune and (three) accompaniment rhythms, seem to
appeal to a different performing clientele, but the scope of possible interpretations
of any individual piece seems comparatively limitless.
This performance of Burdocks could, then, be viewed as a means of uniting
the varied interests of all the groups/performers taking part: or as a means of
emphasising their differences, since, at this stage of the indeterminate game, each
person/group will read and perform the pieces in the light of their own current
musical interests. And there lies one of the strengths of Burdocks: it doesn’t force
you to do anything you don’t want to do, or in a way you don’t want to do it, yet it
doesn’t allow you to do what you might have done anyway had the piece not been
composed the way it has.

‘The Experimental Tradition’ (Art and Artists, October 1972, pp. 44–8)

The ‘true story’ of Fluxus is currently running in these very pages, told like-it-
was by those directly involved.9 Having missed the whole Fluxus game myself,
and lacking the benefit of action replays, I shall avoid unfair comparison with the
who-what-why-when Fluxus documenters, and instead deal with the movement
in a wider context: that of what I shall call the experimental music tradition,
established by Cage and his acolytes in New York in the early 1950s – which gave
it a ten-year head start. What did Fluxus take from and add to the experimental
mainstream (which flowed on and around it regardless)? Or was Fluxus a self-
sufficient isolated phenomenon, a brilliant creative incident, which appeared from
nowhere and disappeared without trace, having established its own fragile laws,
stylistics, behaviour patterns, aficionados etc?
I don’t propose to deal with the common denominators of Fluxus, but with the
work of three composers – George Brecht, La Monte Young and Takehisa Kosugi,
whose work did pass into the general currency of new music, in England at least,
in the hands of John Tilbury and Cornelius Cardew; even quite recently Frederic
Rzewski allowed his friends to put on a performance of La Monte’s fire piece in
the New York church-cum-synagogue where he was an organist, losing his job as
a result. Fluxus lives! I shall discuss their work from a primarily musical point of
view, bearing in mind what Cardew wrote in his Draft Constitution for the Scratch

9
This article was first published in a themed issue of Art and Artists on the Fluxus
movement, and coincided with the opening of Fluxshoe, a travelling and variable exhibition
of Fluxus work. Since the rest of the magazine covered the documentation of Fluxus artists,
Nyman chose to concentrate on musical aspects of the movement, as exemplified in the
work of George Brecht, La Monte Young and Takehisa Kosugi, developing on his writings
about Fluxus in Experimental Music.
142 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Orchestra: that the ‘word music and its derivatives are here not understood to refer
exclusively to sound and related phenomena (hearing, etc)’.10
If sound/hearing were the only criterion, then Fluxus was a ‘diversion’ if only
because of its refreshing anti-modernism; gone are the nasty atonal sounds of
Cage-Stockhausen and Boulez-Wolff (they were all in it together) and in their
place event scores very sensibly called for old favourites, classics, foxtrots
– nostalgic notions which didn’t re-surface into experimental music until the
Ketèlbey revival in England in 1970.11 And like most English music (but not
American or Japanese) Fluxus lived quite happily in the backwoods untouched by
the Electronic Revolution.
But it was largely through Cage that music lost its sound-only virginity: vision
was always there, but the screen was in complete darkness, except for opera. Both
Brecht and Young had direct contact with Cage in the late 1950s – Brecht at the
New York School for Social Research in 1958–59, and Young in that mecca of
serialism, Darmstadt. As a result La Monte took up chance methods and pieces
(Vision and Poem) in which random number tables were used to determine
the timing and succession of events, while Brecht, who had worked on chance
methods independently of Cage, was coming up with pieces (Candle Piece for
Radios, Card Piece for Voices) which had built-in chance durations. The difference
is significant: chance applied from the outside, or occurring from the inside.
These and Brecht’s first ‘Event’, Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event), differed from
true event-to-be in that they were ensemble pieces in which each performer had
something different to do, these different somethings interpenetrating in a spirit of
multiplicity (Cage country). Not that group realisations of monostructural events
are ruled out – Brecht’s Comb Music, Drip Event, La Monte’s Hold a Fifth,12
Kosugi’s Theatre Piece and many others are singularly susceptible to this method
of presentation – but here each performer is given the same verbal information,
a ‘score’, not an individual ‘part’. The use by many people of a single notational
idea has since proved to be very fruitful in experimental music. Michael Parsons
has written that:

The idea of one and the same activity being done simultaneously by a number
of people so that everyone does it slightly differently and so the ‘unity’ becomes
‘multiplicity’ gives one a very economical form of notation – it is only necessary
to specify one procedure, and the variety comes from the way everyone does it
differently. This is an example of making use of ‘hidden resources’ in the sense

10
Cardew, ‘A Scratch Orchestra: draft constitution’, Musical Times, 110/1516 (June
1969), pp. 617–19, p. 617.
11
Albert Ketèlbey (1875–1959) was a highly successful composer of popular,
‘lowbrow’ music.
12
Nyman is referring here to Young’s Composition 1960 No. 7.
 Section 3: 1972–1977 143

of individual differences (rather than talents or abilities) which is neglected in

classical concert music (though not in folk music).13

La Monte Young relates his event scores – which he chose to call ‘Compositions’
– directly to Cage: he has said that since most of Cage’s pieces ‘were generally
realised as a complex of programmed sounds and activities over a prolonged period
of time with events coming and going, I was perhaps the first to concentrate on and
delimit the work to be a single event or object in these less traditionally musical
areas’.14 Brecht came to the same position at the same time, and his relationship
to Cage is quite clear, since both their aesthetic systems draw on examples from
everyday reality. Compare the following: ‘If you go down the street in the city
you can see that people are moving about with intentions, but you don’t know
what those intentions are. Many, many things happen which can be viewed in
purposeless ways’ (Cage) 15 with Brecht’s ‘The occurrence that would be of most
interest to me would be the little occurrences on the street’.16 Similarly, they are
both aware of the organising tendencies of the perceptual faculties: ‘the less we
structure the theatrical occasion and the more it is like unstructured daily life,
the greater will be the stimulus to the structuring faculty of each person in the
audience’ (Cage)17 versus Brecht’s ‘the act of imagination or perception is in itself
an arrangement, so there is no avoiding anyone making arrangements’.18
The differences are of course more revealing than the similarities: Cage is
interested in quantity rather than quality, in what is happening instead of what is
happening (at least in theory); the listener/viewer is supplied with a representation
of life-chaos which he is left to interpret, or arrange in his own fashion. Brecht is not
concerned with the process of the process. If Cage’s music were, in fact, that street scene
(if only it were!) instead of a musical idealisation or attempted imitation of it, then
Brecht could be seen as adopting the perceiver’s role – sifting, selecting, noticing,
noting, arranging qualities, not quantities. Cage, despite his desire to dissolve the
art-life dichotomy, is still dealing with the facts of musical life, Brecht directly
with the facts of life: ‘Events are poetry, through music, getting down to facts’ is
a (previously unpublished) Brecht remark. When Cage noticed the horn player
emptying the spit out of his instrument was more interesting than the sounds of the

13
See ‘Melody Rides Again’, Music and Musicians, 20 (October 1971), pp. 26–8, p. 28.
14
See Richard Kostelanetz, ‘Conversation with La Monte Young’, in La Monte
Young and Maria Zazeela, Selected Writings (Munich: Heiner Friedrich, 1969), p. 32.
15
In Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, ‘An Interview with John Cage’, Tulane
Drama Review, 10/2 (Winter 1965), pp. 50–72, p. 57.
16
Brecht, editorial to ccV TRE (Fluxus newspaper, 28 December 1964) (quoted in
Nyman, Experimental Music, p. 74).
17
Kirby and Schechner, ‘An Interview with John Cage’, p. 55.
18
George Brecht, ‘Excerpts from a discussion between George Brecht and Allan Kaprow
entitled “Happenings and Events” broadcast by WBAI sometime during May [1964]’; see also
Ken Friedman (ed.) The Fluxus Reader (Chichester: Academy Editions, 1998), p. 97.
144 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

orchestra, he might put it into a piece whose complexity guarantees that it remains
insignificant, a mere incident – but in a highly ‘significant’ context, no matter what
Cage says. Brecht, on the other hand, by isolating the insignificant and making an
event out of it, could – if viewed in conventional terms – be accused of raising its
level of significance; the shallow waters of paradox run deep. Cage did not have
the nerve to reduce musical performance to its essence – the horn player’s spit;
Brecht, on the other hand, does: shaking hands (String Quartet), putting it down
(Solo for Wind Instrument), exchanging (Concerto for Orchestra) etc.
Brecht’s events keep in line with the qualities that George Maciunas chose
to distinguish Fluxus Art-Amusement from Art – simple, amusing, unpretentious,
concerned with insignificances, requiring no skills nor countless rehearsals, having
no commodity or institutional value, and with this conception of ‘Borderline’ art:
‘Sounds barely heard; sights barely distinguished – borderline art. See which way
it goes (it should be possible to miss it completely)’19 if – to adopt a cricket analogy
– one can see the ball glancing off the fine edge of George’s intriguingly-angled bat
while he’s looking the other way, see which way it goes … For example, Concerto
for Clarinet (‘nearby’) – La Monte Young’s two-eyed stance and determined
stroke, on the other hand, send the ball in exactly the direction he wants. Not
for nothing did he write, more than a few times, a composition that ran ‘Draw a
straight line and follow it’, which he performed by sighting with plumb lines and
then drawing along the floor with chalk (which way did that go? George Maciunas’
project for erasing all the lines La Monte had drawn and any others you came
across is surely to the point). Young’s Fluxus work shares with Cage’s (though
Cage wouldn’t care to admit it) some of the characteristics of Art as against art-
amusement: complex, pretentious, profound, serious, intellectual, inspired, skilful,
significant, theatrical. (Brecht’s Ten Rules: No Rules express succinctly what Cage
was getting at; Brecht, unlike Cage, was able to live and work according to them
with little difficulty.20) Drawing a line is certainly a visible, tangible, concrete
thing, yet Young is less concerned with outside reality than Brecht; a line is not
merely a line, as a suitcase is a suitcase, but a metaphorical state: in Young’s words,
‘a line is a potential of existing time, and (in mine) a potential of any straight line,
obsessively undeviating, totally consistent activities, like pathological murder,
Catholicism, the musical career of La Monte Young etc.’
The all-inclusive universality of the line as metaphor is totally in line with
Young’s Poem for Chairs, Tables and Benches, etc., for Other Sound Sources of
1960 which, in Cardew’s words:

Developed into a kind of ‘chamber opera’ in which any activity, not necessarily
even of a sounding variety, could constitute one strand in the complex weave of
the composition – which could last minutes, or weeks or aeons. In fact, it was

19
Brecht, editorial to ccV TRE (quoted in Experimental Music, p. 76).
20
Ten Rules: No Rules was included in the editorial to ccV TRE, February 1964.
 Section 3: 1972–1977 145

quickly realised that all being and happening from the very beginning of time
had been nothing more nor less than a single gigantic performance of Poem.21

In contrast, Brecht may perceive the universe as a whole, but made up of separable
occurrences which accumulated in a box entitled Water Yam, which comprises
Brecht’s partial (in both senses) universe.
A line is drawn, a performance takes place. Fluxus, like the whole experimental
tradition, may be seen as primarily performance, rather than a concept-oriented
(depending on which eye you have open at the time) and a performing medium
where, following Cage, sound has no necessary priority: ‘Isn’t it wonderful if
someone listens to something he is ordinarily supposed to look at’, Young said
of his Composition 1960 no. 5 (‘turn a butterfly – or any number of butterflies –
loose in a performance area’). Brecht’s events discover a unique way the world of
intermedia (Dick Higgins’ term), not a piling up of media, but an exploration of
the twilight zones between the different media. They live in the cracks between
poetry – as written observations; performance – as instructions and/or material for
realisation; and art objects – the visual result of what has been done or performed
(‘discover or make’ and ‘On (to) a piano’ are typical); but equally, like La Monte’s
line and a lot of Cage, there is nothing about a Brecht event score which says it
must be art, that it must take place in a culturally defined artistic space. ‘Finding an
incidence of it’ makes the event score a mode of experiencing Brecht’s experience
directly in one’s own life; Three Telephone Events is an obvious case in point.
Cage had, in the 1930s, revolutionised music, or at least the way we define
music, by using duration (the only parameter common to sound and silence) as
the guiding principle. With his rhythmic structures, musical time became merely a
hunk of time to be filled with sounds, silences, actions – anything. Both Cage and
Wolff wrote pieces in the 1950s which lasted the length of program time, and this
process crops up in some of Young’s work; for instance, in Composition 1960 no.
4 a time period of any length is chosen and it is announced to the audience that
the lights will be turned off for that duration. At the same time Cage had evolved a
‘system’ in which a musical space was outlined which could be moved through at
any speed, depending on what time scale one measured the space by; and in Poem
one has to choose one’s time limits (seconds, months, years) before applying
chance operations. Longer time-units open that door to potentially unlimited,
indefinite durations – to eternity (a door that Young, with his endlessly droning
Dream Houses, has since firmly closed behind him). His 1960 compositions give
warning of this with a ‘musicalisation’ of his line piece, No. 7, the notes B and
F-sharp ‘to be held for a long time’.
The ‘Events’ of Takehisa Kosugi are also taken up with the experience of
persistent time in extension. A Cage time-bracket may take on a grotesque
‘realism’, as in Kosugi’s Music for a Revolution: ‘Scoop out one of your eyes

21
Cornelius Cardew, ‘One Sound: La Monte Young’, The Musical Times, 107/1485
(November 1966), pp. 959–60, p. 960.
146 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

five years from now and do the same with the other eye five years later’. This is
a temporal persistence on a physical and mental level, found in a milder form in
Theatre Music: ‘Keep walking intently’ (note the emphasis: keep, intently). All
Kosugi’s 1964 Fluxus pieces stress not one’s relationship with outside objects,
but a direct confrontation with the physicality of one’s body and the space one
occupies (as in Anima 2 and Chironomy 1: ‘Put out a hand from a window for a
long time’).
In his slow motion pieces – such as the South series in which a performer has
to pronounce the word ‘south’ or its components over a period of 15 minutes or
so – Kosugi is less concerned with the new sounds that may arise than with the
complete re-orientation of normal physical and sensual functioning. This principle
reappears in Anima 7 when an everyday action that one performs instinctively is to
be performed in slow motion. John Tilbury has written as follows of a performance
when he decided to take his time over producing the note B-flat on the piano:

Several problems presented themselves, the most taxing of which were how,
where, and when to begin, and at what point to end. By using the slow motion
procedure, a single reflex action turns into an inhibiting dilemma. For example,
was it possible to perform the action to produce the sound without performing
the sound? If I sounded the B-flat, would not that be an ‘excess’? Does the action
begin when my hand is at rest on my leg, or from the moment I approach or sit at
the piano? In fact, I began according to a stopwatch, a solution I suspect Kosugi
would have approved of.22

And in Distance the pianist has to seat himself in a fixed position some distance
from the piano, and can only produce sounds indirectly, by manipulating objects
(obstacles rather) placed between the pianist and the piano.
These demonstrate the koan-like character of many Fluxus scores, which
develop in a far more concentrated manner the growth in the performer’s self-
awareness, control and discipline that experimental music encouraged (or
necessitated) from the very start. Tilbury has also found that in playing Christian
Wolff’s music ‘you are so involved with actually making the sound that you have
no chance of emotional self-indulgence … With this music you learn the prime
qualities needed in performing: discipline, devotion and disinterestedness’.23
And Cardew wrote of pieces like Young’s line piece that they ‘could in their
inflexibility take you outside yourself, stretch you to an extent that could not
occur spontaneously’,24 and that, outside Fluxus (i.e. in the hands of experimental
musicians) Water Yam ‘begins to reveal its real function: a course of study, and

22
‘Music’ by John Tilbury, in Ark Magazine, 45 (Winter 1969), pp. 41–4, 43.
23
Ibid., p. 42.
24
‘Towards an Ethic of Improvisation’, in Treatise Handbook (London: Edition
Peters, 1971), p. xviii.
 Section 3: 1972–1977 147

following on that, a teaching instrument (although in actual fact the box contains
only ‘Two Exercises’)’.25
To return to duration: Cage in 1962 was still concerned with such questions as
measuring and counting; Wolff with an elaborately programmed series of actions.
Fluxus scores were very simple directives, and Brecht’s work in particular cuts
the necessity for making or observing measurements and avoids pre-determining
complications of Cage’s variable time unit methods. They demonstrate the
difference between objective clock time and a ‘natural’ time which may be
presented and realised in a number of unmeasured and unmeasurable ways, by
using some external standard of measurement. Candle Piece for Radios lasts as
long as the candles last; Comb Music lasts as long as it takes the slowest person
to ‘pluck’ the last prong; the duration of the third of the five piano pieces of
Incidental Music (‘a single block is placed inside the piano. A block is placed
upon this block, then a third upon the second, and so forth, singly, until at least
one block falls from the column’) depends on the player’s balancing skills and
the law of gravity; duration may be defined in terms of colour (the variability
of traffic lights?) in Two Durations (red/green); or perhaps in terms of change
of physical state in Three Aqueous Events (ice/water/steam); or in the interval
between things of unspecified duration – ‘between two sounds’, ‘between two
breaths’, or the occurrences of Three Telephone Events (a note to this score adds
that each event comprises all occurrences within its duration, which brings it close
to the Cage Wolff idea of length-programmed time, but without resorting to the
clock). By ‘inventing’ a whole series of non-regular clocks, Brecht played up the
discrepancy between ‘counting’ life according to the equal units defined by clocks
(seconds, days, years) and allowing time to pass, and be measured, according to the
irregularly paced and spaced sequences of events – a personal and experiential time.
Experiential time makes the perceptual situation much more interesting – as
Dick Higgins showed with his story of the performance of a Brecht piece at the New
York School. Each performer had to do two different things once only, and Cage
suggested that it should be performed in darkness so that the players could not tell,
visually, when the piece was over. ‘The result’, says Higgins, ‘was extraordinary
both for its own sake and for the extraordinary intensity that appeared in waves,
what the next thing to happen would be’.26 After the performance was over, the
players were asked how long they thought it had lasted; guesses ranged from four
to 25 minutes; the actual duration in fact had been nine minutes.
Last night on the TV they had a man who played the right hand part on the
piano with his nose (he’d been doing it for about 40 years, but he still made lots of
mistakes with old favourites like Annie Laurie) which prompted me to stop writing
about Fluxus solely as a terribly serious phenomenon, and to remind myself that

25
Cardew, in a note to a Brecht concert at the Royal Court Theatre, London, on 22
November 1970; also in Thomas Kellein, Julia Robinson, George Brecht (eds.) George
Brecht: works from 1959–73 (London: Gagosian Gallery, 2004), p. 65.
26
Dick Higgins, Foew & ombwhnw (New York: Something Else Press, 1969) p. 101.
148 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

it must – despite all the value-destroying instrument-bashing that went on – have

been terribly funny and silly. Brecht’s events are perhaps more realistically looked
at as gags, absurdities, double-takes. Is the final ‘common denominator’ of the
majority of Fluxus events, the final parameter which ultimately separates it out
from the experimental music tradition (which I have shown is concerned with
the highly serious) the ‘problems’ of perception, discipline, new values, duration
etc? Who knows? But Fluxus performances must, whatever else, have been a
laugh (though all the evidence points to the fact that the participants themselves
took it all very seriously too). But an advert like this: ‘Fluxorchestra Performs
20 World Premières! of avant-gardist music, ying yang music, rear guard music,
Donald Duck music, antineobaroque music, pataphysical music, no music’, must
have come as quite a relief in the midst of the art-pomposity of the mid-1960s
– especially when the performance involved some very impure Fluxversions of
Brecht events like Symphony No. 1 (‘through a hole’): a number of musicians
position themselves behind a full-size photo of another orchestra, with their
arms inserted through holes cut in the photo at the shoulders of the photographic
musicians. The performers are told that they may hold their instruments in the
conventional way and attempt to play an old favourite.
Perhaps Cardew was right, perhaps Water Yam is a course of study – the study
of gagging.

‘As the Titanic Went Down’ (Music and Musicians, 21, December 1972,
pp. 10–14)

Gavin Bryars has said of his music that its contents ‘tend towards perceptual
incompleteness, towards excess (of duration, number, ratio of effect to cause,
of visual to aural) and towards caprice’.27 All the music to be heard at his one-
man show at the Elizabeth Hall on 11 December satisfies one or other of these
conditions; The Sinking of the Titanic, a work very much in progress, fulfils them
all. When he was talking to me about the Titanic piece, Bryars – in my opinion
the most independent and original experimental composer in England – pointed
out that any kind of purely descriptive talk about it (‘What goes on in the piece’)
raises problems similar to those of trying to analyse the Large Glass of Marcel
Duchamp: that the references are so many and so diverse that, even with reading
the Green Box and various, notes, one can only get clues as to what is going on.28
However, The Sinking of the Titanic is obviously a good deal more figurative
than Duchamp’s masterpiece, more explicit. And nothing is more explicit than the

27
From an interview conducted with Bryars in 1971, published as ‘Gavin Bryars
1971 Michael Nyman 1975’, in Peter Garland (ed.) Soundings, 9 (Valencia, CA: Soundings
Press, June 1975).
28
Unless stated otherwise, Bryars’ quotes are taken from an interview conducted with
the composer for the article.
 Section 3: 1972–1977 149

Episcopalian hymn tune, Autumn. This was the music that the ship’s eight-piece
string-and-piano band was playing when the Titanic went down, and it was this
musical connection which initially attracted Bryars to the Titanic story (as well as
the Kenneth More film), and which led him to delve further and in great detail into
all the evidence from the disaster.29 Autumn will figure prominently among the
performance data of the piece which will be changed from occasion to occasion –
a different conception of indeterminacy.
Bryars is interested not only in the actual music that was played at the moment
of crisis but also in the social context and consequences for the original audience
– the ship’s passengers. The band had been playing cheerful and modern dance
music to the select patrons of the first-class lounge, but at the moment of crisis
its members moved on to the deck, a public place (change of class allegiances)
where, according to survivors’ reports, all passengers on all parts of the ship could
hear the hymn tune as the ship went down, from 2.15 to 2.20am. Bryars says
of this, ‘I don’t know of any other example where musicians had such an all-
embracing purpose at a given time, the fact that everyone in those circumstances
was conditioned by the music’. He also finds it significant that the players chose
to remain musicians instead of trying to save themselves. One of the ‘references’
of The Sinking of the Titanic could be to the social responsibility of musicians and
the role they adopt, as some kind of public servant, perhaps even an instrument
of revolution.
Bryars is also concerned with purely musical, acoustic consequences of the
performance situation in which this extraordinary music-making took place and
the absence of any evidence that the musicians actually stopped playing. In this
sense The Titanic is based on a whole series of hypotheses, the chief of which is
‘as to what would have happened if they had still been playing – how would the
piece have sounded, granted that it is impossible that they still could be playing’.
Bryars feels that in the light of other pieces he has written ‘it doesn’t really seem
an unreasonable hypothesis to assume impossible conditions’. He mentioned a
piece called A Place in the Country in which 53 players are distributed around
a circle with a 22-mile radius. It is self-evidently impossible for any one person
to hear all of the piece, and any given player can only hear the two players on
either side of him. Each player plays a note a fifth higher than the person on his
left. A further impossibility is dictated by the laws of acoustics: by the time the
circle of fifths has been completed each player will have to adjust his intonation
(by the ‘Pythagorean comma’), since the cycle of fifths does not resolve itself
‘perfectly’. So that, in theory at least, you get this perfectly consonant chord which
is unrealisable. The role of the conductor, who stands at the centre of the circle, is
to coordinate attacks, and since the horizon is 11 miles away from any given point
he will always be visible on the horizon. Yet he could only be seen by all players
under ideal conditions, such as at sea on a perfectly calm day, or in an extremely
flat landscape.

29
A reference to the 1958 film based on the Titanic story, A Night To Remember.
150 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

This unrealisability ties in very closely with the Titanic spectacle, although
Bryars pointed out that perfect conditions are quite realisable – everything, in fact,
apart from a historical detail, the year 1912:

You could take a liner of that tonnage, you could put that number of people
on board, you could play the band at that time, you could sink it by hitting an
iceberg, and you could do the whole piece as far as it is experienceable as a live
performance.

He agrees, however, that such a performance would involve mass audience suicide:
‘That’s why any performance would normally consist of a series of hypotheses.’
Bryars is concerned with the changes the sound of the music would have
undergone had the band continued playing while the boat went down. These
changes can be calculated according to simple mechanical processes which work
themselves out according to known laws:

All I do is to illustrate the ways these laws behave … It seems safe to assume
that the piece lasted until the whole band were drowned and that Hartley (the
bandmaster) was the first to go … working from standard procedures for
chamber ensembles and their positional etiquette, it seems possible to give an
indication of the progression of their immersion in water (28°F) giving a) the
reduction of instrumental forces, b) the modification of instrumental timbres, c)
the duration of the piece, d) the modification of pitch and duration of individual
notes, e) the spatial separation of the instrumental forces due to considerations
of current, suction, swimming ability, buoyancy of instrument …30

As regards modification of timbre, pitch and duration Bryars has isolated four
stages of change that Autumn undergoes as heard in the open air on the deck: as
the ship sinks; as it remains stable on the bottom of the ocean; and in a new state
in the open-air had The Titanic been raised earlier this year as was intended. Such
a ‘reconstruction’ is based on yet another, very fundamental, hypothesis: that the
music would have sounded, had the players been playing under water – which it
wouldn’t as the strings of a string instrument do not vibrate under water due to the
density of the water. Bryars has not yet finalised which data will be used in this
launch performance of The Sinking of the Titanic. Some of the other items may
be musical – such as Edith Russell’s musical pig which played the Schottische to
amuse the children in one of the lifeboats; or theatrical – such as the baker who
drank a whole bottle of whisky which protected his body against the effects of the
cold water, so that he was the only person to survive by swimming; or they may

30
Bryars’s research notes on the work were published in Peter Garland (ed.)
Soundings, 9.
 Section 3: 1972–1977 151

be survivors’ accounts, contemporary reverberations like a Big Bill Broonzy song

about the disaster.31
However, only half the performance will be concerned with the real-life
disaster. Parallel with the Titanic piece will be another similar ‘imaginary’ one, and
they may or may not be in phase with each other. The imaginary reconstruction
is based on a book called Futility by Morgan Robertson, published some 15 years
before the Titanic disaster, but which uncannily foreshadows the real event in a
surprising number of details, even down to the name of the ship, the Titan.32 Bryars
agrees that it is conceivable, although unlikely, that the captain of the Titanic, in a
moment of sheer looniness, decided to act out the whole of the Titan story.
What Bryars called ‘the elements of foolishness about the whole enterprise’ (his
piece, not the Titanic) – Monty Python silliness on the grand scale – which, along
with many other things, sets his music apart from what one has come to consider
the main line of experimental music, stems from his unconventional (musical)
background – philosophy degree, professional jazz bassist and accompanist in
cabaret in working-men’s clubs in Yorkshire. The Greaseborough Working Men’s
Club near Rotherham not surprisingly developed Bryars’ love for the absurd, the
extraordinary, the unspectacularly spectacular (and vice versa). ‘Some of the acts
were completely stunning’, he says:

To put on some of those acts in the context of a contemporary-music concert

would be very close to the kind of content in the pieces I do, close to the humour
of the Portsmouth Sinfonia.33 There were people who were doing things they
simply weren’t able to do, but they did them in front of an audience of 2,000 and
did them with huge panache – with glitter, lights, the band, everything geared
to making it a glamorous production. But it simply wasn’t there. You’d get, for
instance, illusionist acts which would rely entirely on props, and there would
be one night when all their props simply failed, nothing worked. You’d have a
box, the box disappears, but you could still hear the radio playing inside it: but
you can’t hear the radio because it’s broken, or someone has pulled the mains
plug out. And the audience would be totally mystified, watching this inane thing
going on.

Equally Bryars finds working as a teacher with art students far more stimulating
than working with musicians, since their imaginations are less conditioned and
limited by musical considerations (as was the case with the Scratch Orchestra).34

31
From Bryars’s notes on the work, this is probably a reference to the Huddie
Ledbetter (or Leadbelly) song ‘Titanic’.
32
Morgan Robertson, Futility, reprinted in 1912 as The Wreck of the Titan (New
York: McKinlay, 1898).
33
Bryars was a founder member of the Portsmouth Sinfonia; see Nyman’s
Experimental Music, pp. 160–64.
34
See, for example ‘Scratch & Co’, The Spectator (13 December 1969).
152 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Bryars mentioned a realisation of Toshi Ichiyanagi’s Distance made by Portsmouth

art student Jimmy Lampard (now saxophone star with the Portsmouth Sinfonia),
which was far more inventive than anything he ever found with musicians. It
consisted of a complex logical chain. Lampard had a long pole with a cigarette in
the end which was lit. He lowered the pole on to a long board which had clusters
of matches all the way along it. When he inhaled this lit the first match, and very
slowly the whole series of matches would burn and flare. Attached to the last
matches was a balloon filled with water. When the last match burned, it burst the
balloon, which dropped the water into a bucket full of Andrews’ Liver Salts, which
fizzed; the side of the bucket was amplified with a contact mike. That was the
sound that Lampard had set out to make.
Such performances belong to the historic past of experimental music, when as
Bryars pointed out, sounds were not important: ‘Any sound would go, provided
it fitted the rules. Now there are a lot of sounds I probably wouldn’t use any
more.’ He was recently asked to take along to a lady BBC producer some tapes
of experimental music for a discussion programme. She hoped that the nastiness
of the sounds would stir up some sort of controversy. Instead all she heard was
the mellifluous consonances of pieces by Bryars, Howard Skempton, Christopher
Hobbs and Ivan Hume-Carter.
A remarkable sensuous example of the ‘new consonance’ is Bryars’ Jesus’
Blood Never Failed Me Yet, also to be performed in the December concert. For this
Bryars took a recording of an old tramp singing a sentimental religious tune, made
a loop of it, and added a very simple, rich, harmonic accompaniment. ‘I think it’s
very important that Jesus’ Blood is easy to take on a popular level – it could go out
on Radio 2 if they’d put it out for 30 minutes.’35 But as with all Bryars’ music a
simple surface gives rise to many more complex reverberations.

‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’ (The Listener, 22 February 1973, pp. 252–3)
[Morton Feldman]

‘But I did like your 449’, remarked the permanently affable Joseph Cooper to
Hephzibah Menuhin on BBC2’s odious quiz, Face the Music, letting slip coded
information that must have given a warm glow to the music lover, but left your
average viewer staring into his cocoa.36 There are many other codes – which seal
off musician from musician. The announcer said in his introduction to the Morton
Feldman Music in our Time programme (Radio 3) on 13 February that he saw no
need to give us any facts about Feldman since he has had so much coverage of
late. Why, he said, even John Tilbury had performed the complete piano music a
few weeks ago (ignoring the fact that the object of that recital, as revealed in the

35
For more on Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, see Experimental Music, pp. 168–70.
36
A reference to Mozart’s Piano Concerto in E-flat major, K. 449.
 Section 3: 1972–1977 153

subsequent discussion, was a public exorcism, a rejection of the music and the
politics which it unconsciously enshrines).
The factors that have led to Feldman’s acceptance as a BBC Preferred Composer
have had their effect on two completely separate classes of musician, an effect
not unconnected with a mild form of what we used to eulogise as ‘performance
indeterminacy’. In the early Fifties, the performer was allowed to choose his own
notes within a defined range and number; later Feldman withdrew these freedoms,
since liberation of the performer drew attention away from his avowed object of
liberating sound, of ‘letting sounds be themselves’.37 This was accomplished (or
at least the attempt was made) by the instinctive choice of a series of individual
sounds (‘I write one sound and then move on to the next’) and the devising of
methods to allow these sounds to move as if of their own momentum. Feldman hit
on the simplest and most effective method of achieving this in the late Fifties when
a number of performers would each read from an identical part in their own time,
but within the overall direction of ‘very slow’.
Obviously a tempo marking of this sort is very vague, and while performers like
Tilbury and Cardew were still attracted by the problems and sounds of Feldman’s
music, they would agree to abide by the unwritten rules that they themselves
would deduce from the nature of the music, as well as from the composer’s
statements, intentions and practices. Take away this dedication, this agreement,
and the system breaks down. This happened in a concert in Berlin last year when
a piece for five singing pianists, using a similar technique, was performed. Cage,
no less (of whom Feldman once said: ‘Quite frankly, I sometimes wonder how my
music would have turned out if John had not given me those early permissions to
have confidence in my instincts’38), took a very perverse, though perfectly logical
view of ‘very slow’, and finished his part, to Feldman’s apparent annoyance, about
15 minutes after the other players had finished working through theirs.
Because of the experimental performer’s enforced economic independence –
that is, his product is so elitist that nobody is particularly interested in paying
for it – he has no need to involve himself in music he does not believe in, that
does not reflect his particular view of the world (experimental music is a way of
looking at the world, not a music to be played). But the changes that Feldman’s
music has recently undergone have made it easily available and suitable for a
different set of performers, like the Pierrot Players, who earn their living solely
as performers. For these players Feldman’s music is nothing special, except that
it is softer, slower and sparser than any other music, and therefore for the truly
‘professional’ musician needs very little rehearsal time. So the performances are
very rough and ready, there being no need to master the art of cleanly and clearly

37
A reference to Cage’s ‘[getting] rid of the glue so that sounds … be themselves’,
from ‘History of Experimental Music in the United States’, in Silence, p. 71.
38
‘Liner Notes’, originally published in Kulchur, 2/6 (Summer 1962); see also Give
My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman (Cambridge MA:
Exact Change, 2000), p. 5.
154 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

striking the near-inaudible: they have no interest in the coded information which
has been built up from the experience of Feldman’s music over the years.39
Perhaps there is no need, in any case, since the fabric of his music is becoming
less subtle: what was before merely romantic, this dwelling on poetic sonorities,
is now in danger of becoming sentimental, and what became melodic by default
(in line with Christian Wolff’s remark that ‘everything we do is melodic’) is now
replaced by explicit melodies of striking ineptitude.40 And since the viola entered
his life, what was most appealing about the trajectory of Feldman’s music – its
flatness and absence of priorities – has, with the classical ‘opposition’ of viola and
instruments in The Viola in My Life series (three of which were broadcast in Music
in our Time), become dualistic and over-active. Success is the death of instinct.

‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’ (The Listener, 19 April 1973, pp. 521–2)
[Electronic Music]

On Radio 4 last Friday morning Duke Ellington said that when English audiences
first heard his Mood Indigo the opening tune was played on muted trumpet and
two clarinets. When they next heard it 20 years later, he had re-orchestrated it to
‘match’, so he said, ‘people’s illusions’ about the sonority of the original version
which could now sound far less effective than they remembered. It’s a pity you
can’t do this with electronic music, many of whose deficiencies were exposed by
the four electronic classics which last week’s Music in Our Time (Radio 3) gave
us the opportunity of re-hearing. Not only is the standard electronically-generated
piece unrenewable, but continued hearing – if you can take it – rarely reveals
anything which you didn’t hear the first time around.
Ed Cowie’s introductory talk was excellent, outlining the intellectual and
technological revolution of the early part of the century which has altered our
consciousness of reality, but whose only relevance to music is to the music of the last
20 (electronic) years. The major pre-war ‘revolution’ in music is generally thought
to be serialism, which, as far as I can see, is less a revolution than an extension,
beyond tonality, of the old composing method – that of pitch manipulation. This
goes for electronic music too, which has shown itself, despite protestations about
the liberation of sound, the acceptance of noise and the synthesis of time and
space, to be just a more highly sophisticated means of manipulating sound: for
Stockhausen’s ‘transformation’ read ‘development’.
The opening number in the broadcast, Gesang der Jünglinge, showed how
eagerly Stockhausen in 1956 seized not only on the manipulative possibilities but
on the greater degrees of differentiation – in rhythm and pitch, succession and

39
See also ‘Circle Complete’, New Statesman (31 March 1972).
40
Cage retold this story in ‘How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run’: ‘Christian Wolff
prophesized this to me years ago [when] he said, “No matter what we do it ends by being
melodic”’; see A Year from Monday, p. 135.
 Section 3: 1972–1977 155

combination of sounds – that were available with music untouched by human hand
(or breath). Yet the most significant ingredient in Gesang is the boy’s voice (itself
subjected to a ‘logical’ serialised scale of values), which was an admission of the
failure of a basic tenet of the earliest electronic music: that the electronic sine-wave
would make possible a music based solely on pure, unsullied, unadulterated sounds.
The coupling of Gesang with Nono’s La Fabbrica Illuminata, composed
some ten years later, showed (if it needed showing) how very rapidly European
electronics have thrown up mannerisms of their own that are little short of clichés:
the fact that these should be so much more obtrusive than the clichés of the string
quartet is a severe comment on the shortcomings of a supposedly limitless medium.
Yet Stockhausen, Nono and Berio have at least avoided using electronics to bring
into being the kind of surrogate instrumental music produced by the American-
university synthesiser school led by Milton Babbitt. I remember reading a
programme-note by one Babbitt apologist which self-righteously pointed out that
the superiority of Babbitt’s electronic music lay in the fact that it was not about
the electronic medium itself: that it had a purely musical content independent of
the means that generated it. In the days when I found electronic music interesting,
I strongly disapproved of this attitude, and yet there I was on a sunny Tuesday
afternoon finding Ensembles for Synthesiser far from intolerable, happily free
from the sound-effects of the European brand.41 Nonetheless, what Ed Cowie
called the greater speed of succession that the synthesiser (as distinct from the
standard electronic studio) brings about, ultimately creates a music whose super-
clean, super-fast, super-smooth surface leaves one longing for an oboist with a
bad reed, or a group of musicians playing with more enthusiasm than accuracy.
Unfortunately, sound-synthesis produces only synthetic sounds.

‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’ (The Listener, 3 May 1973, pp. 593–4)
[Robert Simpson]

Robert Simpson makes no attempt to disguise his passionate involvement (both

as musician and composer) in the music of Beethoven. I remember that when I
was working as adviser on a weekly part-work series which tried to disguise some
very poor recordings of the classics with a large dollop of verbal sauce (these are
now selling at four for a pound in Dixons and Woolworths) the analyses of the
symphonies which Dr Simpson provided were superb, certainly the best of their
kind since Tovey: accurate, succinct, perceptive and, above all, concerned.
I approached his Fourth Symphony with some ambivalence. To tell the
truth, I have not listened to a large-scale tonal work of the conservative (or
‘conservationist’, as Dr Simpson would have it) persuasion for years: my own
involvement is with the ‘new tonality’, the ritual repetitions of Steve Reich or
Terry Riley, or the unaffectedly simple tonal and melodic progressions of Howard

41
For a review of this concert, see ‘Hands Off’, The Spectator (12 July 1969).
156 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Skempton and Gavin Bryars. Perhaps the pedigree that Dr Simpson attached to his
new symphony gave rise to expectations which were bound to be unfulfilled. But
having been told by Dr Simpson in the Listener that, on the one hand, ‘Beethoven’s
influence is pervasive’, and that, on the other hand, as far as the ‘relevance’ of
traditionalist music to more progressive trends is concerned, the composer’s ‘lack
of interest may be the result of his being only too well in touch’, I had come
to expect a work which stood somehow ‘outside time’, unrelated to any current
music, a distillation of the very essence of Beethoven, such as I had found in Dr
Simpson’s analyses (though this would, in effect, be a tautology, as Beethoven did
this for himself in his later works).42
A music which sets out to restore, or conserve, the old techniques of ‘positive
musical development’ has its problems. What is needed is startling, if simple ideas,
and manipulative skill in translating them into a ‘significant’ pattern of musical
continuity. While there is no denying Dr Simpson’s facility in elaborating his
thematic material, the resultant discourse lacked that inner urgency which genuine
(as distinct from restored) tonality and sonata form gave Beethoven. This is, in my
view, no fault of Dr Simpson’s: tonality has long since lost that kind of binding
dynamic logic. Yet Simpson’s symphony, using different means and conceived
within a looser tonal framework, does manage to resurrect the energy and conflict
that one associates with the myth-like Beethoven symphony.
Dr Simpson was very concerned to stress that his symphony was not neo-
classical, and his preservation of the symphonic virtues is carried out without
degenerating into pastiche. Yet some of the most attractive and startling moments
in this immediately appealing work are those where echoes of earlier music shine
through Dr Simpson’s own rugged individualism. Some of these echoes are
deliberate – such as the tasty morsel from Haydn’s Symphony No. 76;43 others may
be unintentional, arising spontaneously out of the composer’s deep knowledge of
the classical repertoire. The second movement especially was a highly skilful re-
mould of a Beethoven scherzo. Yet perhaps Dr Simpson does himself a disservice
in advertising his debt to Beethoven: his symphony is not so much Beethovenian
as solidly conceived within the Beethoven tradition (which is not the same thing).
In the same way, Schumann and Brahms may have thought they were taking
over the Beethovenian model, only to find themselves unable to do some things,
better-equipped to do others. But composers like Tchaikovsky found the need to
run their ideas through the ‘official’ wringer of thematic development more than
constricting, and I felt that some of Dr Simpson’s strongest musical images, such
as the loud side-drum passage near the end, would have made far more impact if
presented in the rhetorical manner of, say, Messiaen. (It was Beethoven’s supreme
achievement that it is not so easy to separate content from form.) Ironically, the
most memorable movement was the least symphonic: the slow third movement.

42
‘Symphonies’, The Listener (19 April 1973), p. 521.
43
Simpson quotes the second subject theme from the first movement of Haydn’s
symphony in the trio section from the second movement of his Fourth Symphony.
 Section 3: 1972–1977 157

The opening elegiac cello solo was lovely, recalling the music of a less sanctified
classical model – Walford Davies.44

‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’ (The Listener, 23 August 1973, p. 258)

[Harrison Birtwistle]

As Dick Powell said to his disapproving elder brother in Busby Berkeley’s Gold
Diggers of 1933:45 ‘Oh, I don’t write the sort of music that the Boston Symphony
Orchestra plays: you have to be half dead to compose that.’ Most of the orchestral
music written in England over the last few years has done nothing to disprove the
enduring truth of this remark. But, Harrison Birtwistle’s short chamber piece La
Plage, broadcast last Saturday, was encouraging evidence that all is not lost.
The acclaim bestowed on Birtwistle’s Triumph of Time when it was first
performed last summer must surely have sufficiently convinced orchestral
managers that a ‘difficult’ composer can write a ‘hit’ (that is, more or less, a
commission which gets a second performance) and that Birtwistle’s future as an
orchestral composer is, at last, guaranteed. Even one unsatisfactory hearing of it
over a broken-down tranny46 showed me that it was immediately graspable on the
surface level: that is, there are enough familiar musical situations and gestures
to be capable of verbal description and therefore capable of being ‘understood’
(‘a slow inexorable dead march’, ‘a melancholy cor anglais tune’, or whatever).
Surface gestures (‘the least important aspect of my music’, says Birtwistle) may
too easily distract attention from the inner sense of the music – it’s impossible to
say on my one hearing – but La Plage, written late last year for the unassuming
resources of Alan Hacker’s Matrix group, confronts the problem directly, freed of
all that symphonic clatter.
The starting-point of La Plage is a Robbe-Grillet short story47 – a typically
paradoxical offering of children walking on a beach and hearing an unexplained
bell in the distance, with seagulls settling on the beach in front of them, repeatedly
flying off to settle at exactly the same distance from the kids, whose line of footmarks
are not washed away by the sea while those of the birds are. An unresolved series
of images, co-existing in time and space, without ever meeting: the continuous
timeless moment. Birtwistle has said that the ‘extra-musical’ aspects of most of
his music – the Greekery of the Sixties, jellyfish-formation analogies – are always

44
Henry Walford Davies (1869–1941) was an English composer and academic
who was Professor of Music at Aberystwyth University in Wales and Gresham College in
London. He succeeded Elgar as Master of the King’s Musick in 1934.
45
Gold Diggers of 1933 was a Warner Brothers musical film directed by Mervyn
LeRoy with choreography by Busby Berkeley (1895–1976).
46
‘Tranny’ is used colloquially here to refer to the transistor radio.
47
‘La Plage’ was published in a collection of short stories by Robbe-Grillet called
Instantanés (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1962).
158 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

poetics after the fact of conception or composition. But in the case of La Plage
the literary prop was absolutely necessary if Birtwistle was to bring about some
conceptual changes apparently too bold to be attempted unaided.
La Plage consists of seven (or maybe six) slow movements, not easily
distinguished from one another (it’s not important), each the same length (or so
it appears), with instruments intertwining in a basically slow chordal progress,
with occasional vocal monotones and a lightly decorative piano part – the only
noticeable ‘gesture’ apart from some microtonal ‘beats’ between the two clarinets.
What is impressive is less the atmosphere evoked than the absence of anything
above minimal change, the absence of dramatic structure, sense of climax or
any sort of explanation or resolution. This is more heroic than might first appear,
climax and directionality being, as La Monte Young once pointed out, the basis of
all Western music since the thirteenth century – a habit as difficult to shake off for
avant-garde composers as it is for writers.48
In La Plage Birtwistle has perceived the essence of what distinguishes (mainly
American) experimental music from the (mainly European) avant-garde: not the
use of local devices like indeterminacy, but the totally different approach to Time,
which Birtwistle rightly considers to be the most neglected parameter of music
at present. But time in La Plage is not necessarily the same commodity as it is in
experimental music, since Birtwistle considers that for him anything at all to do
with time necessarily involves repetition, not in the form of return – as in sonata
form, which ties up most of the loose ends – but with a ‘moving through again’,
still allied, however, to the principle of Classical structural relationships rather
than the endless small-scale repetitiveness of ethnic or systems music.

‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’ (The Listener, 13 September 1973, p. 354)

[Anton Bruckner]

Two offbeat first performances – the original version of Bruckner’s Eighth

Symphony, impressively introduced by Deryck Cooke, and another Ombra mai
fù,49 Cavalli’s, sung to his own harpsichord accompanied by Raymond Leppard,
egged on in rather coy wonderment by David Attenborough in the last of BBC2’s
Music-Makers series – showed the more acceptable face of musicology.
Unlike Leppard’s free commercial for his forthcoming resuscitation of
Handel’s Serse, Cooke’s Bruckner was presumably only an exercise in historical
reconstruction, the musical might-have-been, rather than the making available of
a hitherto unperformed piece, since the equation of the classics with holy writ

48
Kostelanetz, ‘Conversation with La Monte Young’, in La Monte Young and Maria
Zazeela, Selected Writings, p. 24; see also Nyman’s ‘Against Intellectual Complexity in
Music’, October, 13 (Summer 1980), pp. 81–9.
49
Francesco Cavalli’s ‘Ombra mai fù’ (‘Never was a shade’), from Serse (1654), was
later set to music by Handel.
 Section 3: 1972–1977 159

would make it unthinkable (though to me highly desirable) that there should be

two ‘valid’ versions of the symphony about: Bruckner’s original, prompted only
by his imagination, and the version we know with revisions prompted by the
disapproval of his ‘father-in-music’, Hermann Levi – especially as Cooke went
out of his way to stress that Bruckner’s revised version is in most respects superior
to his original (though I would be inclined to argue the toss with him over some of
the instances he cited).
Cooke’s approach, reflecting Bruckner’s thought processes, implicitly summed
up the ethos of the tonal system. The improvements – the major ones at least – were
not those that removed, touched up or improved passages which merely sounded
weak or unimaginative, but occurred in those passages which had been badly
worked, not necessarily in the surface treatment of the material, but more in the
way he coped with tonality: key movements were handled unclearly, the most was
not made out of a particular modulatory sequence, and so on. This is the essence of
symphonic thinking, yet I have the feeling that it can only be appreciated, aurally,
by a tiny minority of listeners.
The programme also emphasised the impermanence of music in performance.
Cooke would play a passage from the original, follow it with the revised version
(or vice versa), and analyse the differences. I would indicate these roughly in
my copy of the (revised) score, but when they came up in performance the effect
was completely disorientating. You would follow the score, notice a few minor
changes (an oboe added here, a slight thematic change there), until you suddenly
came across a vast musical landscape which was tantalisingly familiar yet which
contained no features that you could identify. This left me wondering how well you
would have to know the revised version aurally (not visually) to be able to appreciate
the real significance of the changes while you are listening to the original.
The juxtaposition of before and after also gave us a fascinating glimpse of
that area in classical music which has been opened up in recent years (what with
Boulez’s obsessive revisions, and Cage’s love of impermanence), where music
is considered to be absolute rather than relative, the composition unique and
definitive. And the insights we gained into Bruckner’s methods showed (if it
needed showing at all) that music is not ‘organic’, does not flow out in an unbroken
red-hot lava of creativity, but is in a permanent state of either/or, decisions to be
made, ideas to be shoved around, so that what might sound organic and flows with
impeccable ‘logic’ is as highly ‘edited’ as a film.
The music of Java and Bali, which is genuinely organic – being based on a
system at once rigorous and spontaneous – is being brilliantly covered in a series
of talks given by Allan Thomas in Study on 3 on Thursday at 6.50, which should
not be missed by anyone whose musical horizons are not limited to Western
musical culture, and the issues raised by Bruckner.
160 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

‘Americana’ (The Listener, 31 October 1974, pp. 578–9)

Charles Ives is so comprehensive and complex an artist that it seems impossible

to comprehend him – and his music – as a whole. To do so requires the same kind
of transcendental act that encompasses his music. John Cage’s view that ‘history
doesn’t influence us, but that what we do influences the way we look at previous
events in time’50 suggests that the whole Ives may be nothing more nor less than
the sum of all our partial (both senses) responses to his music. Two discussions –
one between academics and performers, led by Peter Dickinson, the other between
Eric Salzman and various American composers – broadcast on Radio 3’s American
Sunday (20 October), loosely assembled around the celebration of Ives’s centenary,
emphasised the fragmentary approach that Ives seems to demand.
The American composers showed how Ives has become, variously, a model,
guide, influence, precedent or someone whose example in effecting a unique,
seemingly non-discriminatory mix of European and American, high and popular,
culture, gave them the confidence to make apparently bold, creative decisions
which they felt would have been impossible without Ives. Cage’s response is
not surprisingly of a different order. Today he is not interested in the ‘Americana
aspects’ but in what he calls the mud, the complexity of many things going on
at once where he does not know where he is, does not know what is happening.
This mystery begins to induce a change of mental state. ‘But, in my experience,
that change of mind, which begins, doesn’t continue – it is interrupted by the
emergence from the mud of some well-known tune, and I find myself in a place
familiar to some others, but carefully avoided by me – in the land of melodies
and precedents.’51
Naturally, such an individualistic manner of listening, which not only allows for
the greatest distancing from Ives’s intentions, but also from the person sitting next
to you, would feed more off moments of chaos and confusion than off materials
that enshrine experiences which have been and can be shared. As Peter Dickinson
and Michael Hall pointed out, apart from ragtime, all the popular materials that
Ives uses – band marches, backwoods tunes, country fiddles, Gospel hymns and
minstrel music – were the currency of an earlier time and place. Some of these
were reconstructed in the BBC’s transmission of the Park Lane Group’s inspired
choir and band concert from Grosvenor Square. This was an entertaining reminder
of Ives’s sources in their ‘literal’ state; yet, as David Wooldridge indicates, Ives
could never hear them in this state, since ‘[his] ear was preconditioned to hear these

50
A reference to de Kooning’s observation as quoted in Cage’s Silence, p. 67.
51
Cage’s original reference to the ‘mud’ in Ives’s music comes from his ‘Two
Statements on Ives’, in A Year From Monday, p. 42; he also expands on this theme in an
interview with Joel Suben in 1983; see Kostelanetz (ed.) Conversing with Cage (New York:
Routledge, 2003), p. 42.
 Section 3: 1972–1977 161

tunes with all their attendant overtones, all the remembered and half-remembered
associations they had held for all the people who ever listened to them’.52
Now, the impression given by both English and American discussions (and by
most other commentators if only by omission) is that Ives was the first American
composer to introduce national and popular tunes into what may be called the
symphonic style. This is not the case (though it in no way detracts from Ives’s
uniqueness). For instance, in the 1850s, the Bohemian Anthony Philip Heinrich
obsessively and dedicatedly quoted American tunes in nearly all his pieces.53
And the music of Gottschalk is riddled with national tunes, which he included for
purposes neither academic nor nostalgic.
Against this background, one may begin to view Ives’s Civil War celebrations,
St Gaudens and Decoration Day (as well as his other ‘historical’ reconstructions
and distillations), in a different light, given that Ives’s conceptual and technical
approach was unprecedented, that he may have been sketching his personal, musical
heritage rather than using the tunes as national stereotypes, and that he represented
the opposite idea from the ‘entertainer’ Gottschalk. But it is paradoxical that the
communal experiences that these pieces embody were kept from any audience
who may have been able to share or relive them. This for two reasons (at least):
partly because very few of the scores attained a performable state until he started
revising them in the Twenties, after he had stopped composing; but largely because
he was unwilling, if not unable, to emasculate his art, compromise his ideals, to
make them accessible to the softees – the public, the academics, the professional
musicians, and all the other representatives of the genteel tradition.
That contemporary communal experiences and the old tunes were important
for the adult Ives is shown by his response to the spontaneous outbreak of mass
singing, amongst subway travellers returning home from work, on the evening
after they had heard the news of the sinking of the Lusitania:

[And] finally it seemed to me that everybody was singing this tune, and they
didn’t seem to be singing in fun, but as a natural outlet for what their feelings
had been going through all day long … Now what was this tune? It wasn’t a
Broadway hit, it wasn’t a musical comedy air, it wasn’t a waltz tune or a dance
tune or an opera tune or a classical tune, or a tune that all of them probably knew.
It was (only) the refrain of an old Gospel Hymn that had stirred many people of
past generations. It was nothing but – In the Sweet Bye and Bye. It wasn’t a tune
written to be sold, or written by a professor of music – but by a man who was
but giving out an experience.54

52
David Wooldridge, From the Steeples and Mountains: A Study of Charles Ives
(New York: Knopf, 1974), pp. 17–18.
53
For a more detailed discussion of Heinrich’s work, see Nyman’s ‘Experimental
Music and the American Vernacular Tradition’, in First American Music Conference (Keele
University, 1975).
54
Charles Ives, Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 93.
162 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

So Ives, the millionaire insurance man, goes home and begins to rewrite this
experience as the last movement of the second Orchestral Set which, he claimed,
reflects ‘the sense of many people living, working and occasionally going through
the same deep experience, together’.55 Perhaps I read too much into this episode,
but it seems to me to depict Ives as a humanitarian man, with a sincere feeling
for the people from whom he was ultimately separated – economically, socially
and musically.
Michael Hall, rather intriguingly, drew a parallel between Ives and Scott Joplin
as would-be social reformers. Joplin, a black man, was deeply obsessed with the
social situation in America. His ideal was to create a classical ragtime that would
be acceptable to the white man. He wanted to fuse the races. But when, in 1900,
it became clear that in the Southern states, at least, there were more and more
oppressive acts being levelled against the blacks, he became disillusioned and
ended his days in an asylum. Hall feels that the Ives case is similar, which it may
be, with a very significant difference: that, apart from some jingoistic war songs,
Ives never used his music, as Joplin did, as a means of changing a social situation
that he found intolerable.
But what of Ives in our own time? The no more than fringe acceptance given
to this ‘eccentric’ by the musical establishment was neatly symbolised for me by
two successive music documentaries on BBC2. On one Sunday, we were treated
to a scrappy ill-considered condescending ‘explanation’ of Ives, fronted by
Derek Parker; on the next, a carefully-considered assessment of Schoenberg by a
dedicated Schoenbergian, Alexander Goehr.

‘Tippett at 70’ (The Listener, 16 January 1975, pp. 84–5)

Radio 3’s blockbuster in honour of Sir Michael Tippett’s 70th birthday was a
curiously low-key affair. Something over ten hours of Tippett’s music were given,
but in such a joyless fashion that had Radio Times not plastered Tippett’s signature
over its pages, you might have been forgiven for missing it altogether. If the Music
Department decides that there is significance in such a birthday, then surely it
should do more than merely lash together a number of uncoordinated programmes
in this way. But coordination seems not to be Radio 3’s strong suit: nobody had
seen fit to couple the music with an interview with Tippett, although Hugh Ottaway
did give a talk about him on 28 December.
The coordinators had, however, been at work in a small way with the three
programmes which paired each of the piano sonatas with each of the string
quartets. Was this just a marriage of convenience – two of the least expensive
media to promote, coupled together for numerical rather than musical reasons?
For, while the three sonatas establish significant landmarks in the three phases of
Tippett’s career, the string quartets (if one counts the revision of the First) were all

55
Ibid., p. 93.
 Section 3: 1972–1977 163

written in the early 1940s. And yet this formalistic pairing did stress the essential
oneness of Tippett’s art, the consistency with which he has carried out what he
considers to be the composer’s task of ‘experiencing and communicating the inner
world of his imagination’.56
Of the creative act itself, Tippett has written that

[Like] every creative artist, my days are spent pondering, considering, wrestling
with an infinite permutation of possibilities … The act of imagination is
something of great intensity … I am, as it were, possessed, taken over by the
creative drive from within, and even when I put away the manuscript paper,
I find it almost impossible to switch off the inner activity.57

As with Ives, this drawing out of order from chaos brings with it no simple and
immediately acceptable musical image; one actually hears the stress of discovery
in the notes. Strain is an essential part of the musical expression.
And, just as there appear to be no easy solutions in each individual composition,
so this turbulent integrity has blown Tippett’s creative evolution, as a whole, on
some unexpected courses. Self-censorship caused him to reject everything he
wrote before he was 30, while, in his fifties, Tippett experienced a remarkable
creative renewal, a refreshment – arrived at, I am sure with considerable pain –
which expressed itself in a new, pared down, ritualistic, linear style, spare and
diaphanous. This new approach (it was more than merely a stylistic development)
seemed to release Tippett’s imagination from the complex, thematic, cross-
rhythmic technique of the earlier works, when he showed himself to be
simultaneously heir to two traditions: Elizabethan madrigal and Beethovenian
thematic metamorphosis. This heritage, coupled with Tippett’s fear of anything
that approaches the facile, often dams up the instinctive, lyrical processes that are
the most refreshing aspect of the First Piano Sonata. One result of this apparent
anxiety about allowing his music to propel itself ‘naturally’ was that, in the String
Quartets, for instance, Tippett is unable to state a simple lyrical theme simply – it
is more often than not disguised with a great deal of ‘business’. It is almost as if,
after the Concerto for Double String Orchestra of 1939, his most attractive and
only completely successful work, where there is a perfect balance struck between
form and content, he became inhibited about ‘giving too much away’.
The clarity of the Second Piano Sonata, written in 1962, is of a completely
different order; resulting from an aphoristic style, where unrelated ideas are
juxtaposed rather than integrated and developed. Most of the ideas are rather
brusque and uninhibited, and it is a pity that the BBC could not have persuaded
an orchestral manager to programme the Concerto for Orchestra of 1963, since
here the technique is refined and extended, the colouristic potential greater and

56
See Michael Tippett’s ‘Poets in a barren age’, in Moving into Aquarius (London:
Paladin, 1974), p. 148.
57
Ibid., p. 148.
164 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

the invention more wayward and, in a gentle way, wilder. In these works, silence
played an important part, resulting in an opening up of time and space similar to
that brought about by Stravinsky in Agon.
The most recent work broadcast, the Third Piano Sonata, seemed, on one hearing,
to bring the best of the new and old together – the free-flowing inventiveness with
the ability to work in long, continuous forms. Yet, I have a suspicion that the over-
elaboration of one of the unique features of Tippett’s piano writing – the rich and
exultant lyricism – may disguise a work of great passion, but of considerably less
substance than Beethoven’s Op. 111, which was the starting point for the Sonata.
But, then, that is one of the problems for those composers who have inherited and
chosen to continue the tonal tradition. Perhaps only Messiaen has been able to
effect a truly original reassessment of tradition that enables him to be judged in his
own terms rather than Beethoven’s.

‘Peak District’ (The Listener, 9 October 1975, p. 480)

It is not often that a ten-minute burst of unknown music, broadcast late one night,
should send me rushing out the next morning to track down the record. Past
experience has taught me that this column has a disarming tendency to turn itself
into a record review if only because, as last week, the most interesting music
I heard – the Liszt Requiem and Mary Thomas’s fine sequence of Eisler songs
excepted – was on record. So I thank the producer, Keith Horner, for his inspired
choice for Radio 3’s exit music, last Wednesday night.
On the whole, it was a rich week especially for new series: John Peel’s new
show;58 the first of three programmes (repeats admittedly) devoted to the music
of Hans Eisler; and Between the Wars, a roughly chronological survey of British
orchestral music, featuring especially the symphonies of Arnold Bax. This could
be valuable if it gives us unfamiliar works by neglected composers; less so if it,
too, has to rely on what record companies choose to issue.
Pride of place, for the BBC and EBU59 at least, has to be given to the opening
concert in the EBU’s International String Quartet series. Yet another boost for the
string quartet could surely only be justified by an entirely new slant which, if Hans
Keller’s blurb in Radio Times is anything to go by, it won’t get. He talks of ‘related
peaks’ and breathlessly announces that the series will not be planned chronologically
but that – gasp – ‘in one future concert, for instance, a Beethoven quartet will be
linked with a quartet by Schoenberg, in order to show their family resemblance’.60

58
The BBC’s ‘John Peel Show’ replaced ‘Top Gear’, which had been running for
eight years.
59
European Broadcasting Union.
60
Keller’s programme notes to the EBU String Quartet concert series (1975);
see Alison Garnham, Hans Keller and the BBC: The Musical Conscience of British
Broadcasting, 1959–79 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) p. 133.
 Section 3: 1972–1977 165

‘Related peaks’ invariably means high peaks. I doubt if we will be permitted

more than a glimpse of the lesser peaks, let alone the foothills and the rivers out
of which the string quartet muddily and hazily climbed, before Haydn even. And
it all depends on what vantage point you view your high peaks from. To me, the
quartet attributed to Benjamin Franklin, in which all the strings are retuned to
enable every note to be played on an open string, is a peak. So, too, is Cage’s string
quartet of 1949, whose quiescence beautifully defuses the explosiveness of the
high peak tradition.61 As does, more paradoxically, George Brecht’s string quartet
with its two-word score, ‘shaking hands’.
Between the Wars began strongly, with curiosities by Ireland and Bliss, whose
robust continental lyricism contrasts with the self-conscious folksy lyricism that
will, no doubt, feature in later programmes. But what I would like to hear is a
series, rather on the lines of Claud Cockburn’s Bestseller, devoted not to lesser
peaks, but to a completely different mountain range. Bestseller is a critical-cum-
political survey of serious popular fiction between the wars, and the way in which
novels like When it is Dark, The Green Hat, Sorrell and Son very closely (and
immediately more than ‘great’ novels) reflected and reinforced the ideology and
preoccupations of the middle-class reading public. Ketèlbey is an obvious musical
equivalent. There must be more, but one never hears their music.
The Americans, belatedly, at last seem to have exorcised the ghost of high
peakism which still haunts Europeans. They show the same respect for Ives,
Converse or Mrs H.H.A. Beach as they do to Joplin and their nineteenth-century
equivalents of Ketèlbey. A fine musician like Professor Neely Bruce is a persuasive
champion of the lighter, alternative, peak district writing of it as follows:

Besides asserting the value of being a humorous curiosity, however, this music
asserts, often aggressively, many other values rarely asserted in the concert
hall today: extravagance, sentimentality, opulent sonorities indulged in for no
reason at all other than their sound, evangelical fervour, boredom (patiently
suffering through it all), crude pictorial realism, unabashed commercialism,
grandiloquence, repetitive and mindless motion, the desire for entertainment
rather than enlightenment.62

Which brings me back to last Wednesday night’s ten minutes of nineteenth-

century American ballroom music – waltzes, marches and quadrilles – played
vigorously but delicately in arrangements and on instruments of the time by a band
calling itself the Smithsonian Social Orchestra and Quadrille Band, conducted
by James Weaver. The use of old instruments covered this attractive, functional
music with a fresh yet sombre patina, impossible to reproduce on brash, modern
instruments. If only an enterprising British band would revive, not necessarily

61
Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts was in fact completed in New York in
February 1950.
62
Neely Bruce, liner notes to Piano Music in America, Vol. 1 (Vox SVBX-5302).
166 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

old band instruments, but the nineteenth-century band repertoire. Every week, I
turn to Radio 3’s Bandstand, hoping to find, say, Jullien’s British Army Quadrilles
instead of the usual Eric Ball and Peter Yorke.
Schoenberg, atop the high peaks, once admitted that light music could not
entertain him unless something interested him about its musical substance and
working out; he denied the very strengths of popular music – its regular phrase
structure and repetitions, when he wrote: ‘Here one finds numerous slightly varied
repetitions, as in the otherwise very beautiful Blue Danube Waltz’.63

‘Bare Essentials’ (The Listener, 9 December 1976, p. 763)

Describe Varèse’s artistic standpoint, define his intentions, above all analyse the
components of his sound-world and his involvement with form-as-process, and
you appear to have a neatly acceptable package. Pierre Boulez implied as much
in his introduction to the three Varèse chamber works he conducted in a recorded
broadcast on 28 November of the Roundhouse concert of 13 days earlier. In the
small-scale works, he said, there is no problem with form: themes are exposed,
repeated, distorted with different harmony and orchestration, often by means of
ostinato, and development is easy to follow.
Certainly, his bag of technical and stylistic tricks is limited; and his musical
worldview was more circumscribed than any other innovatory composer this
century – perhaps such singlemindedness is the very essence of innovation. If
his music is so simple, then why is it that my regular once-every-four-years stint
with Varèse, whose music I reckon I know so well, is an invariably discomforting
experience, no matter how my musical tastes may have changed in the meantime?
Annoying, too, as his startlingly autographic language slips noiselessly into sub-
Stravinsky/Debussy. Are these simply clues to a humanity that his music generally
tends to hide, proof that it is as difficult to attempt to reject one’s immediate
musical surroundings, as it is any other part of cultural or social life? To remove
these stylistic ‘lapses’ would, I suppose, leave one with the icy perfection of much
of the sterile music of recent years.
Varèse once wrote that he wanted ‘simply to project a sound, a musical thought,
to initiate it, and then let it take its own course. I do not want an a priori control
of all its aspects.’64 With statements like that, from any composer, one is always
tempted to wonder about degrees of control; but in Varèse’s case, should one take
it as an admission that, for him, composing was the equivalent of surrealistic

63
From Arnold Schoenberg’s essay ‘Brahms the Progressive’, in Leonard Stein (ed.)
Style and Idea (London: Faber, 1984), p. 399. Around this time, Nyman furnished the
same quote for the title of his piece for multiple pianos, The Otherwise Very Beautiful Blue
Danube Waltz (1976).
64
Gunther Schuller, ‘Conversation with Varèse’, Perspectives of New Music, 3/2
(Spring–Summer, 1965), pp. 32–7, p. 37.
 Section 3: 1972–1977 167

automatism? Louise Varèse did remark that her husband always worked under
considerable tension, and maybe this is similar to Kandinsky’s painting ‘rather
subconsciously in a state of inner tension’.65 But writing music is invariably a
slower, more considered business than painting need be – after all, you can’t just
splash notes on to manuscript paper (though the computer composer, Lejaren
Hiller, John Cage’s collaborator on HPSCHD, did, with a toothbrush) and this is
especially true with Varèse whose scores demonstrate an unprecedented degree
of non-automatic precision, which could not possibly have come about through
chance. Varèse spoke of relaxing control, and perhaps in these derivative passages
he allowed himself to relax control over sound-organisation, thereby exposing
himself to the problems of invention, which was definitely not his strong suit.
My recent refresher course on Octandre, Hyperprism and Intégrales – all early-
twenties scores – convinced me that these topical, anecdotal allusions (Varèse
was no Ives!) are part of a wider problem. Varèse’s music is primitive, in that it
builds from the raw fundamentals of sound (but it is not primitive in any other
way – it is distinctly short on the ritualistic, expressive, and communicational
power of primitive music). He stripped music down to its essentials, and redefined
it from basics upwards (or perhaps defined it for the first time). Varèse was, in
fact, the only composer before Cage to dismiss the ready-madeness of music
(something that Schoenberg and Stravinsky, for instance, did not, could not, do),
and to reassemble these components according to newly-minted laws. These laws
are so personal that, as Boulez pointed out, it has proved impossible for younger
composers to deduce a useful abstract theory from Varèse’s music, as it was from
Schoenberg’s and Webern’s.
So an E-flat clarinet, for instance (at the opening of Intégrales), extends a single
note into a series of ‘drawings’ of the same ‘line’, each differentiated by means
of emphasis, accent, rhythmic displacement and slight indentations through rapid
flurries of approach notes. These lines are of irregular length, and are weighted
against vertical densities which also appear to move according to their own inner
momentum. These are not melodies, not chords, since they lack any outward
functionalism, either short-term or long-term. And instruments, though deprived
of their historical content, are treated with great sensitivity and awareness for
individual timbral identity. However, occasionally one detects a sense of strain
towards the unattainable: even Boulez could not make the oboe, in bar 12 of
Intégrales, even when playing fff, balance with the much more piercing E-flat
clarinet; or to achieve the required clarity and punch on a horn playing loudly in its
bass register. And just as Stravinskian representation creeps into the architectonic
abstraction, so occasionally the innate character of certain instruments forces
Varèse into unavoidable historical expressiveness.
This is particularly true of instruments that lack edge, notably the oboe in
Intégrales and the bassoon in Octandre which are each given rather ill-defined,

65
Quoted in Hugh Honour and John Fleming, A World History of Art (London:
Laurence King, 1984), pp. 657–8.
168 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

weedy solos. It is well known that it is the limitations of traditional instruments,

limitations both technical and expressive, and also the ‘impertinent intermediary’
between composer and public, the performer, that led Varèse to seek out
electronically-generated sounds.
In his quest for sounds controllable without human intervention, sounds not
limited by the tempered scale, percussion provided a temporary refuge. A radical
step, doubtless, but Varèse handled them less radically than he did orchestral
instruments – Cage was the first composer to treat percussion with the high
definition Varèse demanded of the wind department. Rhythmically, too, one hears
a contradiction between struck and blown. Blown instruments (mainly) sustain,
and Varèse’s additive rhythmic extensions suitably bear no relationship towards
traditional metrical means of measuring time. Struck instruments, on the other
hand, are (largely) non-sustaining, and therefore move in shorter durations, which
are based on not very unconventional subdivisions of the beat. The perpetual
busyness of the percussion dulls the edge of the startling constructivism of the
blown instruments; yet I suppose it does guarantee the listener some physical
contact with this alien, semi-abstract, self-referential sound-world – physical
in the sense that it preserves a residual kinship with body rhythm. Otherwise,
Varèse’s concern with the physical was limited to sound as an abstract, non-human
phenomenon, if one takes a statement like this seriously: ‘I don’t care about
reaching the public as much as I care about reaching certain musical-acoustical
phenomena, in other words, to disturb the atmosphere – because, after all, sound
is only an atmospheric disturbance!’66

‘Mexican Discovery’ (The Listener, 21 April 1977, pp. 520–21)

It is possible, of course, and for some very tempting, to treat this column as a
means of confirming and publicising familiar opinions about what Radio 3 is
renowned for, familiar music. For me, as must be obvious by now, writing this
column only has any value when, hidden among the familiar acres, one discovers
something new. A greater pleasure still when a new piece (new to me, that is, not
necessarily new chronologically) gives one the opportunity to confirm what one
had read about a previously unheard composer, but had found rather suspect –
opinions overstated by special pleading. It happens rarely, but it did happen just
before Easter with the music of the Mexican, Sylvestre Revueltas, whose tone
poem Sensemaya (1938) was included in the intriguing programme presented by
the Venezuelan National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the tireless veteran
Mexican, Carlos Chavez, whose Toccata for percussion was also played.
Chavez is known at least by name, perhaps by reputation, less likely by his
music, as being, more or less, the founder of Mexican new music. Revueltas, who
worked closely with Chavez (both were born in 1899), called him a composer

66
Gunther Schuller, ‘Conversation with Varèse’, p. 37.
 Section 3: 1972–1977 169

‘made out of iron who organised the music production and activity of Mexico’.67
Together, these two, and a small group of younger composers, in Revueltas’s own
words ‘animated by the same impulse and by a great amount of destructive energy’,
fought against the ‘ancestral apathy and darkness of the academic musicians.
We cleaned, swept, and washed the old Conservatory that was crumbling down
with tradition, moths and glorious sadness.’68 In 1928, they founded the Orquesta
Sinfonica de Mexico, introduced the music of Stravinsky, Debussy, Honegger,
Milhaud and Varèse, which stirred up the ‘placid dreams of the ancient “professors”
who were addicted to the old moths, and also of the public anaesthetised by the
yearly Beethoven’, conducted by those ‘venerable consecrated maestros that tried
to squeeze from the nine symphonies the total amount of musical literature’.69
(I make no apologies for quoting the words of Revueltas, since they carry the same
conviction that his music appears to.)
I said earlier that I had been suspicious of the claims made on Revueltas’s
behalf, not by Mexicans, but by Californian composers who might be accused of
merely promoting ethnic and national musics neglected and downtrodden through
European American cultural imperialism, of hero-worshipping a man who they
never knew (he died in 1940) more for his social/political/creative identity than
for his actual music. Certainly, the testimony of people who knew Revueltas is
persuasive. Paul Bowles wrote, for instance, that the way in which Revueltas

[So] grandly discarded the poverty and disease always present in his life perhaps
helped to make him a great romantic figure. Whatever it was that did it, none
who knew him escaped the conviction that here was someone who, if not a great
composer, was all the same a great man who wrote music.70

But the passionate, wild, concentration of Sensemaya has temporarily convinced

me that admiration for the man is of a piece with admiration for his music. The
compulsion of this tone poem derives not merely from its overt subject-matter
(inspired by the verses of the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen) which, according
to one commentator, gives form to the ‘suffering of the Negro oppressed by
centuries of misery’,71 but also because Revueltas, according to Paul Bowles,
knew that the ‘bases of music’ were not in the Europeanised conservatoires, but
in the ‘noises that accompany drunkenness and abandon. He had played in border
bars and dives and movie houses in his youth. With this education his approach

67
See Peter Garland (ed.) Soundings, 5 (Valencia, CA: Soundings Press, February 1973).
68
Ibid.
69
Ibid.
70
Bowles, ‘Sylvestre Revueltas’, Modern Music (November–December 1940);
see also Timothy Mangan and Irene Harrmann (eds.) Paul Bowles on Music (California:
University of California Press, 2003), p. 30.
71
Otto Mayer-Serra, ‘Silvestre Revueltas and Musical Nationalism in Mexico’, The
Musical Quarterly, 27/2 (April 1941), pp. 123–45, p. 128.
170 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

could only be healthy.’72 And like many Latin-American artists and musicians,
Revueltas was intensely political, not being able to detach himself from society
and its problems as European and North American artists often find so easy.
His short creative life – he wrote all his music in the 1930s – conveniently
fell into that brief era when popular, socialist realist or politically involved
music had replaced (rather than developed out of) the experimentation of the
later 1920s (similar things are happening today, as Cornelius Cardew’s musical
position shows). Chavez, for instance, fascinated by modernism in the 1920s,
turned out pieces with geometric titles like Poligonos, Exagonos, or physical ones
like Energia and Espiral, while, in the Thirties, we find the Sinfonia Proletaria
and the Obertura Republicana. I am far less impressed by Chavez’s music, if
his 1942 Toccata for percussion is a good example. In fact, the strengths of
Revueltas – the almost tangible physical abandon – emphasise the weakness of
Chavez, with his emphasis on control, clarity and calculation. The Toccata, both
rhythmically and texturally, is a cautious piece (it was played rather tentatively,
too), as though Chavez was deliberately holding himself back, scrupulously
unwilling to overexploit the character of skins, metal and wood. Paul Bowles (the
Christian name is necessary, otherwise one automatically thinks it’s Satan) neatly
distinguishes Revueltas from Chavez: ‘There is none of the preoccupation with
form or conscious establishment of individual style that makes Chavez’s music an
intellectual product. With the instinct of the orator, he made his effects, barbaric
and sentimental, after which he might have remarked with quiet pride. He dicho.’73
More relevantly, on the strength of Sensemaya, Revueltas (to make a wild
journalistic oversimplification) is a Varèse with passion, a human face. Peter Garland,
the young Californian composer to whom one is grateful for rescuing Revueltas
from the obscurity of Histories of Latin American music, put it more elegantly and
effectively (with perhaps a hint of exaggeration) in the magazine, Soundings:

If Varèse may represent for us the intense Lenin, armed foremost with his
intelligence and energy to ‘change the world’, then Revueltas is the burly
Vakulinchuk of Potemkin crying ‘We’ve had enough of eating rotten meat!’ and,
like Vakulinchuk, the first to die in the risk of commitment to another, more
equitable, vision.74

‘Lindbergh’s Flight’ (The Listener, 2 June 1977, pp. 722–3)

The broadcast of Kurt Weill’s cantata, Der Ozeanflug, on 21 May, promised to

set new standards for the responsible and enlightened treatment of music on
Radio 3. Here was a new work (well, not exactly new, since it was written in 1929,

72
Ibid., p. 30.
73
Ibid., p. 30.
74
See Garland, Soundings, 5.
 Section 3: 1972–1977 171

but certainly unfamiliar) performed, not according to the usual rules of random
programming, but for a specific reason (the fiftieth anniversary of the ending of the
Lindbergh flight), and introduced by a substantial talk by an acknowledged expert
(David Drew, obviously). Drew’s talk was exemplary in its cogent exploration of
the historical, musical and interpretative qualities of Weill’s work. He sketched in
the ending of the flight itself (though not Lindbergh’s reasons for undertaking it),
the contemporary reactions to it – the crowd at Le Bourget; Mussolini; the popular
songwriters and the clerics who stressed the spiritual rather than technological
achievement of the flight – some people even saw it as an atonement for the
excesses of the jazz age. It was good to hear about the moral interpretation of the
flight not simply because it is central to Weill’s work, but also because, for me, it
corrected the impression given by all those recent TV dramatised documentaries
that Lindbergh is better known for the kidnapping than for the flight.
The immediate background to the cantata was an experimental radio play
which Brecht wrote in 1929 and which had incidental music by both Weill and
Hindemith. Weill subsequently made an independent work out of a rewritten text
by Brecht, though it was not clear from Drew’s talk what the relationship between
the two texts was and whether Weill retained any of the radio music for the cantata.
Perhaps that is not important, since Drew seemed to be attempting to steer a course
between treating Der Ozeanflug as a non-didactic, autonomous musical work from
whose textual ambiguities nothing can be learned ‘since no lessons are taught, no
lessons defined other than those which the artistic imagination can encompass’
(whatever that means), and considering it as promoting a quasi-religious ‘message’
which Drew maintains is central to his work. This message is polarised around
questions of choice and sacrifice – a theme further developed in the work Weill
wrote a year later, Der Jasager.
On the question of musical autonomy, I may have misunderstood Drew’s drift,
since he was at pains to draw attention to places in the cantata where Weill, whose
ideology in no way coincided with that of Brecht, used his music to comment
critically on the text he was setting. At one point, Drew maintains, Weill calls the
writer to task: where Brecht talks of ‘the time when man first began to understand
himself’, Drew remarked that the tonality of a particular passage ‘conveys a
legitimate doubt’. This use of particular tonal moves for particularised expression
or comment can obviously only be tested and clarified by listening to the work,
which in itself was welcome since the more involved Drew became with the
significance of Der Ozeanflug, the more apprehensive I became about hearing it.
But I need not have worried: the first singing voice is heard soon after the piece
begins, a familiar English voice (Philip Langridge, I think), singing in German
(in a performance using only English musicians, conducted by an Englishman,
Colin Davis). The ultimate mystification: how could one understand what was
being sung, the close symbolic relationship between text and music, the specific
details Drew touched on? How could one judge the significance, let alone the
value, of the style of the work, a style from which Weill had stripped away the
popular dualities of The Threepenny Opera score of the previous year, and evolved
172 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

quite another kind of neoclassical, sometimes neo-mediaeval synthesis? One was

reduced to listening to Der Ozeanflug on this purely formalistic level, wondering
why, in the midst of this grim but entirely accessible music, Weill had seen fit to
‘revert’ to his more covertly popular style in a subdued cabaret number with a
delightfully prominent part for tomtoms.
Maybe I was at fault for not understanding German – this must limit the
accessibility of the piece to a small minority of what is already a minority audience.
Maybe it is only part of the old controversy about ‘opera in its original language’
anyway – which would make Drew’s talk more or less completely redundant. But
it is certainly ironic with this work in particular, with its particular history, that
Brecht’s text (whatever Weill’s attitude to it) should have been incomprehensible
to a large number of people. On the original Brecht/Weill/Hindemith collaboration,
Der Flug der Lindberghs (as it was originally called – Brecht insisted that
Lindbergh’s name be deleted from the title after the flyer had defected to the
fascists), Brecht wrote that it ‘is valueless unless learned from. It has no value as
art which would justify any performance not intended for learning.’75 And here
we are, as passive listeners, not understanding a word of what is going on. In the
original Lehrstuck, even the performers who were not singing at any given time
were forced to participate:

Free-roaming feeling roused by music, special thought such as may be

entertained when listening to music, physical exhaustion such as easily arise
just from listening to music, are all distractions from music. To avoid these
distractions the individual shares in the music, thus obeying the principle that
doing is better than feeling, by following the music with his eyes as printed, and
contributing the parts and places reserved to him by singing them or himself or
in conjunction with others (school class).76

No matter how far their political attitudes may have differed, both Brecht and Weill
were in agreement about the importance of radio as a means of communication,
especially of two-way communication, rather than merely as distribution. (Nothing
much has changed since the 1920s, despite the advent of the phone-in.) Brecht
wrote that Der Flug der Lindberghs ‘is not intended to be of use to the present-day
radio but to alter it’.77 David Drew omitted to tell us whether Der Ozeanflug had
been written for concert or radio performance. Even if it was a concert piece, Weill
would not have been too happy about the recent broadcast, and if Drew was as
concerned about Weill’s artistic credibility and message, then he should not really
have sanctioned it, since Weill, too, was concerned about, and had experience
of, the ‘musical possibilities and limitations of radio technology at that early

75
See Bertolt Brecht, ‘An Example of Paedagogics’ (Notes to Der Flug der
Lindberghs), in Brecht on Theatre, pp. 31–2, p. 31.
76
Ibid., p. 31.
77
Ibid., p. 31.
 Section 3: 1972–1977 173

stage’ (to quote Drew in another context). Weill’s views about the use of radio
were obviously less polemical and didactic than Brecht’s, but he was certainly
deeply concerned about comprehensibility (of both musical and verbal language,
I would imagine). Of the Berliner Requiem, which, again ironically, had its first
performance in the same year as Der Ozeanflug was composed, Weill wrote:

The radio presents serious musicians of our own day for the first time with the
problem of composing works which can be assimilated by as large a number
of listeners as possible. The content and form of these compositions for radio,
therefore, have to arouse the interest of a large number of people of all sorts.

Not only German-speakers.

This page has been left blank intentionally
 Part II
Articles, Essays, Interviews
and Longer Prose Pieces
This page has been left blank intentionally
‘Towards (a definition of) experimental music’ (Chapter 1 of Experimental
Music: Cage and Beyond (First Edition, Studio Vista, 1974; Second Edition,
CUP 1999))

Objections are sometimes made by composers to the use of the term experimental
as descriptive of their works, for it is claimed that any experiments that are
made precede the steps that are finally taken with determination, and that this
determination is knowing, having, in fact, a particular, if unconventional, ordering
of the elements used in view. These objections are clearly justifiable, but only where,
as among contemporary evidences in serial music, it remains a question of making
a thing upon which attention is focused. Where, on the other hand, attention moves
towards the observation and audition of many things at once, including those that
are environmental – becomes, that is, inclusive rather than exclusive – no question
of making, in the sense of forming understandable structures, can arise (one is a
tourist), and here the word ‘experimental’ is apt, providing it is understood not as
descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as
of an act the outcome of which is unknown. What has been determined?
 John Cage (1955)1

When a composer feels a responsibility to make, rather than accept, he

eliminates from the area of possibility all those events that do not suggest this
at that point in time vogue for profundity. For he takes himself seriously, wishes
to be considered great, and he thereby diminishes his love and increases his fear
and concern about what people will think. There are many serious problems
confronting such an individual. He must do it better, more impressively, more
beautifully, etc. than anybody else. And what, precisely, does this, this beautiful
profound object, this masterpiece, have to do with Life? It has this to do with
Life: that it is separate from it. Now we see it and now we don’t. When we see it
we feel better, and when we are away from it, we don’t feel so good.
 John Cage (published in 1959, written in 1952)2

For living takes place each instant and that instant is always changing. The wisest
thing to do is to open one’s ears immediately and hear a sound suddenly before
one’s thinking has a chance to turn it into something logical, abstract or symbolical.
 John Cage (1952)3

1
Cage, ‘Experimental Music: Doctrine’, in Silence (London: Calder and Boyars,
1961), p. 13.
2
Cage, ‘Lecture on Something’, Silence, p. 130. Nyman borrows from Cage’s words
in ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’, The Spectator (13 December 1968).
3
Cage, ‘Julliard Lecture’, in A Year from Monday (London: Calder and Boyars,
1968), p. 98.
178 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

In this opening chapter I shall make an attempt to isolate and identify what
experimental music is, and what distinguishes it from the music of such avant-
garde composers as Boulez, Kagel, Xenakis, Birtwistle, Berio, Stockhausen,
Bussotti, which is conceived and executed along the well-trodden but sanctified
path of the post-Renaissance tradition.* Since, as the Chinese proverb has it, ‘One
showing is worth a hundred sayings’ I propose to take a practical instance – Cage’s
4’33” – dating from the same inauguration period of experimental music as the
three statements quoted above, and use it as a point of reference. I have selected
the so-called silent piece not because it is notorious (and misunderstood) but
simply because it is the most empty of its kind and therefore for my purposes
the most full of possibilities. It is also – certainly for Cage – a work that has
outlived its usefulness, having been overtaken by the revolution it helped to bring
about. (‘I no longer need the silent piece’ Cage said in an interview in 1966.4)
I shall build the discussion around Cage’s questioning of the traditional unities
of composing, performing and listening: ‘Composing’s one thing, performing’s
another, listening’s a third. What can they have to do with one another?’5 In normal
circumstances it might seem puzzling to make this separation, but even at such an
early point in the history of experimental music 4’33” demonstrates very clearly what
composition, realization and audition may or may not have to do with one another.
The distinctions between the experimental and the avant-garde ultimately
depend on purely musical considerations. But as Cage’s statements show it would
be foolish to try to separate sound from the aesthetic, conceptual, philosophical
and ethical considerations that the music enshrines. As Alan Watts wrote of
the difficulties for the western mind in understanding Chinese philosophy, ‘the
problem is to appreciate differences in the basic premise of thought and in the

*
[Nyman footnote] For obvious reasons I have deliberately chosen to concentrate on
the differences between the experimental and the avant-garde. Interestingly enough Morton
Feldman’s professed independence of both experimental and avant-garde standpoints
(as I will show, Feldman’s music is experimental as I define it) leads him to these recent
conclusions: ‘What music rhapsodizes in today’s “cool” language, is its own construction.
The fact that men like Boulez and Cage represent opposite extremes of modern methodology
is not what is interesting. What is interesting is their similarity. In the music of both men,
things are exactly what they are – no more, no less. In the music of both men, what is heard
is indistinguishable from its process. In fact, process itself might be called the zeitgeist of
our age. The duality of precise means of creating indeterminate emotions is now associated
only with the past.’ (Feldman, ‘A Compositional Problem’, originally published in Neue
Musik, Sondernummer (Munich, 1972), p. 35; see also Give My Regards to Eighth Street:
Collected Writings of Morton Feldman (Cambridge MA: Exact Change, 2000), p. 109.)
4
This comment appears to go against subsequent statements made by Cage about
4’33”. For example, he famously said in an interview with Stephen Montague in 1985 that
‘I always think of my silent piece before I write the next piece’ (see ‘John Cage at Seventy:
An Interview’, American Music, 3/2 (Summer 1985), pp. 205–16, p. 213).
5
Cage, ‘Experimental Music: Doctrine’, in Silence, p. 15.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 179

very methods of thinking’.6 And Boulez was aware of such differences: ‘Nothing …
is based on the “masterpiece”, on the closed cycle, on passive contemplation, on
purely aesthetic enjoyment. Music is a way of being in the world, becomes an
integral part of existence, is inseparably connected with it; it is an ethical category,
no longer merely an aesthetic one.’7 Boulez was in fact comparing non-western
ethnic traditions to the western art music tradition, but his statement nonetheless
expresses the position of experimental music very clearly.

Composing

Notation
The score of 4’33” presents, by means of the roman numerals I, II and III, a
three-movement work; each movement is marked ‘TACET’. A footnote (the only
actual ‘note’ in Cage’s score!) indicates that at the first (and most talked-about)
performance David Tudor chose to take four minutes and 30 seconds over the
three sections. Since ‘TACET’ is the word used in western music to tell a player to
remain silent during a movement, the performer is asked to make no sounds; but –
as the note makes clear – for any length of time, on any instrument.
As notation, then, 4’33” is clearly evidence of the radical shift in the
methods and functions of notation that experimental music has brought about.
A score may no longer ‘represent’ sounds by means of the specialized symbols
we call musical notation, symbols which are read by the performer who does his
best to ‘reproduce’ as accurately as possible the sounds the composer initially
‘heard’ and then stored. Edgard Varèse once drew attention to some of the
disadvantages of the mechanics of traditional notation: with music ‘played by
the human being you have to impose a musical thought through notation, then,
usually much later, the player has to prepare himself in various ways to produce
what will – one hopes – emerge as that sound’.8 4’33” is one of the first in a
long line of compositions by Cage and others in which something other than a
‘musical thought’ (by which Varèse meant a pattern of sound) is imposed through
notation. Cornelius Cardew wrote in 1963: ‘A composer who hears sounds will
try to find a notation for sounds. One who has ideas will find that one expresses
his ideas, leaving their interpretation free, in confidence that his ideas have been
accurately and concisely notated.’9

6
Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (London: Thames and Hudson, 1957), pp. 3–4.
7
Boulez, ‘Sonate, Que me Veux-tu?’, trans. David Noakes and Paul Jacobs, in
Perspectives of New Music, 1/2 (Spring 1963), pp. 32–44, p. 34; see also Jean-Jacques Nattiez
(ed.) Orientations: Collected Writings by Pierre Boulez (London: Faber, 1986), p. 145.
8
Gunther Schuller, ‘Conversation with Varèse’, Perspectives of New Music, 3/2
(Spring–Summer, 1965), pp. 32–7, p. 36.
9
Cornelius Cardew, Treatise Handbook (London: Peters Edition, 1971), p. iii.
180 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Processes
Experimental composers are by and large not concerned with prescribing a
defined time-object whose materials, structuring and relationships are calculated
and arranged in advance, but are more excited by the prospect of outlining a
situation in which sounds may occur, a process of generating action (sounding
or otherwise), a field delineated by certain compositional ‘rules’. The composer
may, for instance, present a performer with the means of making calculations to
determine the nature, timing or spacing of sounds. He may call on the performer
to make split-second decisions in the moment of performance. He may indicate
the temporal areas in which a number of sounds may be placed. Sometimes a
composer will specify situations to be arranged or encountered before sounds may
be made or heard; at other times he may indicate the number and general quality
of the sounds and allow the performers to proceed through them at their own
pace. Or he may invent, or ask the performers to invent, particular instruments or
electronic systems.
Experimental composers have evolved a vast number of processes to bring
about ‘acts the outcome of which are unknown’ (Cage). The extent to which they
are unknown (and to whom) is variable and depends on the specific process in
question. Processes may range from a minimum of organization to a minimum
or arbitrariness, proposing different relationships between chance and choice,
presenting different kinds of options and obligations. The following list is
of necessity only partial because any attempt to classify a phenomenon as
unclassifiable and (often) elusive as experimental music must be partial, though
most processes conform to what George Brecht termed ‘The Irrelevant Process’
(especially if ‘selection’ is taken to include ‘arrangement’): ‘In general, bias in
the selection of elements for a chance-image can be avoided by using a method of
selection of these elements which is independent of the characteristics of interest
in the elements themselves. The method should preferably give an irregular and
unforeseen pattern of selection.’10

1. chance determination processes These were first used by Cage who still
favours them – the I-Ching (the ancient Chinese Book of Oracles) used to answer
questions about the articulation of his material (Music of Changes, 1951, Mureau,
1971); observation of the imperfections on paper (Music for Piano, 1952–6); the
random overlaying of shapes printed on perspex and readings taken to make various
determinations (Variations I–III and VI, 1958–67); a star map (Atlas Eclipticalis,
1961–2) and the computer (HPSCHD, 1969). Other composers have also used this
type of chance process: random number tables or the telephone directory are to be
used in La Monte Young’s Poem (1960), and in Christopher Hobbs’ Voicepiece
(1967) random techniques are used to produce a programme of vocal action for
each individual performer. George Brecht uses shuffled cards in Card Piece of
Voices (1959) as does Cage in Theatre Piece (1960). The importance of Cage’s

10
George Brecht, Chance-Imagery (New York: Something Else Press, 1966), p. 14.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 181

chance methods of the early 1950s, according to Dick Higgins, lay in the placing
of the ‘material at one remove from the composer by allowing it to be determined
by a system he determined. And the real innovation lies in the emphasis on the
creation of a system’ (or process).11

2. People Processes These are processes which allow the performers to move
through given or suggested material, each at his own speed. Morton Feldman was
certainly the first to use this procedure in Piece for Four Pianos (1957); Cardew
uses it in all seven paragraphs of The Great Learning (1968–71). It could of course
be used to establish the determinations of chance processes. One particular form
of this process, where each person reads the same notation, has been described by
Michael Parsons:

The idea of one and the same activity being done simultaneously by a number of
people, so that everyone does it slightly differently, and so the ‘unity’ becoming
‘multiplicity’, gives one a very economical form of notation – it is only necessary
to specify one procedure and the variety comes from the way everyone does
it differently. This is an example of making use of ‘hidden resources’ in the
sense of natural individual differences (rather than talents or abilities) which
is completely neglected in classical concert music, though not in folk music.12

Differences of ability account for the (possible) eventuality of players getting lost
in Frederic Rzewski’s Les Moutons de Panurge (1969) (once you’re lost you’re
encouraged to stay lost) and the (probable) deviations from the written letter of the
classics by the members of the Portsmouth Sinfonia.

3. Contextual Processes These are concerned with actions dependent on

unpredictable conditions and on variables which arise from within the musical
continuity. The selection of new pitches in The Great Learning Paragraph 7 is
an example of this process, originated by Christian Wolff whose music presents
a comprehensive repertoire of contextual systems. One of the ‘movements’ of
Burdocks (1970), for instance, is for an orchestra made up of at least 15 players,
each of whom chooses one to three sounds, fairly quiet. Using one of these each
time, you have to play as simultaneously as possible with the next sound of the
player nearest to you; then with the next sound of the next nearest player; then
with the next nearest after him, and so forth until you have played with all the
other players (in your orchestra, or if so determined beforehand, with all players
present), ending with the player farthest away from you. Rzewski’s ‘improvisation
plan’ for Spacecraft (1968) also perhaps falls into this category, as do the last two

11
Dick Higgins, Foew & ombwhnw (New York: Something Else Press, 1969), p. 57.
12
See ‘Melody Rides Again’, Music and Musicians, 20 (October 1971), pp. 26–8,
p. 28.
182 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

paragraphs of Cardew’s The Great Learning, and (in an entirely different way)
Alvin Lucier’s Vespers (1968).

4. Repetition Processes These use extended repetition as the sole means of

generating movement – as, for example, in John White’s Machines, in the ‘gradual
process’ music of Steve Reich, Terry Riley’s Keyboard Studies, or a piece like
Hugh Shrapnel’s Cantation I (1970). Riley’s In C [1964] and Paragraph 2 of
Cardew’s The Great Learning use repetition within a ‘people’ process (or vice
versa). In repetition processes the ‘unforeseen’ may arise (pace Feldman) through
many different factors, even though the process may, from the point of view of
structure, be totally foreseen.

5. Electronic Processes These take many forms and are dealt with at length in
Chapter 5. A straightforward example is David Behrman’s Runthrough (1970).
This asks only for a particular electronic set-up consisting of generators and
modulators with dials and switches and a photocell distributor which three or four
people use for improvisation. Behrman writes that ‘because there is neither a score
nor directions, any sound which results from any combination of the switch and
light positioning remains part of the “piece”. (Whatever you do with a surfboard
in the surf remains a part of surfboarding.)’13

The Unique Moment

Processes throw up momentary configurations which have no sooner happened

than they are past: the experimental composer is interested not in the uniqueness
of permanence but in the uniqueness of the moment. This is a concept which is
clearly expressed in Jung’s statement about the I-Ching:

The moment under actual observation appears to the ancient Chinese view
more of a chance hit than a clearly defined result of concurring casual chain
processes. The matter of interest seems to be the configuration formed by chance
events in the moment of observation, and not at all the hypothetical reasons
that seemingly account for the coincidence. While the Western mind carefully
sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment
encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all of
the ingredients make up the observed moment.14

By contrast the avant-garde composer wants to freeze the moment, to make its
uniqueness un-natural, a jealously guarded possession. Thus Stockhausen [1955]:

13
In Behrman’s liner notes to the Sonic Arts Union LP, Electric Sound (Mainstream
Records, 1972).
14
See Carl Jung’s foreword to the I-Ching or Book of Changes (London: Routledge,
1968), p. xxiii.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 183

A sound which results from a certain mode of structure has … no relevance

outside the particular composition for which it has been intended. For this reason
the same ‘prepared’ element, the same sound or the same ‘object’ can never
be utilized in different compositions, and all sounds which have been created
according to the structural pattern of one composition are destroyed when the
composition is completed.15

And one finds Boulez, seemingly disconcerted by the impermanence of his sounds,
constantly trying to fix them with ever greater precision by obsessive revising,
refining and reworking, in the hope of sculpting his sounds into more permanent
finality. This attitude is hallowed by tradition, as is shown by Webern’s approval of
‘the way Beethoven worked and worked at the main theme of the first movement
of his “Eroica” until it achieved a degree of graspability comparable to a sentence
of the “Our Father”’.16

Identity
The identity of a composition is of paramount importance to Boulez and
Stockhausen, as to all composers of the post-Renaissance tradition. But identity
takes on a very different significance for the more open experimental work, where
indeterminacy in performance guarantees that two versions of the same piece
will have virtually no perceptible musical ‘facts’ in common. With a score like
Cardew’s Treatise (1963–6) aural recognisability is both impossible and irrelevant
since the (non-musical) graphic symbols it contains have no meanings attached
to them but ‘are to be interpreted in the context of their role in the whole’.17 The
performer may choose to realize for example, as a circle, some sort of circular
sound, movement or gesture; but it is more likely that he will interpret it in a
‘non-representational’ way by a melody, or silence, or counting, or turning off
the lights, or tuning in to a radio signal, or whatever. Each performer is invited by
the absence of rules to make personal correlations of sight and sound. These will
naturally change from one performance to another, whose timescale will be totally
different. What price identity here with a score which is in no way a compendium
or reduction of all possible realizations?
As regards the relationship between one performance and another Cage wrote
in 1958:

A performance of a composition which is indeterminate of its performance is

necessarily unique. It cannot be repeated. When performed for a second time,

15
Karlheinz Stockhausen, ‘Actualia’, in Die Reihe 1 (London: Universal Edition,
1958), pp. 45–51, p. 51.
16
Anton Webern (trans. Cornelius Cardew), Letters to Hildegard Jone and Josef
Humplik (Bryn Mawr, PA: T. Presser Co., 1967), p. 10.
17
Cardew, Treatise Handbook, p. iii.
184 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

the outcome is other than it was. Nothing therefore is accomplished by such a

performance, since that performance cannot be grasped as an object in time.18

Recordings of the most open processes are also misleading. Both Cage and Cardew
have drawn attention to this. Talking of a composition which is indeterminate of
its performance, Cage says that a recording of such a work ‘has no more value
than a postcard; it provides a knowledge of something that happened, whereas the
action was a non-knowledge of something that had not yet happened’.19 Cardew
is concerned about the practical problem of reproducing improvisation where
documents such as tape recordings are essentially empty; they preserve chiefly
the form that something took, give at best an indistinct hint as to the feeling, and
cannot of course convey any sense of time and place. From his experience with
AMM he found that it is impossible to record with any fidelity a kind of music
that is actually derived from the room in which it is taking place – its size, shape,
acoustical properties, even the view from the window, since what a recording
produces is a separate phenomenon, something really much stranger than the
playing itself. ‘What we hear on tape or disc is indeed the same playing, but
divorced from its natural context.’20
Difficulties also arise when one tries to explain the most open processes. A
description of a particular performance may tell you little of its musical concepts,
and a description of the score may tell you too much about possible interpretations
to be of any use. With Cage’s Cartridge Music, Behrman’s Runthrough or Lucier’s
Vespers the difficulties are less obvious because the type of sound in any one
version will be recognizably similar to that of another (though a lot of other aspects
will be different). But separate performances of Cage’s Fontana Mix (1958) or
of Cardew’s Treatise may exhibit no family likenesses. Cage’s own tape collage
versions (available on record ironically) are only versions, momentary isolations
or interruptions of an unrestricted process; they in no way constitute the identity
of the process called Fontana Mix.
4’33” raises similar questions. Since its first and most famous performance
was given by a pianist (David Tudor) it is thought of as a piece for piano. But the
score does not specify a particular instrument, and strictly speaking 4’33” is not a
piece for any instrument, but rather a piece by means of any instrument. Reference
to the score will show that the actions David Tudor chose for his realization in
the Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock, New York on 29 August 1952 would
only mistakenly be considered as the identity of the piece. Literary, art and music
critics who use the silent piece as an aesthetic bargaining counter have shown little
interest in the reasons why Tudor did what he did and in whether what he did is
more, or less, important than the fact of doing it.

18
Cage, Silence, p. 39.
19
Ibid., p. 39.
20
Cardew, ‘Toward an Ethic of Improvisation’, in Treatise Handbook, xviii.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 185

At the first performance Tudor, seated in the normal fashion on a stool in front
of the piano, did nothing more nor less than silently close the keyboard lid at the
beginning of, and raise it at the end of each time period. The score had not of
course explicitly asked him to make these – or any – actions, but they were implied
because some means or other had to be devised to observe the three time lengths
without causing to be heard any sounds not specified by the composer.

Time
The attitude towards time expressed by 4’33” had its origins in the rhythmic
structures that Cage worked with during the thirties and forties (see Chapter 2 [of
Experimental Music]) and it became the basis of all Cage’s music which involves
the measurement (exact or approximate) of time. This attitude was of such
fundamental importance to experimental music that Robert Ashley could state
with certainty (in 1961):

[Cage’s] influence on contemporary music, on ‘musicians’, is such that the entire

metaphor of music could change to such an extent that – time being uppermost
as a definition of music – the ultimate result would be a music that wouldn’t
necessarily involve anything but the presence of people … it seems to me that
the most radical redefinition of music that I could think of would be one that
defines ‘music’ without reference to sound.21

Time may initially be nothing more than a frame to be filled. ‘Form is the length
of programmed time’ declared Christian Wolff,22 a statement Cage explains more
fully in his comment on Wolff’s Duo II for Pianists (1958):

The ending, and the beginning, will be determined in performance, not by

exigencies interior to the action but by circumstances of the concert occasion.
If the other pieces on the programme take forty-five minutes of time and fifteen
more minutes are required to bring the programme to a proper length, Duo II for
Pianists may be fifteen minutes long. Where only five minutes are available, it
will be five minutes long.23

Needless to say this has nothing to do with partial or incomplete performances:

processes are by definition always in motion and can be equally well expressed in
two minutes or 24 hours:

21
Quoted in Richard Kostelanetz (ed.) John Cage (London: Allen Lane, 1971), p. 148.
22
Wolff, ‘Precise Actions Under Variously Indeterminate Conditions’, in Die Reihe
7 (London: Universal Edition, 1960); see also Cues: Writings & Conversations (Cologne:
MusikTexte, 1998), p. 38.
23
Cage, ‘Composition as Process II: Indeterminacy’, in Silence, pp. 38–9.
186 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Beginnings and ends are not points on a line but limits of a piece’s material …
which may be touched at any time during the piece. The boundaries of the piece
are expressed, not at moments of time which mark a succession, but as margins
of a spatial projection of the total sound structure.24

And since the experimental composer is not dealing in artefacts, the elaborate
time-structures erected by Stockhausen, for example, are unnecessary: primary
time-calculations may be very simple and direct.
One can distinguish a number of methods of releasing time in experimental
music. A time frame may be chosen at random and then filled with sounds. Or
temporal determinations may be made by some method or other and then measured
according to any time units whatsoever, from the shortest possible to the longest
possible. For Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis or La Monte Young’s Poem (to name but
two) ‘the duration may be anything from no time to any time’. The work may
last the duration of a natural event of process – the time it takes birthday cake
candles to burn out (George Brecht’s Candle Piece for Radios) or the time it takes
for swung microphones to come to rest (Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music). Or the
duration may be determined simply by the time it takes to work through the given
material. In some pieces (such as Reich’s Phase Patterns, Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’
Blood Never Failed Me Yet or Christopher Hobbs’ The Remorseless Lamb) the
working-through may be similar to that of traditional music but in Paragraphs 2,
6 or 7 of The Great Learning, or in Riley’s In C, where each performer moves
through at his own speed, the duration of the piece is dependent on the inner
workings of the process.
But any temporal decision made before a performance is transcended by the
experience of time as it actually does pass, for, paradoxically, the sounds flow free
of any formalistic restraint. The audience may see Tudor dividing the available
time into three in his version of 4’33” but this may not divide their listening
into three periods. And in works such as Cartridge Music where the temporal
measurements may have to do with perceptible things like turning amplifiers on
and off, this, too, is an independent, external programme, which may have no
audible connection with the nature of the sounds themselves.
As an example of how a ‘working-through’ notation is experienced as time,
there is a story that Dick Higgins tells of a performance of a piece by George
Brecht given by Cage’s class at the New School of Social Research around 1958.
Each performer had to do two different things once only, and Cage suggested
that they should do them in the dark so that they could not tell, visually, when the
piece was over. ‘The result was extraordinary’, says Higgins, ‘both for its own
sake and for the extraordinary intensity that appeared in waves, as we wondered
whether the pieces was over or not, what the next thing to happen would be’.25
Afterwards the performers were asked how long they thought they had been in the

24
Quoted in Cage, ‘Composition as Process III: Communication’, in Silence, p. 54.
25
Dick Higgins, Foew & ombwhnw, p. 101.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 187

dark; guesses ranged from four to 24 minutes: the actual duration had been nine
minutes. Perhaps this kind of experiential time was what was in Feldman’s mind
when he spoke of working with ‘Time in its unstructured existence … how Time
exists before we put our paws on it – our minds, our imagination, into it’.26

Performing

Experimental music thus engages the performer at many stages before, above and
beyond those at which he is active in some forms of western music. It involves his
intelligence, his initiative, his opinions and prejudices, his experience, his taste and
his sensibility in a way that no other form of music does, and his contribution to the
musical collaboration which the composer initiates is obviously indispensable. For
while it may be possible to view some experimental scores only as concepts, they
are, self-evidently (specific or general), directives for (specific or general) action.
Experimental music has, for the performer, effected the reverse of Duchamp’s
revolution in the visual arts. Duchamp once said that ‘the point was to forget with
my hand … I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind’.27 The
head has always been the guiding principle of Western music, and experimental
music has successfully taught performers to remember with their hands, to produce
and experience sounds physiologically.

Tasks
The freedom of action that experimental scores give may be to some extent an
illusion. In Lucier’s Vespers echo-locating devices are to be freely adjusted by
the performers to produce the best results from what they hear feeding back from
the particular environment that is being explored. But Lucier tells the performers
that ‘any situations that arise from personal preferences based on ideas of texture,
density, improvisations or compositions, that do not directly serve to articulate the
sound personality of the environment, should be considered deviations from the
task of echo-location’.28 The significance of Lucier’s instructions extends beyond
Vespers for he very specifically demands two conditions which explore the number
of myths surrounding experimental music.
People tend to think that since, within the limits set by the composer, anything
may happen, the resulting music will therefore be unconsidered, haphazard, or
careless. The attitude that experimental music breeds amongst its best performers/

26
Feldman, ‘Between Categories’ (1969), in B.H. Friedman (ed.) Give My Regards
to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman (Cambridge MA: Exact Change,
2000), p. 87.
27
Calvin Tomkins, The Bride & the Bachelors (New York: Viking Press, 1965), p. 29,
p. 13.
28
Alvin Lucier, Vespers (1968), quoted in Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn (eds)
Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966–1973 (California: University of California Press,
2011), p. 249.
188 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

composers/listeners is not what Cage called ‘carelessness as to the result’ but

involvement and responsibility of a kind rarely encouraged in other music. What
degree of ‘carelessness’, how much ‘self-expression’ (self-discovery is quite
another matter) is one to find in this account by John Tilbury of a performance he
gave of Takehisa Kosugi’s Anima 7 (1964), a work which consists of performing
any action as slowly as possible?

The trouble with playing the piano is that once you have made the action to
produce the sound, the sound tends to free itself of your control. The performer
is concerned primarily then with the action, not with the result; if indeed the two
are separable. This problem of defining where the performance of a sound begins
and ends is perfectly exemplified in Kosugi’s piece. In a London performance
last year I decided to perform the action to produce B-flat on the piano as slowly
as possible. Several problems presented themselves, the most taxing of which
were how, where, and when to begin, and at what point to end. By using this
slow-motion procedure a simple reflex action turns into an inhibiting dilemma.
For example, was it possible to perform the action to produce the sound without
performing the sound? If I sounded the B-flat, would not that be an ‘excess’?
Does the action begin when my hand is at rest on my leg, or from the moment I
approach or sit at the piano? In fact, I began according to a stopwatch, a solution
I suspect Kosugi would have approved of.29

The crucial work in Lucier’s instructions for Vespers is task. For each experimental
composition presents the performer with a task or series of tasks which extend
and re-define the traditional (and avant-garde) performance sequence of reading–
comprehension–preparation–production. David Tudor’s task in 4’33” was merely
to indicate the prescribed time-lengths of silence.

Unpredictable Difficulties Encountered in Performance

Apparently routine tasks may have an alarming tendency to breed random variables
which call for a heroic (unsung, unnoticed) virtuosity on the part of the performer.
The difficulties may be of his own making, as in Tilbury’s case, because he chose
to consider the ramifications of Kosugi’s quite unobscure directive in relation to
the act of performance. But the problems may develop and pile up uncontrollably
during the performance of an activity which on the surface seems to be mere routine.
Cardew’s perceptive consideration of the implications of the words ‘as possible’
as applied to ‘uniformity and regularity’ in La Monte Young’s X (any integer) for
Henry Flynt, an unnotated piece of the early sixties, in which a heavy sound (such
as a cluster) is to be repeated as uniformly, as regularly, and as loudly as possible
a relatively large number of times, shows his awareness of the nature of this
problem (just as the demands made on each individual performer in his Schooltime
Special provide a strong, programmed antidote to automatic or casual playing in

29
‘Music’ by John Tilbury, in Ark Magazine, 45, Winter 1969, pp. 41–4, 43.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 189

a totally different situation). He enquires as to what is the model for uniformity.

The first sound? Or does each sound become the model for the one succeeding it?
If the former, the first sound has to be fixed in the mind as a mental idea which all
the remaining sounds are to approach as closely as possible. If the latter method is
chosen, constant care has to be taken to assimilate the various accidental variations
as they occur. Cardew points out that David Tudor approached the piece in this
way and on noticing that certain keys in the centre of the keyboard were not
being depressed he made it his task to ensure that these particular keys continued
to be silent. This task of assimilating and maintaining accidental variations, if
logically pursued, requires superhuman powers of concentration and technique.
But, he says, it must be remembered that although uniformity is demanded (‘as
far as possible’), what is desired is variation. ‘It is simply this: that the variation
that is desired is that which results from the human (not superhuman) attempt
at uniformity.’30
Similarly chance procedures have so strong an ethical value for Cage that
they are seen not simply as generators (or disorganizers) of sounds, but as quasi-
natural forces whose results are accepted totally and unquestioningly, without any
adjustment being made. But complete acceptance of the results may make the
task of the performer (in this case, Cage’s Water Walk of 1959) an unexpectedly
difficult one:

And then I made lists of actions that I was willing to involve myself in. Then
through the intersection of those curved lines and the straight line (the materials
of Fontana Mix) I could see within what amount of time I had, for instance, to
put a rose in a bathtub, if that came up. If at the same time playing a particular
note – or not a particular note – on the piano came up, those two things had to get
done within the time allotted. I ended up with six parts which I then rehearsed
very carefully, over and over again with people watching me and correcting me,
because I had to do it in three minutes. It had many actions in it and it demanded
what you might call virtuosity. I was unwilling to perform it until I was certain
that I could do it well.31

The Game Element

The tasks which the coordination processes of Christian Wolff set the player are of
a different order. For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964) contains four symbols which mean:
(1) play after a previous sound has begun, hold till it stops; (2) start anytime,
hold until another sound starts, finish with it; (3) start at the same time (or as
soon as you are aware of it) as the next sound, but stop before it does; (4) start
anytime, hold till another sound starts, continue holding anytime after that sound

30
Cardew, Treatise Handbook, p. xv.
31
Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, ‘An interview with John Cage’, The Tulane
Drama Review, 10/2 (Winter 1965), pp. 50–72, p. 62.
190 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

has stopped. The fact that notations like these give the players no advance warning
led David Behrman to write:

The player’s situation might be compared to that of a ping-pong player awaiting

his opponent’s fast serve: he knows what is coming (the serve) and knows what
he must do when it comes (return it); but the details of how and when these take
place are determined only at the moment of their occurrence.32

Dick Higgins coined the term ‘Games of Art’ in connection with certain forms of
experimental music, and Professor Morse Peckham has written:

The role of the game player is to present his opponent, who may be himself,
as in solitaire or fishing, with an unpredicted situation which will force him
to behave in a particular way; while the player faced with such a situation has
as his role the task of rearranging the situation so that the tables are turned.
Playing a game involves continuous risk-running. The rules place limits on what
may be done, but more importantly, they provide guides to improvisation and
innovation. Behaviour is aimed at following rules in predictable situations and
interpreting rules in unpredicted ones. Hence, the important ingredient of game
playing consists of arguments about how the rules should be interpreted.33

Rules and their (Subjective) Interpretation

Peckham was writing about games in general, but what he has to say is very
relevant to the mainly solitaire-type games of experimental music. The composer
gives the performer freedoms, which may take him further than the composer may
have envisaged:

I think composition is a serious occupation and the onus is on the performer to

show the composer some of the implications and consequences of what he has
written, even if from time to time it may make him (the composer, of course)
look ridiculous. What he writes and what you read are two different things.34

And Cardew reinforces Peckham’s final point about arguments over the rules in
one essay in which he submitted the rules (or lack of them) of Morton Feldman’s
Piano Three Hands to close analytical scrutiny, and in another called ‘On the

32
David Behrman, ‘What Indeterminate Notation Determines’, Perspectives of New
Music, 3/2 (Spring–Summer 1965), pp. 58–73, p. 67.
33
Morse Peckham, Man’s Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behaviour and the Arts (New
York: Schocken Books, 1967), p. 58.
34
‘The Contemporary Pianist – John Tilbury talks to Michael Parsons’, Musical
Times, 110/1512 (February 1969), pp. 150–52, p. 152.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 191

Role of the Instructions in Indeterminate Music’.35 In this he wrote that very often
a performer’s intuitive response to the notation influences to a large extent his
interpretation of the instructions. He influences the piece’s identity, in fact, at the
moment when he first glances at the notation and jumps to a conclusion about what
the piece is, and what is its nature. Then he turns to the instructions, which on
occasion may explain that certain notations do not for instance mean what many
people might at first blush expect, and these he proceeds to interpret in relation to
his preconceptions deriving from the notations themselves.
Just as the interpretation of the rules may be taken out of the composer’s hands
and becomes the private concern of the performer, so may the rules themselves.
Some pieces intentionally make explicit the subjectivity which is at the root of a
large number of experimental scores. Giuseppe Chiari’s instructions for his Lavoro
(1965) provide a simple example: ‘All round the performer are many different
things placed in the most complete disorder. He arranges them in the proper order.
He follows his own idea of what their proper order is.’ The conditions on which
Frederic Rzewski’s Selfportrait (1964) depends (as distinct from the decisions
made in performance) may arise from qualities of which only the performer is
aware. Four types, or origins, of sound are specified: (1) ‘interior’ sounds, ‘merely
thought or expressed as vague, introverted, or incomplete actions, e.g. barely
audible or unclear, functioning as silence’; (2) sounds made by the performer’s
body or by objects attached to his body, such as clothing; (3) sounds made by
objects or instruments directly confronted, or mechanically manipulated, by the
performer; (4) sounds of an independent character, produced by means external to
the performer or his sphere of musical influence.
Not unrelated to this privacy are some of Gavin Bryars’ works, especially a
piece actually called Private Music (1969) in which all the activities are to be
private and self-insulated: ‘simply keep your privacy private depriving others of
the possibility of your privacy’. The first of Christopher Hobbs’ Two Compositions,
21 May 1969 requires another subjective procedure, that of observation: ‘Observe
activities in the environment which are unintentional on your part (silence).
Make actions or cause actions to be made, in such a way that the activities of the
environment seem intentional and the actions which you make or cause to be made
seem like silence.’ In fact, many scores are equally valid as means of observing as
of producing sounds or actions. Some of Brecht’s event-scores carry instructions
as ‘discover or arrange’ while the small print of Cage’s Variations III reads: ‘Some
of all of one’s obligations may be performed through ambient circumstances
(environmental changes) by simply noticing and responding to them.’

The Instrument as Total Configuration

Something else that emerges from Tudor’s version of 4’33” is the notion that
the use of a musical instrument need not be limited by the boundaries erected by

35
See Cardew’s ‘Piano (Three Hands) – Morton Feldman’, Accent No. 4 (Leeds College
of Art and School of Architecture, Autumn 1962) and Treatise Handbook, pp. xiv–xvi.
192 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

tradition. Experimental music exploits an instrument not simply as a means of

making sounds in the accepted fashion, but as a total configuration – the difference
between ‘playing the piano’ and the ‘piano as sound source’.
In the past, piano music viewed the keyboard-hammer-string mechanism from
the vantage-point of the keyboard alone. (There have been exceptions, of course –
Chopin’s view of the art of pedalling as a ‘sort of breathing’ and Debussy’s desire to
‘forget that the piano has hammers’.) Experimental composers have extended the
functions of the basic mechanism. They have brought about the alteration of timbre
by inserting objects between the strings (Cage’s prepared piano) and by applying
various treatments of which the simplest is amplification. The piano becomes
more than ever before a keyboard-operated percussion instrument. Cage devised
the prepared piano as a one-man percussion band and Steve Reich describes his
Phase Patterns as ‘literally drumming on the keyboard’.36 Alternatively, auxiliary
objects may be placed between the keyboard and the performer who activates
them to produce sounds, as in Kosugi’s Distance; these objects may be viewed
both as extensions of the performer and extensions of the keyboard. And forget
the hammer mechanism, replace it with any kind of ‘manual’ operation, and the
strings may be activated in any way; they can be hit or scraped or bowed, with
the fingers, hands or any other mechanical aids – the piano has become a pure
percussion instrument.
Once you move to the exterior of the piano you find a number of wooden and
metal surfaces which can be ‘played’. Again it was Cage who pioneered this with
the accompaniment to The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942) which is
performed by the percussive action of the fingertips and knuckles on the closed
keyboard lid. When you have realised that the piano does have an outside then a
series of extensions of the concept ‘piano’ become possible. The instrument can
be seen as just a large brown, mainly wooden object, on legs with wheels, of
a particular shape, having curious mechanical innards and serving as a musical
instrument. The inner mechanism may be completely disregarded (does it then
cease to be a piano? – any complex object has a number of uses, most of them
only partial) so that the piano can be treated as an object with surfaces to be hit or
painted, have things thrown at, left on, hidden in, moved about or fed with hay.
(Needless to say it is in no sense a definition of experimental music that pianos
should be used in this way – Feldman’s keyboard writing, for instance, has always
been every bit as ‘sensitive’ and ‘musical’ as Debussy’s or Webern’s.)
Cardew’s Memories of You (1964), for piano solo, sums up this new approach
to the piano. Its notation consists of a series of miniature grand piano outlines on or
off which tiny circles are placed. Each circle gives the location of a sound relative
to a grand piano: the sound begins and/or ends at that point. Different kinds of
circle indicate whether the sounds are to be made at floor level, above floor level
or both. It is not specified whether the sounds are to be made on or with the piano,

36
See Nyman, ‘First interview with Michael Nyman (1970)’, in Steve Reich, Writings
on Music 1965–2000, ed. Paul Hillier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 55.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 193

or with other instruments, or whether the sounds should be ‘musical’ or made on

or with the environment. Thus the piano becomes a kind of ‘umbrella’ covering a
range of sounding activities whose only direct connection with the piano may be
the fact that they take place with reference to the ‘piano space’.

Music as Silence, Actions, Observations – and Sounds

Tudor’s version of 4’33” also showed that the performer is not obliged to begin
from the traditional starting point of causing sounds to be made or heard by means
of a musical instrument. For when Tudor does not need to make sounds to give
a musical performance; when Cage declares ‘Let the notations refer to what is to
be done, not to what is heard, or to be heard’;37 when Ashley refers to time, not
sounds, as the ruling metaphor of music; and when the slow-motion procedure
of Kosugi’s Anima 7 could be applied to any action – then we realize that in
experimental music sounds no longer have a pre-emptive priority over not-sounds.
Seeing and hearing no longer need to be considered separately, or be combined
into ‘music theatre’ as an art-form separate from, say, instrumental music (as it
tends to be with the avant-garde). Theatre is all around us, says Cage, and it has
always hung around music – if only you let your attention be ‘distracted’ from
the sounds: Cage prefers the sight of the horn player emptying out the spit from
the instrument to the sounds the orchestra is making: you may prefer to watch
Bernstein with the volume control turned down to zero.

Who are the Performers?

Understandably, in view of the kind of tasks set, the extraordinary range of often
demanding musical and para-musical skills called upon, experimental music had
developed its own breed of performers and tightly-knit performing groups – Tudor,
Rzewski, Tilbury, Cage, Cardew, Skempton, Feldman (even), the Sonic Arts Union
and the Scratch Orchestra, to whom experimental music is more than just a ‘kind
of music’ to be performed; rather, a permanent creativity, a way of perceiving the
world.38 Significantly only Tilbury and (in the earlier part of his career) Tudor
in this list are strictly performers only; all the others are composers who took
up performance – perhaps to protect their scores from misunderstandings their
very openness may encourage, or because the most direct way of realizing their
performance-proposals was to realize them themselves. And in the same way,
some performers, seeing how little work the act of composition may involve, have
in turn become composers. The work of Rzewski and the Scratch Orchestra in

37
Quoted in ‘The Contemporary Pianist’, p. 152. Nyman also notes here that, ‘Cage’s
declaration, consistent with de Kooning’s “The past doesn’t influence me, I influence it”,
gives one a new perspective on old music: the note C in a Mozart piano sonata means “hit
that piece of ivory there, with that force and for that long”.’
38
For more by Nyman on the Scratch Orchestra, see ‘Scratch & Co’, The Spectator
(13 December 1969), p. 845 and ‘Cage/Cardew’, Tempo, 107 (December 1973), pp. 32–8.
194 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

the late sixties went a long way towards channelling and releasing the creativity
everybody has within them.

Listening

The third component of Cage’s compositional ‘trinity’, listening, implies the

presence of someone involved in seeing and hearing. But need this be ‘the
audience’ as we have come to consider it? For experimental music emphasizes
an unprecedented fluidity of composer/performer/listener roles, as it breaks away
from the standard sender/carrier/receiver information structure of other forms of
Western music.
In experimental music the perceiver’s role is more and more appropriated by the
performer – not only in scores like Toshi Ichiyanagi’s Sapporo (1962) which has a
sign which tells the player to listen to what the other players are doing, or in music
like Christian Wolff’s which needs a high degree of listening and concentration.
Dick Higgins’ account of the Brecht performance in the dark at the New School
showed that the task (of performing two actions) had become less important for
the individual than the perceptual and experiential situation that was brought
about. (This does of course leave room for perceiving to be done by any ‘audience’
that may happen to be present.) And if the performer’s participation is passive,
involving observation rather than action, the work is not invalidated or changed.
For Cage at least experimental music is not concerned with ‘communication’ as
other music is considered to be. He once said: ‘We are naïve enough to believe that
words are the most efficient means of communication.’39 On another occasion he is
reported to have said: ‘Distinguish between that “old” music you speak of which
has to do with conceptions and their communication, and this new music, which
has to do with perception and the arousing of it in us. You don’t have to fear from
this new music that something is bad about your liking your own music.’40
A task may have a greater value for the performer than it has for the audience.
Certain tasks may seem hermetically sealed to the listener, self-evident games
whose rules are not publicly available, mysterious rites with professionally
guarded secrets. For the performer the tasks may be self-absorbing, or of
only private significance, so that the question of ‘projection’ is not part of his
concern. Sometimes the materials of the task are so strong in themselves as to be
automatically self-projecting, as in Ashley’s The Wolfman, Cardew’s The Great
Learning Paragraph 2, La Monte Young’s drone music, and in the extravagant
actions Cage and Fluxus composers sometimes chose to busy themselves with.
On occasions where more than one of this is going on at a time (Cage, Scratch
Orchestra) one activity may completely blot out another. This was the case
when Tilbury was performing Anima 7 within a Scratch Orchestra presentation:

39
See John Cage, sleeve notes to Variations IV (Everest 3132/3230, 1966–68).
40
In an interview with poet Robert Creeley; see Donald Allen (ed.) A Quick Graph:
Collected Notes & Essays (San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1970), p. 359.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 195

did anybody notice that he was doing what he was doing? And if someone did
notice (suddenly), was Tilbury’s activity made into a different kind of art?
The tasks of experimental music do not generally depend on, and are not
markedly changed by, any response from an audience, although the atmosphere
in which these tasks are accomplished may be completely changed by audience
response. Experimental music has, if nothing else, at least the virtue of persistence
which keeps it going throughout any uncalled-for reactions it quite often provokes.
Hostile listeners quite often consider that their protest sounds just as good as those
of the performers; John Tilbury pointed out the difference on one such occasion:
that whereas the audience’s sounds were uncontrolled, instinctive gut-reactions,
the performer knew exactly what he was doing, producing his sounds with
consideration and control.
What then is the function of the audience in experimental music? Does ‘listening’s
a third’ in fact leave nothing for the listener to do? Quite the contrary – the listener,
too, has a far more creative and productive role than he had before. This follows
from Cage’s rejection of the notion of entertainment as ‘being done to’:

Most people … think that when they hear a piece of music, that they’re not doing
anything but that something is being done to them. Now this is not true, and we
must arrange our music, we must arrange our Art, we must arrange everything,
I believe, so that people realize that they themselves are doing it, and not that
something is being done to them.41

Cage is not giving a mandate for audience participation: he is aiming at the fullest
possible engagement of the listener and the testing of his perceptual faculties.
But what then is perceived? Perhaps nothing, as when you are present at a
performance of La Monte Young’s Poem when the chance procedures have
determined a duration of no length (‘the composition may be any length, including
no length’). Or very little, if you have witnessed the first performance of Cage’s
Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radios in 1951. This was performed so late
at night that very few of the specified wavelengths were still broadcasting, so
that, according to the veteran composer Henry Cowell, ‘the “instruments” were
unable to capture programmes diversified enough to present a really interesting
specific result’.42 But Cowell had been unable to adjust his ears (and his mind)
to the actuality of the new music, which is not a music of results. Nor is the need
to be ‘interesting’ the concern of experimental composers – as it is of the avant-
garde. Cowell did add: ‘Cage’s own attitude about this was one of comparative
indifference, since he believes the concept to be more interesting than the result

41
In Joseph Byrd, Variations IV (ca. 1967); see Kostelanetz (ed.) Writings About
John Cage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 135.
42
Henry Cowell, ‘Current Chronicle: New York’, Musical Quarterly, 38/1 (January
1952), pp. 123–36, p. 126.
196 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

of any single performance’43 – though he seems to have failed to appreciate the

implications of this remark.

Focus
Equally important as regards the reception of experimental music is Cage’s
concept on ‘focus’. Focus for Cage is ‘what aspect of one’s noticing’; focus is
Cardew hearing Alan Brett playing a Bach Sarabande at the top of a cliff in Dorset
– ‘from half a mile away down by the water’s edge I identified the melody quite
positively as Holy Night’.44 Focus is the engineer in charge of Cage’s recording of
his Indeterminacy stories in 1958 trying

to get some kind of balance rather than just letting the loud sounds (made by
David Tudor) occasionally drown out my voice. I explained that a comparable
visual experience is that of seeing someone across the street, and then not being
able to see him because a truck passes between you.45

Focus is the woman at the Black Mountain Happening in 1952 asking Cage which
is the best seat and being told that they were all equally good ‘since from every seat
you would see something different’.46 Focus is listening closely to the gradually
changing patterns arising out of the repetition process in Steve Reich’s music.
Focus is wandering either physically or perceptually around a Scratch Orchestra
multiple-activity presentation, concentrating on a single activity or feature of that
activity (sharp focus), or listening, from a fixed position, to everything that is
going on (soft focus), allowing for all the possible shifts and gradations of focus in
between. For Cage, at least, is ‘averse to all those actions that lead toward placing
emphasis on the things that happen in the course of a process’.47
Cage’s crucial decentralization of musical and physical space brings music
more into line with painting: ‘Observe that the enjoyment of a modern painting
carries one’s attention not to a centre of interest but all over the canvas and not
following any particular path. Each point on the canvas may be used as a beginning,
continuing, or ending of one’s observation of it.’48 So that if the listener does not
have anything done to him, since the composer has not arranged things so that

43
Ibid, p. 126.
44
Taken from a radio talk recorded by Cardew for the BBC in 1971, but never
broadcast; see John Tilbury, Cornelius Cardew: A Life Unfinished (Essex: Copula, 2008),
pp. 423–4.
45
See Cage’s article, ‘Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and
Electronic Music’, on the Indeterminacy LP (Folkways FT-3704, 1958).
46
Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, ‘An interview with John Cage’, The Tulane
Drama Review, 10/2 (Winter 1965), pp. 50–72, p. 53.
47
From an interview recorded for BBC’s Radio 3, London, December 1966; see also
‘Cage and Satie’, Musical Times, 114 (December 1973), pp. 1227–9.
48
Cage, A Year from Monday, p. 31.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 197

everything is done for him, the responsibility for how he hears or sees is placed
firmly on the functioning of his own perception. The listener should be possessed
ideally of an open, free-flowing mind, capable of assimilating in its own way a type
of music that does not present a set of finalized, calculated, pre-focused, projected
musical relationships and meanings. The listener may supply his own meanings if
that is what he wants; or he may leave himself open to taking in any eventuality,
bearing in mind George Brecht’s proviso that any ‘act of imagination or perception
is in itself an arrangement, so there is no avoiding anyone making arrangements’.49
Since the listener may not be provided with the structural signposts (of various
shapes and sizes, pointing in various directions) that he is given in other music,
everyone has, according to Cage, the opportunity of

structuring the experience differently from anybody else’s in the audience. So

the less we structure the theatrical occasion and the more it is like unstructured
daily life, the greater will be the stimulus to the structuring faculty of each person
in the audience. ‘If we have done nothing then he will have everything to do’.50

Music and Life

It is a well-known fact that the silences of 4’33” were not, after all, silences,
since silence is a state which it is physically impossible to achieve. Cage had
proved this to his own satisfaction in 1951 when he betook himself to Harvard
University where, in an anechoic chamber – an environment which is as silent
as was technologically feasible – he nevertheless heard two unavoidable sounds,
one high – the sound of his nervous system, the other low – the sound of his
blood circulation. Cage therefore proposed that what we have been in the habit of
calling silence should be called what in reality it is, non-intentional sounds – that
is, sounds not intended or prescribed by the composer.
4’33” is a demonstration of the non-existence of silence, of the permanent
presence of sounds around us, of the fact that they are worthy of attention, and
that for Cage ‘environmental sounds and noises are more useful aesthetically than
the sounds produced by the world’s musical cultures’.51 4’33” is not a negation of
music but an affirmation of its omnipresence. Henceforward sounds (‘for music,
like silence, does not exist’) would get closer to introducing us to Life, rather than
Art, which is something separate from Life. This would not be ‘an attempt to bring
order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of
waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s

49
George Brecht, ‘Excerpts from a discussion between George Brecht and Allan
Kaprow entitled “Happenings and Events” broadcast by WBAI sometime during May
[1964]’; see also Ken Friedman (ed.) The Fluxus Reader (Chichester: Academy Editions,
1998), p. 97.
50
Kirby and Schechner, ‘An interview with John Cage’, p. 55 (Nyman’s italics).
51
Cage, A Year From Monday, p. ix.
198 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

mind and one’s desires out of its way and let it act of its own accord’ (politically a
highly dangerous attitude).52
Cage wrote this in 1957, and at that time George Brecht coined the term ‘chance
imagery’, thus placing the artist’s ‘chance images in the same conceptual category
as natural chance images (the configuration of meadow grasses, the arrangement
of stones on a brook bottom), and rejecting the idea that an artist makes something
“special” and beyond the world of ordinary things’.53 This explains Cage’s
attachment to an art which ‘imitates nature in its manner of operation’,54 that is,
the spontaneous – natura naturans, rather than the classified – natura naturata,
and it accounts for the emphasis in experimental music on operational processes,
which ensure a music that appears to happen of its own accord, unassisted by a
master hand, as if thrown up by natural forces.
Consistent with these ideas is Morse Peckham’s statement: ‘A work of art is
any perceptual field which an individual uses as an occasion for performing the
role of art perceiver’,55 a definition that correctly leaves open the question as to
whether the perceptual field was occasioned by somebody else (a performer) or by
the individual himself, and whether this field is an Art context or a Life situation.

The Musical Consequences

What then are the musical resultants of the two separate musical-ideational systems,
the experimental and the traditional/avant-garde? I will let the protagonists speak
as much as possible for themselves.
In an article in 1958 Stockhausen drew attention to what he saw as one of the
major disadvantages of total serialism:

[In total serialism in general] all elements had equal rights in the forming process
and constantly renewed all their characteristics from one sound to the next … if
from one sound to the next, pitch, duration, timbre and intensity change, then the
musical finally becomes static: it changes extremely quickly, one is constantly
traversing the entire realm of experience in a very short time, and thus one finds
oneself in a state of suspended animation, the music ‘stands still’.

If one wanted to articulate larger time-phrases, the only way of doing this
was to let one sound-characteristic predominate over all others for some time.
However, under the circumstances then prevalent, this would have radically
contradicted the sound-characteristics. And a solution was found to distribute in

52
Cage, ‘Experimental Music’, in Silence, p. 12.
53
Brecht, Chance-Imagery (New York: Something Else Press, 1966), p. 12.
54
A phrase taken from Ananda K. Coomaraswamy’s The Transformation of Nature in
Art; see Cage, ‘Where are we going? And what are we doing?’ in Silence, p. 194.
55
Morse Peckham, Man’s Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behaviour and the Arts (New
York: Schocken Books, 1967), p. 68.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 199

space, among different groups of loudspeakers, or instruments, variously long

time-phases of this kind of homogeneous sound-structure.56

Christian Wolff wrote in the same year:

Notable qualities of this music, whether electronic or not, are monotony and the
irritation that accompanies it. The monotony may lie in simplicity or delicacy,
strength or complexity. Complexity tends to reach a point of neutralisation;
continuous change results in a certain sameness. The music has a static character.
It goes in no particular direction. There is no necessary concern with time as a
measure of distance from a point in the past to a point in the future, with linear
continuity alone. It is not a question of getting anywhere, of making progress,
or having come from anywhere in particular, of tradition or futurism. There is
neither nostalgia nor anticipation.57

It is interesting to compare the reactions of these two composers to certain conditions

common to both avant-garde and experimental music of the fifties – sameness,
stasis, lack of direction. Stockhausen is speaking of an unwanted situation needing
to be remedied by his intervention, Wolff of a situation he is quite happy to accept,
leaving sounds to go their own way.
But what were Stockhausen’s reasons for bending the rules without contradicting
the authority of the Idea? The composer was nominally in total control of his
materials, yet despite (or because of) the rigidity of his control system, the sounds
had a tendency to develop, en masse, a surrogate life of their own. In order to
restore his mastery over his sounds, he had to resort to other means of ordering
them, of shaping their movement and identity.
The classical system, and its contemporary continuation (in the hands of
Stockhausen, Birtwistle, Berio, Boulez, Maxwell Davies and others) is essentially
a system of priorities which sets up ordered relationships between its components,
and where one thing is defined in terms of its opposite. In this world of relationships
dualism plays a large part: high/low, rise/fall, fast/slow, climax/stasis, important/
unimportant, melody/accompaniment, dense/open-textured, solo/tutti, mobile/
immobile, high profile/low profile, sound/silence, colourful/monochrome – the
one only exists in terms of the other. The seemingly experimental plus–minus
systems Stockhausen uses in recent works like Spiral deal with these dualisms on
a sliding scale – more articulated, slower, lower in pitch, louder, etc. than what has
gone before.

56
Karlheinz Stockhausen, ‘Music in Space’, ‘Two Lectures’, Die Reihe, 5 (Bryn
Mawr: Theodore Presser, 1961), p. 69.
57
Christian Wolff, ‘Immobility in Motion: New and Electronic Music’, originally
published in Audience V/3 (Summer 1958); see also Christian Wolff, Cues: Writings and
Conversations (Cologne: Edition MusikText, 1998), p. 36.
200 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

This priority system establishes a series of functions. The most obvious

example in classical music is the ‘closing theme’ whose function is to end the
exposition of a sonata form movement, and which sounds as though it is rounding
something off. While the return of the main theme in the newly established home
key is obviously shown to its best advantage after a development section whose
function is precisely to be tonally unstable. With the expansion of tonality in the
early part of this century music lost the possibility of this clear-cut type of musical
functionalism; but the need for something arranged and heard in the context of, or
in opposition to, something else, still remained. Stockhausen’s use of space was a
way for him to package his sounds, to shape the sound mass, to set one thing in a
calculated relationship to another, and he achieved this by shifting sound blocks
around in space.
At the same time as Stockhausen and Wolff, Cage was writing about the need
for separating instruments in space as follows:

[It] allows the sounds to issue from their own centres and to interpenetrate in a
way which is not obstructed by the conventions of European harmony and theory
about relationships and interferences of sounds. In the case of the harmonious
ensembles of European musical history, a fusion of sound was of the essence,
and therefore players in an ensemble were brought as close together as possible,
so that their actions, productive of an object in time, might be effective. In the
case … of the performance of music the composition of which is indeterminate
of its performance so that the action of the players is productive of a process,
no harmonious fusion of sound is essential. A non-obstruction of sound is of the
essence … separation in space is spoken of as facilitating independent action on
the part of each performer …58

What Cage is proposing is a deliberate process of de-packaging so that the listener’s

mobile awareness allows him to experience the sounds freely, in his own way.
Stockhausen’s processed packaging gives the listener fewer chances of this kind
since the major part of the organization has been done for him. This is as it is in
classical systems where the listener is manipulated by the music that progresses as
a series of signposts: listen to this here, at this point, in this context, in apposition
to this or that; in such a way that your method of listening is conditioned by what
went on before, and will condition, in roughly the way the composer intends, what
comes next. And what in experimental music (say a piece by Feldman) is almost
a fact of living, that you should listen from moment to moment, was made by
Stockhausen into a fact of structure (Moment Form) where the moments are not
heard as-they-happen, but as-they-are-structured (to happen).
The statements which I have used to clarify some of the differences between
the experimental and the avant-garde date from the fifties. But comparison of two
more recent statements will show that, despite Stockhausen’s outward conversion

58
Cage, ‘Composition as Process II: Indeterminacy’, in Silence, p. 39.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 201

to process-music, he has in fact changed very little – once a European art composer,
always a European art composer.

Cage:
I would assume that relations would exist between sounds as they would between
people and that these relationships are more complex than any I would be able
to prescribe. So by simply dropping that responsibility of making relationships I
don’t lose the relationship. I keep the situation in what you might call a natural
complexity that can be observed in one way or another.59

Stockhausen:
So many composers think that you can take any sound and use it. That’s true
insofar as you really can take it and integrate it and ultimately create some
kind of harmony and balance. Otherwise it atomizes … You can include many
different forces in a piece, but when they start destroying each other and there’s
no harmony established between the different forces, then you’ve failed. You
must be capable of really integrating the elements and not just expose them and
see what happens.60

(Note the key European avant-garde words, ‘integrate’, ‘harmony’, ‘balance’, which
show that the responsibility for making relationships is in the hands of the composer,
whereas Cage is far more willing to allow relationships to develop naturally.)
And this is the effect that processes have in experimental music: they are the
most direct and straightforward means of simply setting sounds in motion; they are
impersonal and external so they do not have the effect of organizing sounds and
integrating them, of creating relationships of harmony as the controlling faculty of
the human mind does. If a composer sets up a process which allows each player
to move through the material at his own speed, for example, it is impossible for
him to draw things together into some kind of calculated image, a particular effect
or pattern of logical connections. Rise and fall, loud and soft, may occur but they
occur spontaneously, so that the old (and new) ‘music of climax’ is no longer
the prevailing model. For all things are now equal and no one thing is given any
priority over any other thing.
Merce Cunningham summed up the implications of this situation where
priorities no longer exist, where every item is of equal value, as early as 1952:

59
John Cage, ‘Is an élite necessary? – in the second of three investigations Frank
Kermode looks at the role of the artist’, The Listener (5 November 1970), pp. 619–20,
p. 619; see also Peter Dickinson (ed.) CageTalk: Dialogues with & about John Cage
(Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006), p. 198.
60
In Jonathan Cott, Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer (London:
Robson Books, 1974), p. 43.
202 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Now I can’t see that crisis any longer means a climax, unless we are willing
to grant that every breath of wind has a climax (which I am), but then that
obliterates climax, being a surfeit of such. And since our lives, both by nature
and by the newspapers, are so full of crisis that one is no longer aware of it,
then it is clear that life goes on regardless, and further that each thing can be
and is separate from each and every other, viz: the continuity of the newspaper
headlines. Climax is for those who are swept by New Year’s Eve.61

One of the automatic consequences, so it appears, of the musical processes

employed by experimental composers, is the effect of flattening out, de-focusing
the musical perspective. This flatness may be brought about in a situation ranging
from uniformity and minimum change – for example, the music of Steve Reich or
John White, which consists of a constant or near-constant band of sound from which
inessentials have been removed, to one of maximum change and multiplicity – for
instance Cage or the Scratch Orchestra where no attempt is made to harmonize
or make coherent any number of hermetic and self-contained ‘compartments’.
(Cage said in 1961: ‘We know two ways to unfocus attention: symmetry is one of
them; the other is the over-all where each small part is a sample of what you find
elsewhere. In either case, there is at least the possibility of looking anywhere, not
just where someone arranged you should.’62)
Form thus becomes an assemblage, growth an accumulation of things that have
piled-up in the time-space of the piece. (Non- or omnidirectional) succession is the
ruling procedure as against the (directional) progression of other forms of post-
Renaissance art music. What the painter Brian O’Doherty wrote of Feldman’s
music can be seen to apply to the music of other experimental composers: ‘Sounds
do not progress, but merely heap up and accumulate in the same place (like Jasper
Johns’ numbers). This blurs and obliterates the past, and obliterating it, removes
the possibility of a future.’63

What is, or seems to be, new in this music? [asked Christian Wolff in 1958].
One finds a concern for a kind of objectivity, almost anonymity – sound come
into its own. The ‘music’ is a resultant existing simply in the sounds we hear,
given no impulse by expressions of self or personality. It is indifferent in motive,
originating in no psychology nor in dramatic intentions, nor in literary or
pictorial purposes. For at least some of these composers, then, the final intention
is to be free of artistry and taste. But this need not make their work ‘abstract’,
for nothing, in the end, is denied. It is simply that personal expression, drama,

61
Merce Cunningham, ‘Space, Time and Dance’, trans/formation No. 1 (1952); quoted
in Barbara Rose, ‘ABC Art’, in Gregory Battcock (ed.) Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology
(New York: EP Dutton, 1968), pp. 274–97, p. 280.
62
Cage, Silence, p. 100.
63
Brian O’Doherty, quoted in Arts International, 12/7–10 (1968), p. 25.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 203

psychology, and the like are not part of the composer’s initial calculation: they
are at best gratuitous.64

‘Tim Souster’s Night Out at the Proms’ (Tempo, 94, Autumn 1970, pp. 20–24)

‘Make Triple Music’ exhorts Tim Souster’s serviceable matrix. And so the fabled
late-night ‘experimental’ Prom – a more inspired successor to the ‘competition’
Prom of a couple of years back65 – presented us with three pieces, each of which
– incidentally – exhibited distinct triple characteristics. Terry Riley’s Keyboard
Studies coordinates ostinato, metre and texture, Souster’s own Triple Music II by
definition exploits many things triple, while the music of the Soft Machine brings
together pop, jazz and straight musics.66
Perhaps one had been conned into gullible acceptance by all the pre-concert
publicity to expect an affirmation of a new musical trinity – the Riley, the Souster
and the Soft Machine – a contrived attempt to bridge gaps that can only be bridged
by natural means (as the Soft Machine drummer Robert Wyatt pointed out in
Melody Maker) using Terry Riley as fertilising agent.67 It could have been a very
vital illustration (at least) of the power of Riley’s ‘alternative culture’ music –
which Dick Higgins refers to when he says that ‘this will be, perhaps, the first time
since the 1930s that a popular movement (hippy, yippy or post-whatever) has had
its own classically-based music’ – to fertilise music as different as Souster’s and
the Soft Machine’s.68 But it wasn’t.
Riley was certainly omnipresent though; the expected ‘figures’ and periodic
rhythms cropped up in Triple Music while the Soft Machine – who worked with
Riley in the States a few years ago and who had planned an abortive English
tour with him later this year – have progressed from the Keyboard Studies-type
ostinatos of six months ago to A Rainbow in Curved Air-style dreamy electric
piano tape played backwards.

64
Christian Wolff, ‘Immobility in Motion: new and electronic music’; see also
Christian Wolff Cues: Writings and Conversations, p. 24.
65
Nyman is referring here to the Prom concert of 12 August 1968, when the audience
was invited to vote for either Thea Musgrave’s Concerto for Trombone, Don Banks’s Violin
Concerto or John Tavener’s In Alium. Tavener’s work won the day (see ‘Britons at Sea’, The
Spectator (23 August, 1968), p. 269).
66
(Nyman footnote) The late-night Promenade Concert was given at the Albert
Hall on 13 August [1970]. Triple Music II, commissioned by the BBC, was performed by
the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Atherton, Justin Connolly and Elgar
Howarth.
67
‘The Softs, the Proms and drummer Wyatt’, Melody Maker (5 September, 1970), p. 15.
68
Dick Higgins, ‘Does avant-garde mean anything?’, in Edward Kamarck (ed.) Arts
in Society: Sounds and Events in Todays [sic] Music, 7/1 (University of Wisconsin, 1970),
pp. 27–32, p. 29.
204 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Keyboard Studies belongs to the nouvelle vague music inaugurated possibly

around 1962 by La Monte Young when he gave up his Fluxus events and began
to develop the ‘continuous sounds’ of his ‘Tortoise’ series. The precise origins
of Keyboard Studies itself are not so easy to pinpoint exactly – not surprising,
as Riley’s music is a genuine outgrowth of (his own) performances. Henning
Christiansen has said that when Riley took part in a weeklong happening in
Copenhagen in 1964, he had not developed his ostinato/tape-loop method, but
was still playing honky-tonk piano.
Of the different versions of Keyboard Studies currently circulating the one
included in Cage’s Notations, entitled ‘Untitled Organ’, is elsewhere dated 29
November 1966.69 This version consists of 15 melodic figures which cover a span of
an octave, rising gradually from F to B-flat (below middle C) of the first figure to the
same figure an octave higher at the end. Like all of Riley’s music Keyboard Studies
is straightforwardly tonal, or rather modal, being based on the dorian mode on F.70
(He uses this mode for Dorian Reeds, the ionic for In C and Olsen III and more
extended modes for A Rainbow in Curved Air and Poppy Nogood’s Phantom Band.)
The figures are arranged into three tonal areas, which on paper resemble tonic–
dominant–tonic, but which in performance are not heard as ‘modulations’ due to
the prescribed persistence of the opening ‘tonic’ figure and the absence of any
leading-note feeling. Each figure revolves obsessively around a circumscribed part
of the mode, and an unbroken chain of succession from one figure to the next by
means of permutation, repetition and sustained pitches.
A pitch analysis of this sort might (on the one hand) appear infantile to the
serial lobby and (on the other) unnecessary to anyone experiencing Riley’s music
as nothing more or less than ‘mindblowing’. However in a music whose raison
d’être is the total isolating and re-articulating – by means other than amplification –
of what were previously regarded merely as incidental minutiae, such analysis
is important.
For it is because of the very limitations of the chosen pitches, because of the
inexorability of the method of structuring, and because the process is carried
through from beginning to end without any digressions from its chosen path –
that this music has a unique, even revolutionary, character.71 The performance
method is stated simply: ‘Each figure should be repeated in a continuous manner,

69
John Cage (with Alison Knowles), Notations (New York: Something Else Press,
1969), p. 204.
70
Nyman notes that ‘it is also possible to hear it as a blues scale on B-flat’.
71
Nyman points out that ‘all that might seem obvious – until one notices that the
Riley “style” is more easily imitated than most – just set up a few glib tonal ostinatos and
repeat them endlessly in combination. But this only skims off the surface of a music which
is – more than any other – an indivisible fusion of idea and technique. Moment Form is
different: such a structure is a convenient peg to hang any sort of material on.’
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 205

for a long period of time, so that it turns into a stream of notes, moving steadily,
without accent.’72
Instrumentation is taken for granted – i.e. any keyboard(s); total length is free,
the duration of each figure is more or less free for each player, while tempo is
regulated by a fixed pulse (which in In C is made audible so as to act as a focusing
point for the far wider melodic and rhythmic range of the figures). Hence a solo
(two-handed) performance is possible (Riley himself on the 1966 Mass Art Inc.
recording on harmonium with prominent sounds of finger key clicks), or a multi-
tracked solo version with tapes prepared by the soloist (John Tilbury, for example),
or a performance using tape-delay systems (which Riley uses in his live concerts)
or the kind of ensemble performance we heard at the Albert Hall, which consisted
of two amplified pianos, electric piano, Hammond organ and Albert Hall organ.
As Keyboard Studies sets itself in motion, totally new relationships and
patterns are heard – a marvellous microcosmic changing of colour, of emphasis,
in a steadily unfolding, unchanging continuum; a perpetual motion in a basically
static texture (or vice versa, depending on whether you hear micro or macro). On
the melodic side one hears this osmosis of colour shades, while rhythmically each
figure sets up its own accentuation and chain of tiny, conflicting, eddying pulses.
From time to time the sustained pitches glow magically from inside the texture.
And as the pitch range gradually moves a fifth higher, and then another fourth
higher, the ‘lift’ one feels is of quite extraordinary power and simplicity, since it
happens so imperceptibly, over such a comparatively long period of time.
With a music which relies on the perception of inequalities in an ‘equality
system’, absolute equality of sound balance is necessary. The Albert Hall
performance was fluent if not always accurate – playing Czerny-type riffs for
15 minutes (or more) nonstop is a task not to be undertaken lightly – but the
balance, or lack of it, was disturbing.73 While the pianos and electric organ were
well matched, the big organ was intrusive and unwelcome – what we heard was a
hitherto unheard Organ Concerto in F ‘minor’ by Terry Riley, hardly appropriate
for such democratic music.
A quarter of an hour was (as Tim Souster pointed out) about the shortest time
in which the piece could make itself ‘felt’. Obviously, for what is important is not
what is going on at any particular moment – after all the basic sound of the piece
can be grasped in about 30 seconds – but the unfolding of the total time-process.
This music needs to flow into our bloodstream, and we must be carried along in its
bloodstream. This is rather difficult when the sound sources are at a fixed point in
the distance. It would surely not have been very complicated (or pricey) to install
loudspeakers all round the hall.

72
Nyman is referring here to Keyboard Study No. 2, dated ‘early 1965’ by Keith Potter
(Four Musical Minimalists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 123–5); see
also Wim Mertens American Minimal Music (London: Kahn and Averill, 1983), p. 39.
73
A pupil of Beethoven, and Liszt’s piano teacher, composer and pianist Carl Czerny
(1791–1857) wrote several technical studies for piano.
206 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Tim Souster’s Triple Music II was also supposedly environmental. I say

supposedly as the strong image it had of itself on paper failed to come across
aurally. At first I thought it needed a longer period of gestation (or digestation
or even trigestation) before it could accommodate the sort of gestures it was
concerned with. But then it seemed to need not gestation but impulsive music-
making like Riley. It is the ‘heavy’ obsession with the written note that has led
composers to adopt less restrictive forms of notation – like Souster’s own matrix.
Perhaps the matrix gave the whore’s rather than the mother’s advice, which is
the root cause of the failure of Souster’s aural imagination. (I am qualified to
discuss the matrix not as a critic but as a possible maker of triple music.) The
matrix seems to spring from no genuine musical impulse, nor does it create one:
it does not suggest any particular activity (Wolff: Make sounds with stones …74);
nor any kind of musical process ([Stockhausen’s] Aus den sieben tagen); nor a
personal relationship to an acoustical situation (Alvin Lucier’s Chambers); nor a
framework of musical social behaviour (Scratch Orchestra Improvisation Rite);
nor is it, in its sheer openness (it’s only one word away from ‘Make Music’)
either in any way suggestive (Brecht: Two Durations • red • green) or free-spirited
(Cage’s Variations). In fact Triple Music is nothing more than (another) musical
number game dressed up as a word score; and the number three appears to be less
stimulating than the number 12 (even).
Many printed words trace the impeccable backgrounds, intentions and secrets
of Triple Music II (Peter Britton in Music and Musicians, Souster in The Listener
and programme notes) and only need a summary here.75 The work exploits
threeness on many levels. The 103 players are organised into three separated
orchestras: orchestra I (in the arena, stage right) of 60 strings, orchestra II (on
stage) of 2 pianos, 2 harps, 2 organs, celeste, vibraphone and bass guitar (which
uses discreet amplification), and orchestra III (arena, stage left) of 34 winds.
The raw material is also triple and separated, consisting of (a) melody-
texture, (b) regular rhythms, (c) irregular rhythms. The durations of each of these
for Orchestras I and III are determined by the number 3 and its multiples, for
Orchestra II by recourse to the Fibonacci series.76 This, as Britton points out, has
‘an eminently richer musical and dramatic resource than the mere piling up of

74
A reference to Wolff’s Stones, which forms part of his Prose Collection (1968–69).
75
Souster and Britton were both members of live-electronics group Intermodulation,
co-founded by Souster and Roger Smalley in 1969, whose ‘ideas of intercommunication,
interconnection and integration’ was not limited to the way they played, but determined
what they played, too (see Souster, ‘Inter-Modulation’, Time Out (24 January–7 February
1971), p. 22). On Triple Music, see ‘Souster writes about his new composition for Three
Orchestras “Triple Music II”’, The Listener, lxxxiv (1970), p. 222; P. Britton, ‘Tim Souster’s
“Triple Music II”’, Music and Musicians, xviii/12 (1969–70), pp. 22–3.
76
The well-known mathematical pattern where the sum of the previous two integers
(after the first number is repeated) are combined to generate the sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8,
13 etc.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 207

threes’,77 which both dirties the purity of tripleness and shows that the composer
– if he wishes to fulfil his intention to set up an ‘oral tradition’ – must set a good
example to his followers. Each orchestra has its own matrix chord and each its
own nine-note (3×3) series.
The disposal of the material is arranged as a slow rotation around the orchestras
climaxing in a series of mammoth chords and a powerfully pulsating C-sharp. But
despite the conceptual clarity of the sounds and their arrangement the work never
succeeded in setting up its own ritual, never created an overall situation strong
or consistent enough to relate the three ideas in anything but superficial time and
space. This was partly the fault of the uneven relative strength of the materials:
melody-texture and aperiodic were very negative forces, the one clusters (after
Ligeti and Riley) the other ‘statistical’ sounds à la Xenakis. Only the periodic
music seemed to have any positive charge; this pulsed along very impressively but
without giving off, or receiving, any vibrations from its musical surroundings. All
in all I sensed a very uncomfortable attempt to project minimum information into
and through a ‘maximum’ medium.
Neither did the Soft Machine come up to expectations. Rattled by the late
arrival of their equipment from Spain, awed (?) by the associations of the Albert
Hall, cramped by the Cinderella limits on playing time, disturbed by personal/
musical frictions inside the group, they did not give of their best, sounding very
‘untogether’ and tired.
Perhaps the linking factor of the whole concert was not in fact Terry Riley
but the different ways one experiences Time. With the Soft Machine it was very
uncomfortable, since they had to compress into 45-minutes a lot of what is contained
on the four sides of their most recent record Third, a striking documentation of
their very individual style and a bird’s eye view of internal stylistic conflicts. This
was a curious reversal of the usual Soft Machine concert situation. When I first
heard them live – electrifyingly so at the Fairfield Hall – and then heard their
second record, I was very much aware of the time-compression necessitated by
the recording medium. (The BBC ought to have the courage of its convictions and
let music run for its full course whether it’s ‘experimental’, pop or whatever.) My
first contact with the Soft Machine was at the Roundhouse about a year ago where
the group had provided a tape containing a single uninterrupted flow of a music
refreshingly hard to pigeonhole. Their concert image is more mannered, and at
the Fairfield Hall I was (almost literally) knocked sideways by the strength and
‘ritualised’ arrangement of these mannerisms – the staggering amplification, the
tenseness of Hugh Hopper’s fuzz bass, the lyrical zaniness of Wyatt’s solo vocal
breaks, but mainly Ratledge’s intelligent musicianship, his command of organ
and amplified piano (and of the group as a unit). His technique consisted of long
searing one-handed tunes full of fourths, agitated irregular-metered jazz chordal
riffs, and subtle use of the filter pedal. Interesting too was the way in which the

77
Britton, ‘Tim Souster’s “Triple Music II”’, p. 22.
208 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

two wind players were ‘orchestrated’ into the group’s previously self-contained
compositions.
Now, three performances (for me) later, I was aware of seeing a group in the
process of perhaps disintegration, perhaps renewal (I hope the latter). This living
quality of pop groups is very exciting and something alien to the world of straight
music – the BBC Symphony Orchestra will not change, despite the efforts of
Stockhausen and Souster (alas).
The realignment of the power structure of the group has very serious musical
consequences. The jazz saxophone player Elton Dean is now a permanent member,
and through his regular presence and his own compositions the old ritual has
been destroyed and no new one has yet been set up in its place, except that Dean
sounds like the present leader of the group – which considering that his style is
not as individual as Ratledge’s is a pity. Now the saxophone and saxello doubles
Hopper’s bass in octaves and doubles the organ even more disastrously. The edge
is blunted, the fire dimmed, the driving pulse weakened. I am not alone in this
opinion: my litmus paper to the success of the Soft Machine is a young groover
who gyrates frenetically and quite beautifully at every concert. In the arena of the
Albert Hall his performance was very limp. At times he stood stock still, confused,
and disorientated.

‘John Cage in Paris’ (New Statesman, 6 November 1970, p. 617)

Europe’s first Musicircus, which took place in Paris last week, under the auspices
of the Semaines Musicales Internationales de Paris, was, so we had been told,
‘under the direction of John Cage’. As I saw Cage taking the sounds (as one takes
the air) in the vast circus in Les Halles, I asked him what instructions he had in
fact given to the motley collection of assembled performers. None, he replied;
he’d merely asked the organisers to get together as many things as possible. Did he
consider the Musicircus to be his composition? No. (Pause.) ‘It’s more interesting
than most of my compositions.’ He laughed, completely without affection, and just
as he did so a student brass band struck up, out of nowhere, a heavy German-type
march. Cage, surprised and charmed, applauded gleefully like a child given an
unexpected but very special present.
Genuine simplicity, acceptance, even saintliness are the keys to understanding
Cage’s music. He wants nothing to belong to him, which is why he turns the
process of composition over to random methods, and the process of performance
to the ability, understanding and creativity of the performer (an even more saintly
and dangerous act). Each time a piece is performed it is made over again, from
a state of nothingness, to a state of nothingness, leaving no remains from one
realisation to another.
How does this match up with a Boulez, obsessed as he is with purely aesthetic
justifications, with perfection and correctness and, by comparison with Cage,
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 209

sterility – painstakingly sifting and scrutinising, year in, year out, the small residue
of sounds he has, with acute sensitivity, dredged from the vast river of music?
Cage’s achievement could be seen not in terms of his compositions in
themselves, but in the way they make us aware of the richness of the music inside
the river, and of the richness of music inside us. His scores not only permit any
sound, from any part of musical history, to be heard in them, but he has also
introduced means to make audible sounds that were always ‘there’, but previously
inaudible. In Cartridge Music (1960) he used, for the first time, amplification to
liberate ‘sounds … too small to be heard’.78 And in Variations VII (1966) he used
a multitude of receiving sets to pick up the inaudible sounds with which the air
is filled.
How does this compare with Stockhausen’s position? He claims that ‘I am
not writing my music, but merely transcribing the vibrations I receive’;79 but in
Stockhausen’s case the transcriber becomes possessor, arranger, rearranger, so the
sounds cease to be what they were – Cage tries to let them out of their cages of
association and ‘meaning’ – and become nothing more or less than Stockhausen
(this is the traditional role of the composer after all).
Cage, in the Théâtre de la Ville, could sit through the first performance of Song
Books (Solos for Voice 3–92) done simultaneously with Concert for Piano and
Orchestra and Rozart Mix, apparently oblivious to what was going on around him
and could, among other things, produce on an amplified typewriter (as I saw later)
the much-repeated phrase to the effect that the composer has no right to waste the
time of an audience.
Stockhausen, on the other hand, during performances of his music sits in the
centre of the action and, by using filters and potentiometers, censors, regulates,
alters and structures the sounds he receives from the performers who have been
‘inspired’ by his word scores. As a further distinction from Cage, to whom the idea
of improvement, progress and making symbolic connections is alien, take a work
like Stockhausen’s Spiral, a package which comes without the material but with
extensive rules for making and developing it in a complex formal scheme, and
which carries the regulation that each time round the performer should begin again
not from nothing but from where he left off last time. In the words of the master,
he should ‘transcend the limitations of his technique’ etc.
But in a way it is not the German who is the antithesis to Cage (he has made
every attempt to come to terms with Cage’s teachings) but some younger American
composers who have themselves been liberated by Cage’s openhandedness.
A most fascinating aesthetic reversal can be seen in the work of La Monte
Young, who in 1960 wrote (29 times) a piece which instructed ‘Draw a line and

78
Quoted in Cage’s note on Cartridge Music; see John Cage: Writer (New York:
Limelight Editions, 1993), p. 60.
79
Also quoted in David Simmons, ‘London Music’, Musical Opinion, 94/1125 (June
1971), p. 439.
210 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

follow it’.80 More recently he has developed a music of ‘privilege’, which consists
of a continuous sound which grows from an almost imperceptible amount of
material, which completely shuts out silence (Cage’s baby), which depends
entirely on the personal taste of the composer and which can be performed only by
Young and his close associates. For a performance Young needs a whole week in
which to become accustomed to the vibrations (both senses) of the hall.
Cage’s music is similarly, though not so crucially, dependent for its success on
who performs it, in what context, and in what atmosphere. It’s safe to say from
the two-day crash course in Paris that the French do not understand Cage. Only
one event – the slightest – was really ‘good Cage’ (a concept one senses rather
than explains). That was Music for Carillon, which took place in the Mairie near
the Louvre. This was a beautiful setting: a group of people standing about in a
courtyard as dusk fell, listening to the most heavenly, barbaric music issuing from
the bell tower, in perfect focus. The right focus is crucial to Cage performances,
and the French managed to focus wrong at both ends of the telescope. Two
piano pieces (performed along with, amongst other things, 45’ for a Speaker)
were concerned with an almost Boulez-like sense of nervous activity, something
which Cage has guarded against by stressing that the ‘notation may be read in any
“focus”, as many or as few of its aspects as desired being acted upon’ (the idea of
leaving notes out of Boulez …!). Cage didn’t seem to mind; he was content just to
laugh at the jokes in 45’.
That’s one side of the automatism possible when misinterpreting Cage. The
other occurred during Rozart Mix, which was more involved with making and
putting on the tape loops than making them sound. Cage didn’t seem to notice.
Nor did he mind that Cathy Berberian in Song Books used many old clichés of
the avant-garde – such as onstage cookery – or that she added very little to the
repertoire of gestures already known from her masterly readings of Aria. Nor
did he seem to be perturbed by the way in which the soprano, Simone Rist,
pandered to the liberal bourgeois taste of the audience by appearing on stage
successively as a railway worker, riot cop and nun (each of which were duly and
fatuously applauded).
Perhaps we should all learn from Cage’s Zen Buddhism that all these things
do not matter and we should not allow ourselves to be disturbed by them – as we
could also learn from how to accommodate the paradox of spending two days
cooped up in concert halls listening to the music of a composer who has tried to
remove himself from his music and his music from ‘culture’.

80
A reference to Young’s Composition 1960 #10.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 211

‘Steve Reich: an interview with Michael Nyman’ (Musical Times, 112, March
1971, pp. 229–31) 81

MN Is there a convenient descriptive label you like to attach to your music?

SR When the Columbia record was produced (with Violin Phase and It’s Gonna
Rain) 82 we talked about what would be the best title, and we came up with Live/
Electric. Then I wrote a piece called Pulse Music; in a review someone said that
I’d been playing pulse music elsewhere, and I realized that he had construed it as a
generic term for my music. That’s not bad, so I’m inclined to use it sometimes; at
least it gives some indication of the nature of the music, more than ‘avant-garde’,
‘experimental’, or ‘modern’, all of which are deadly.
MN You once said that you would prefer to have your works recorded commercially
than on a subsidized basis, and to succeed ‘out there’ as a composer because these
are the terms on which music survives. How does this affect the way you choose
(or are forced) to earn a living?
SR I can get by as a composer now, although I teach one day a week (at the
New School in New York), but I’d like to drop that and try to make a living as a
performer, which I am on the verge of doing. But for the last 10 years I did all kinds
of things and I would certainly rather take my chances in the commercial world, as
a person, than in an academic world. I think that if you have any close connection
or involvement with a department – and this is a particularly American situation –
then it’s going to wipe you out. Being an A&R man for a record company or a
location recordist for a movie (I’ve done a little bit of that) is one thing, whereas
if you go off to a university thinking ‘This is the way I’ll survive, I’ll have a nice
little scene going on here and have a lot of time to compose’, I don’t think that
works (that is, if you stay in one place for any length of time).
MN Come Out is the only piece of yours that is at all known over here. The phase
relationships are fascinating; how did you do them? Presumably there was no tape
editing at all?
SR I first made a loop of the phrase ‘Come out to show them’, and recorded a
whole reel of that on channel 1 of a second tape recorder. I then started recording
the loop on channel 2; after lining up the two tracks, with my thumb on the supply
reel of the recording machine, I very gradually held it back (I was literally slowing
it down, but at such an imperceptible rate that you can’t hear) until ‘Come out to
show them’ had separated into ‘come out-come out/show them-show them’ (which
is something like two eight notes apart). Then I took that two-channel relationship,

81
Paul Hillier states that ‘[this] interview was recorded in May 1970 when Reich was
in London en route to Africa. David Behrman, who had produced recordings of Reich’s tape
pieces for CBS, had suggested that Reich contact Nyman in London. Nyman and Reich
spent a week together and established a friendship, which resulted in Reich’s return the
following year to present two concerts of his works, one in London (at the ICA) and one in
Paris’ (see Reich, Writings on Music (ed. Hillier), p. 52).
82
The LP Columbia MS 7256.
212 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

made a loop from it, fed it into channel 1 again, and held it back with my thumb
until it was four eighth-notes away from the original sound and could be heard as
a series of equal beats, quite distinct melodically. I then spliced together the two-
voice tape with the four-voice tape – they fit exactly – and what you sense at that
point is a slight timbral difference, due to all this addition, and then all of a sudden
a movement in space. At that point I divided it again into eight voices, separated it
by just a 32-note, so the whole thing began to shake, then I just faded it out again
and put those two takes together. So there’s absolutely no manipulation of the tape.
MN What was your first tape piece?
SR The first piece I did was for a movie called The Plastic Haircut. It was very
heavily edited, a cross between animation and live film. Somebody said he heard
a sportscaster trying to narrate the action. So I got hold of a record called ‘The
Greatest Moments in Sport’ (a kind of old talkie LP that I had heard as a child) and
made a collage of it in the most primitive of all ways. I’d record a bit, stop the tape,
move the needle, and then start taping again, so there was hardly any splicing.
Formally it started very simply and turned into noise through overdubbing with
loops, rather like a surrealist rondo with all kinds of elements recurring. The
exciting thing was that the voices, used as sound, nevertheless have a residual
meaning that was also very ambiguous – it could be sporting, or sexual, or political –
and immediately seemed to me to be the solution to vocal music. So I went on this
binge of working with tape, which came to a point about two and a half years later
when I felt that I’d had enough.
MN Since Come Out you’ve been writing (and performing) only live music. How
did you make the change from tape to instruments?
SR 1966 was a very depressing year. I began to feel like a mad scientist trapped in
a lab; I had discovered the phasing process of Come Out and didn’t want to turn
my back on it, yet I didn’t know how to do it live, and I was aching to do some
instrumental music. The way out of the impasse came by just running a loop of a
piano figure and playing the piano against it to see if in fact I could do it. I found
that I could, not with the perfection of the tape recorder, but the imperfections
seemed to me to be interesting and I sensed they might be interesting to listen to.
MN So through tape you arrived back at live music.
SR What tape did for me basically was on the one hand to realize certain musical
ideas that at first had to come out of machines, and on the other to make some
instrumental music possible that I never would have got to by looking at any
Western or non-Western music.
MN What about the mechanical aspect of your writing?
SR People imitating machines was always considered a sickly trip; I don’t feel
that way at all, emotionally. I think there’s a human activity, ‘imitating machines’,
in the sense in which (say) playing the phase pieces can be construed; but it turns
out to be psychologically very useful, or even pleasurable. So the attention that
kind of mechanical playing asks for is something we could do with more of, and
the ‘human expressive quality’ that is assumed to be innately human is what we
could do with less of right now. That ties in with non-Western music – African
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 213

drumming or the Balinese gamelan – which also have an impersonality to them as

the participants accept a given situation and add their individual contributions in
the details of the working out.
MN You work with an absolute minimum of musical material – five words in
Come Out and a dominant seventh chord with the tonic sitting on the top in Four
Organs.83
SR Four Organs is not a phase piece at all: it consists of one chord growing in
time. My preoccupation with gradual processes – which don’t affect the timbre or
dynamic of the sound, but only its rhythmic and durational values – means that
you can begin to take an interest in things that in older music were just details.
In baroque music, you might hear a few harmonics in a certain passage that stays
within one chord, or you might begin to hear all kinds of details of the action of
a keyboard instrument. These are merely incidental details, but by isolating them
you can legitimately use them as your basic musical material.
MN So one has to learn to listen in a fundamentally different way.
SR Yes. You listen to developmental music, and you just can’t stay with it, or you
can’t stay with it once you’ve seen the way you stay with something else. I’m
interested in a process where you can get on at the beginning and literally rest
on it, uninterrupted, right to the end. Focusing in on the musical process makes
possible a shift of attention away from the he and she and you and me, outward
toward it.84
MN What is your particular interest in African drumming?
SR I became interested in African music through A.M. Jones’s book,85 and I
recently found a group at Columbia University with a Ghanaian drummer from the
tribe Jones had written about. One of my reasons for going to Ghana and studying
drumming is, in the very simplest sense, to increase my musical abilities. I studied
rudimentary Western drumming when I was 14 and interested in jazz, and this last
piece, Phase Patterns, is literally drumming on the keyboard: your left hand stays
in one position and your right hand stays in one position and you alternate them
in what’s called a paradiddle pattern, which produces a very interesting musical
texture because it sets up melodic things you could never arrive at if you just
followed your melodic prejudices and your musical background.
MN You’re not interested in taking over the sound of the music and incorporating
it into your music?
SR What I don’t want to do is to go buy a bunch of exotic-looking drums and set
up an Afrikanische Musik in New York City. In fact what I think is going to happen

83
Nyman later refers to the chord more accurately as a ‘single Domin­ant 11th chord …
progressively stretched out and slowed down’ (see ‘SR - Mysteries of the Phase’, Music and
Musicians, 20 (February 1972), pp. 20–21).
84
Reich is here virtually quoting from his own 1968 essay ‘Music as a Gradual
Process’ (see Steve Reich, Writings on Music (ed. Hillier), p. 36).
85
A.M. Jones, Studies in African Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959).
214 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

more and more is that composers will study non-Western music seriously so that it
will have a natural and organic influence on their music.

‘Harrison Birtwistle’ (London Magazine, 11, October/November 1971,

pp. 118–22)

Birtwistle: in his later thirties; on the brink of a second opera,86 a Covent Garden
commission no less (that is if it survives the departure of Peter Hall);87 his An
Imaginary Landscape the ISCM Festival Committee’s most ingenious way of
lining up English new music and the new musical Establishment (under Boulez
the Embalmer);88 his Verses rapidly becoming a kind of cultural exchange token,
and the mid-career BBC2 profile: are these the symbols of a music successfully
and uncompromisingly challenging the reactionary mores of conventional
musical society, or of those rigid values insidiously eating away at the very core
of Birtwistle’s originality; or of – and this is more probable – society merely being
seen to do its perfunctory duty to the contemporary artist, with a few handouts,
without distracting from the serious business of Wagner, Bellini and Beethoven?
One watches the process of cultural acclimatization with a certain amount
of suspicion anyway, especially since Birtwistle is unable, unlike his ex-RAM
colleague Cornelius Cardew, to have his music paid for and played without the
museum organizations – opera houses, symphony orchestras, chamber groups.
Any attempt he may make to change the status quo, such as the Pierrot Players,
can only be an alternative within the system. Cardew has managed to live happily
if precariously, beyond the fringe, and has created in the Scratch Orchestra a
radical alternative to the system. (The musical requirements and attitudes of the
two composers are of course strikingly dissimilar.) Birtwistle did drop the Pierrot
Players when he saw them becoming the victims of their own glamour and too
limited to be of further use to him as a composer even though he could still have
got a lot of favourable mileage out of them.
If the second opera is evidence to some of the perpetuation of an unnecessary
and costly institution, others may see Birtwistle’s recent admission of the
importance of landscape in his music as the down payment on the sad role of
English pastoral composers, the sentimental nature poet wandering irrelevantly
down memory lane. However it is perhaps only of late that Birtwistle has reached
the maturity where he can admit it, since the influence has always been there, in
his music and in his lifestyle; farm upbringing in the fields around Accrington,

86
The opera The Mask of Orpheus was to preoccupy Birtwistle for the best part of ten
years until English National Opera eventually produced it in May 1986.
87
Peter Hall was director of the Royal Opera House for a year before taking up the
directorship at the National Theatre.
88
The International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) was founded in
Salzburg in 1922.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 215

years of teaching in Dorset and Wiltshire, a new interest in closeup photography,

the Philip Sutton flower paintings on the walls of his house. The musical results
of this environment is never intentionally depictive; like Cage he is concerned
with nature in its manner of operation, and with our perception of it (though
unlike Cage who attempts to imitate this manner of operation, Birtwistle develops
principles from it).
The concern is with formal properties: nature as structure, nature as growth,
productive both of living processes and dead objects (which is what a musical
composition is after all), but essentially cyclic (an aspect of nature which Cage
chooses to ignore). And the individual’s position in relation to natural phenomena
is significant too. Birtwistle has pointed out that one’s perspective in a landscape
is perpetually changing, as body and eye rove about, and that one links together
separate impressions – of changing relationships, of static masses, of details in
greater or lesser focus and so on – into an idea of a whole which one has never seen
as a totality. A musical composition of the type that Birtwistle is concerned with is
the same: even an aerial view (the score?) is only another view.
These observations animate An Imaginary Landscape (a Klee title also used by
Cage for the most revolutionary of his early compositions),89 where the material is
laid out in a way analogous to landscape perception, with changes of focus, some
features hidden by others, before reappearing in a slightly different vista, others
disappearing out of hearing. Medusa (written for the Pierrot Players, with an
impressive electronic tape part realized in Peter Zinovieff’s computerized studio)
takes the analogy of the reproductive process of the jellyfish.90 Each jellyfish is
divided into seven symmetrical segments, one of which detaches itself to grow into
another jellyfish with seven symmetrical segments. In musical terms identifiable
units of sound matter separate, coalesce, grow independently of their surroundings
or as part of them.
These at least are the basic principles from which the music developed. The
aural reality is always different; structural mechanisms are not accepted passively
like laws of nature, but are destroyed or bypassed by Birtwistle’s technical
manipulations and by the real motion of the music. Sometimes this is a loss – as
in the second of the two versions of Medusa which overlays the bare, excitingly
obvious, structure of the original version with a mass of rather grandiloquent and
overburdened jelly. In Nomos (literally ‘law’) for orchestra, however, the tension
between structure and perception is remarkable as the framework of vertical shafts
of sound are soon lost in the vast cumulative narrative of the music as it unfolds.
Notice that the metaphors have already changed: for landscape substitute
architecture or epic narration, they are equally relevant or of no consequence, being
all part of the game of Birtwistle’s music which frequently uses not ‘found sounds’
(like national anthems, foxtrots, or the classics) but found formal archetypes or

89
Cage’s set of five Imaginary Landscapes was composed in 1939 (No. 1), 1942
(Nos. 2 & 3), 1951 (No. 4) and 1952 (No. 5) respectively.
90
Zinovieff also wrote the libretto for Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus.
216 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

myths, whether the forms of Greek tragedy (in Tragoedia), a traditional ritual
(Punch and Judy, his first opera); a method of combining voices and instruments
which Holst found used by folk musicians in Devon (in Monody for Corpus
Christi, the most perfect of his early works); or the mummers’ play (in Down by
the Greenwood Side, written for the Music Theatre Ensemble, another group set up
to bypass stereotyped institutions). These last two show the extent of Birtwistle’s
involvement with the English tradition in its harsher, wilder, starker aspects.
The method of Down by the Greenwood Side is typical not only of Birtwistle’s
stage pieces but of his instrumental music as well. It proceeds on two completely
separate planes, that of pantomime (the mummers’ play) and tragedy (a ballad of
a mother who killed her children – infanticide also crops up in Punch and will do
in the new opera). These are juxtaposed, never combined; they grate against each
other in uneasy coexistence. The action is handled by Father Christmas, a master
of ceremonies like the Choregos in Punch, the horn in Verses, the harp and horn
in Tragoedia – the Greek chorus substitute seems to be integral to Birtwistle’s
music. St George is killed twice by the Turk, Bold Slasher. He is ‘cured’ first by a
goonish doctor, second by a magical mystery man, the Green Man, familiar from
Old English church carvings. Everybody, including Mrs Green, telling her little
tale for the fourth time, dance away quite happily at the end, until the music turns
on its dark side, and things are obscurely doomed to perpetual irresolution.
The presentation of opposites is characteristic: Verses especially amongst
Birtwistle’s works is concerned with the exploitation of light/dark, high/low, fast/
slow, elaborate/simple, etc. (again after Klee). As in Punch the allegory is left
open, for the listener/viewer to make up his mind. Both mummers and mother are
involved in death and (since the children come alive to accuse her) rebirth, and
knowing Birtwistle’s interest in nature one could read in the symbolism of the
seasons (but political, psychological interpretations are equally valid perhaps). The
seasonal cycle is also closely relevant to the cyclic repetitions of all Birtwistle’s
music, which imply perpetual renewal and in musical terms perpetual variation
(but not of the Schoenbergian developmental variety, since this music, for all its
momentum, is basically static) both on the large-scale structure level, and on the
note-to-note level.
The interlocking of self-reliant cycles is what gives Punch its ritual strength
and one of the few viable construction methods – ironically derived from the old
fashioned ‘number’ opera – which could justify the writing of operas today. Where
other composers try to compete with the cinema with an operatic pseudo realism,
Punch compounds the natural artificiality of the medium to its ultimate degree.
What is so fresh about the technique of radical juxtaposition is that the appearance
of musical types is usually not explicable in logical-causal terms, things are placed
side by side in a determinedly non-dialectic manner. This is not to make a collagist
of Birtwistle: each piece gives a composite view of some distinctive landscape
or other.
As the hills roll on endlessly, and the seasons recur, so the music goes through
the motions of renewing itself. Nomos, written for a 1968 Prom, and full of as yet
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 217

unrealized possibilities, begins, as do many of Birtwistle’s works, with rudimentary

intervals, which evolve on a spiral of complexity. Throughout a quartet of
amplified wind instruments threads its way through the dense undergrowth of the
full orchestra; their music, too, proliferates, and eventually takes over from the
other instruments, ending with the same music that was heard near the beginning
on an unamplified wind quartet. The process is ready to begin again, a few inches
off the ground, perhaps with the whole orchestra amplified, with an electronic
tape taking the place of the amplified quartet, till meta-musical solutions suggest
themselves in ever-decreasing circles.
With Tragoedia in 1965 the stylistic elements of Birtwistle’s music asserted
themselves with confidence. He had cut through the unfocus of his previous works
through simplification and the reintroduction into music of elements forgotten by
atonality and post-Webern serialism: pulse, ostinatos and a cadential language, and
a number of tricks which have become near-mannerisms: high contrast material,
violent articulations, instruments laid out in separate groups, and an aggressive
sound-world reminiscent of Varèse.
In Meridian and An Imaginary Landscape the edges have been rounded off,
the aggression held in check. One hopes that the music is, Nomos-like, beginning
to renew itself. The public and the benefactors have presumably learned to adjust
to Birtwistle’s assaults, which they may see as the (only) evidence of a ‘strong
musical personality’, simply because that’s the way they like composers to express
their individuality. To me his best work is slight and of remarkably fine proportions:
the Cantata with a text drawn from tombstone inscriptions. Birtwistle’s recent
‘discovery’ of Morton Feldman is a good sign; Feldman’s music is one of exquisite
beauty, refined self-effacement and non-obstruction, completely drained of
aggression, which may lead Birtwistle back along the lyrical path of Monody. The
perpetual demands made for novelty, astonishment and ‘bigness’ are occasionally
too much for a composer to bear without suffering.

‘Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning’ (London Magazine, 11,

December 1971/January 1972, pp. 130–35)

With simultaneous ceremony and jubilation, Paragraph 5 is to be finally lowered

into place on 21 January 1972, and the second stage of Cornelius Cardew’s The
Great Learning achieves completion. The first stage, the writing, occupied Cardew
from Spring 1968 to Summer 1970; one by one six of the seven paragraphs have
been performed, mainly by the Scratch Orchestra, in a variety of locations in and
out of London.
My own initial experience of the first two paragraphs was as a listener/critic. My
reviews in The Spectator, separated by a period of seven months, were curiously
similar. Of Paragraph 1 I wrote that it was ‘as real as a drizzly afternoon, gradually
218 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

eating away at our blinded and cluttered musical mentalities’,91 and of Paragraph 2
as being ‘one of those rare works of such power and freshness that seem to reinvent
music from its very sources by somersaulting musical history’.92 Now, over two
years later, not only do I still hold to those opinions (if not precisely to the way
of expressing them) but they have been reinforced through close contact with The
Great Learning as a performer – though such is the incorruptible latitude of the
score that each participant ideally fulfils the roles of performer, listener, critic
and composer.
This incorruptibility, which is coupled with a meticulous generosity, derives
from Cardew’s personal acceptance of the principles laid down in the Confucius
text on which The Great Learning is based and the way in which they are translated
into direct, non-symbolic musical terms (on a more profound level than the
accepted banality of ‘expressing the text in music’). Not only does this subtly help
one along the road of ‘correct behaviour’ during a performance, it beneficially
affects one’s mode of procedure in everyday life.
An apt analogy is tidal. As the sea progressively readies the seashore, there is
a period of maximum immersion when the sand is completely covered; equally
gradually, and inevitably, the water recedes, drawn away by its own forces; the
sand looks much as it did before. But who can say what effect the experience has
on the sand?
The book of The Great Learning is one of the four classic books of the Confucian
religion. The first chapter is said to have been written by Confucius himself in the
sixth century BC; it lays down a basic ethical code. The first chapter is divided into
seven paragraphs, and Cardew has taken each of these seven paragraphs ‘as the
basis of a sizeable composition for an unlimited number of performers’.93
The Confucius text as Cardew has pointed out, is concerned with the
development of an unassailable moral authority, an authority that Confucius
locates inside. In the first paragraph he speaks of ‘looking straight into one’s own
heart and acting on the results’ and in the second paragraph he advises to ‘know
the point of rest and then you will have certainty’.
So to Gene Youngblood’s statement that ‘the act of creation for the new
artist is not so much the creation of new objects as the revelation of previously
unrecognized relationships between existing phenomena, both physical and
metaphysical’ we must add ‘and ethical’;94 and note that whereas Youngblood
sees these relationships as being revealed through an ever-spiralling complex of
electro-technological hardware, The Great Learning comes to rest at a point of
redefinition of the natural, concrete, basic physical properties of things. These
properties make themselves felt as though totally independent of ‘composition’.

91
See ‘Minimal Music’, The Spectator (11 October 1968).
92
See ‘This Way Madness’, The Spectator (9 May 1969).
93
See also Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (London: Alta Vista, 1974;
Cambridge: CUP, 1999), pp. 122–6.
94
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970) p. 346.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 219

In this respect it was not simply to make The Great Learning accessible to
large bodies of untrained musicians that Cardew has avoided using traditional
instruments; for in these, as Cardew noticed when improvising on his cello in
AMM, there resides a permanent and inescapable portion of musical history. In
The Great Learning, one is made intensely aware, as if for the first time, of the
physical intension of sound: of wind as it issues from blown pipes (Paragraph 1),
from organ pipes (Paragraphs 1 and 4), or from the human throat, in singing
(2, 3, 5, 7) or speaking (1, 4, 5); of objects struck against each other – stone against
stone (1), wood on skin (2), mainly metal on metal (Crash Bang Clank Music of
Paragraph 5) or scraped (the gueros of Paragraph 4): of bow against string (5); or of
raw physical gesture (as in the highly disciplined Introductory Dumb Show of 5).
This vast reservoir of existing natural sound phenomena is coupled with an
equally important reservoir of methods for causing these sound resources to be
activated. The Great Learning seems to me to have a status akin to that older
experimental ‘classic’, Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–8):
each accumulates a rich multiplicity of notations, but with one very significant
difference (at least). Cage’s notations, especially in the piano part, propose ways
of organising the production of sounds, whereas Cardew’s propose various ways
of organizing people to produce sounds. Organizing is the wrong word; the
extraordinary thing about reading Cardew’s notations is the way in which one is
immediately and directly stimulated to musical action, whatever type of notational
symbols he has adopted or invented. It applies equally to the sign-event complexes
of Octet 61, the matrices of Solo and Accompaniment, the brilliant, exhaustive
graphic ‘journey’ of Treatise, the cryptic diagrams, hints, and texts of Schooltime
Compositions as to The Great Learning.
It is equally remarkable that Cardew’s concern with liberating human resources
(rather than ‘sounds’) has developed on a consistent line over the past ten years. In
the instructions for Octet 61 the attitude revealed in the following: ‘this piece is an
opportunity for an interpreter. It demands no very sophisticated formal approach:
the performer does not have to be a composer, he merely has to discover and
use that modicum of creativity that is available to all’95 is continued in ‘Towards
an Ethic of Improvisation’ in which, in reference to Treatise, Cardew says that
‘Ideally such music should be played by a collection of musical innocents; but in
a culture where musical education is so widespread (at least among musicians)
and getting more and more so, such innocents are extremely hard to find. Treatise
attempts to locate such musical innocents wherever they survive, by posing a
notation that does not specifically demand an ability to read music’:96 and finally
comes home to roost in the foundation and constitution of the Scratch Orchestra,
which was actually born out of the need to find a large pool of musicians to perform
Paragraph 2 of The Great Learning.

95
Cornelius Cardew, ‘Octet ’61 for Jasper Johns’, Musical Times, 103 (January 1962),
p. 38.
96
In Experimental Music, p. 117.
220 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

The summation of social and musical experience that The Great Learning
represents far transcends the situation towards which Cardew was groping when,
in connection with The Tiger’s Mind (1967), the notation of which required only ‘a
willingness to understand English and a desire to play (in the widest sense of the
word, including the most childish)’, Cardew remarks, somewhat sadly perhaps,
that this ‘still leaves the musically educated at a tremendous disadvantage. I see no
possibility of turning to account the tremendous musical potential that musically
educated people evidently represent; except by providing them with what they
want: traditionally notated scores of maximum complexity.’97
The reservoir of resources that is The Great Learning magnificently succeeds
in encompassing the ‘needs’ of the musician whose ‘individual personality (which
a musical education seems so often to thwart) is absorbed into a larger organism,
which speaks through its individual members as if from some higher sphere’,98 as
well as those who just wish to indulge in play, and musical innocents who have no
ability or desire to read standard musical notation.
The methods of stimulating the growth of the larger organisms are perpetually
fascinating and account (in part at least) for the internal vitality of The Great
Learning. Quite often the ‘social ritual’ is static and draining, as in Paragraph 1,
which grows through the straightforward democratic process of the addition of a
series of solos for whistle instruments (supported by a multiple drone provided by
non-soloists). Each whistler does his solo in turn according to his personal reading
of the curling graphic notation. Each solo is separated from the next by the other
large group of performers speaking the Confucius text.
Paragraph 2, though similarly concerned with group music, allows of less
individuality; its ritual is tough, its discipline exuberant. Each group consists of a
number of singers and a drummer. The drummer repeats rhythmic patterns over
and over again, as the singers sing the text through to slow pentatonic phrases. For
the singers: progressive exhaustion; for the drummers: progressive exhilaration;
when all the singing has stopped all the drummers finally come together in a state
of metric agreement. For the listener: each group, proceeding at its own pace,
produced as ‘out-of-syncness’ in relation to all the others – a multi-spatial multi-
rhythmic, multi-tonal experience out of a common, unitary notation (unitary in
that one single score is used by the groups, independently of each other).
At the other extreme, the unitary scores of Paragraphs 6 and 7 provide for a
personal ritual threading through a communal network, in a climate of silence or near-
silence. In Paragraph 6 personal responsibility for making music is at its most acute,
as one has to wait and judge the correct context into which to place one’s fragile
sound. Working through the score at your own pace means that this context is different
for each player; your context depends on theirs, and is simultaneously part of theirs.
Paragraph 7 also works on the ‘network’ principle. One of my most beautiful
musical experiences came from taking part in a performance of this piece in a

97
Ibid, p. 122.
98
Ibid.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 221

low-lit Portsmouth Cathedral. Sounds fanned out in space and time as singers,
standing still or circulating in a slow procession, passed on their sounds to someone
in close proximity, and with great reverence, picked up sounds in the same way.
Paragraph 5 is The Great Learning spectacular, and for Cardew ‘in a way is
my view of the composition of the Scratch Orchestra as it now exists, with its high
level of differentiation of actions and functions’.99 The range of differentiation of
the material, the scope it gives for every and any member of the Scratch Orchestra
no matter what their level of development, interest or ability, is an astonishing
achievement on Cardew’s part.
The Introductory Dumb Show, for instance, is to be performed with the normal
teacher/pupil relationship viewed through the wrong end of a telescope:

A player who thinks he will be relatively slow in performing the dumbshow gets
up in front like a teacher. Another who thinks he will also be slow gets up and
faces the ‘teacher’ who now performs sentence 1 while the other watches. The
watching one then becomes teacher in his turn, and another gets up and watches
him perform sentence 1. And so on …

So that the fastest start last; a handicap game.

The Action Score and Number Score seem to harness the energy potential
of mind and body, concept and action on an entirely new and fruitful level of
participation, and as far as musical activities are concerned the Ode Machines,
elaborate solo vocal melodies and The Compositions which outline, in very general
terms, a process of activating various sound resources, represent two extremes of
the musical spectrum.
Two of the Compositions’ notations are so rich in suggestions as to require no
further comment:

SILENT MUSIC No sound. Silent and still. Occasionally a movement watched

by all, never more than one at a time. … Comprehend the movements as deeply
as possible – physically, referentially, plastically, symbolically – as they occur.
Very heavy music. BEAUTIFUL SOUND MUSIC Players make sounds they
think are beautiful, making them beautifully, spacing them and arranging them
in a manner they think beautiful in the general context. Three times try and make
the neighbouring sounds sound stupid or ugly in the general context. Three times
make sounds that you think are stupid or ugly … Try to go forward to ever more
beautiful sounds. If no more beautiful sound occurs to you repeat the last one
over and over ever more beautifully. If it gets less beautiful, stop.

And so begins the third stage of The Great Learning as it takes off into the world.

99
See Cornelius Cardew: A Reader, ed. Eddie Prévost (Harlow UK: Copula, 2006),
p. 290; also quoted in Brian Dennis, ‘Cardew’s “The Great Learning”’, Musical Times,
112/1545 (November 1971), pp. 1066–8, p. 1067.
222 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

‘SR – Mysteries of the Phase’ (Music and Musicians, 20, February 1972,
pp. 20–21) 100

Faced with the task of explaining new music as direct and exhilarating as Steve
Reich’s, the temptation is obvious: go to the Hayward Gallery on February 4, leave
behind any preconceived ideas as to what music should or shouldn’t do, open your
ears (and your mind) and listen to Drumming.101 (And then go back home and read
the rest of this article.) Drumming is the most recent, extended and immediately
appealing of a remarkable series of pieces the 35-year-old New Yorker Reich has
produced in the last six or seven years.
What will hit you first is the stunning sound, the unrelenting rhythmic drive,
the relaxed discipline of the playing. Reich works only with ensembles of identical
instruments. Piano Phase used two pianos, Four Organs and Phase Patterns four
Farfisa electric organs, while Drumming – which runs continuously for about one
and a half hours – has four sections. The first is for eight small tuned drums, the
second for three marimbas played by nine players, the third for three glockenspiels
and in the last section these three groups are combined.
Each section of Drumming, like any Reich piece, presents a single uniform
texture which, once established, does not change over a period of 20 or 25 minutes.
The change‑overs are managed by the new instruments doubling the exact pattern
of the instruments already playing.102 These latter are gradually faded out (like
a slow motion baton change in an eternal relay race), so that the fresh unmixed
timbre emerges out of the old one. This is especially beautiful when the soft
warmth of the marimbas takes over from the harder, more neutral sound of the
tuned bongos.
The primary motivation of Reich’s music, however, is not colouristic but
rhythmic (or: timbre is in a perpetual state of rhythmic animation). All his
instrumental music keeps up a regular quaver pulse, although only in one piece –
Four Organs, in which a single domin­ant 11th chord is progressively stretched
out and slowed down into its melodic components against a rhythmic grid laid
down by maracas – is the pulse stated explicitly. In other pieces the regular quaver
motion is produced by the rhythm on which the whole piece is based (Phase
Patterns) or by the combination of different ‘positions’ of the same rhythmic cell
played by all the instruments together (Drumming).

100
A play on the title of the 1971 film W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism by Yugoslav
director Dušan Makavejev.
101
Nyman was in fact responsible for organising this concert at the Hayward Gallery
– the British première of Drumming.
102
Each of the four sections in Drumming utilizes a different set of instruments:
section 1 is for tuned bongo drums played with sticks, section 2 for marimbas and female
voices, section 3 for glockenspiels, whistling and piccolo; the final section combines
instruments from all the three previous sections.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 223

Similarly pitch is a static parameter. In Drumming each player keeps to the

narrow modal melodic gamut he begins with, which is just one contribution to
the total static harmonic ‘unit’. Today the taboos on tonality are being lifted, but
often only in the form of ‘objects’ used for sentimentality, symbolism or shock
in a non‑tonal context. Reich’s music is not part of this seemingly guilt‑ridden
movement. When he was a student under Berio at Mills College in the late 1950s,
he found himself writing 12‑tone music in which the row didn’t (or couldn’t)
transpose. Berio noticed that Reich would repeat a row over and over again
turning it into a static thing, and said to him one day ‘If you want to write tonal
music, why don’t you write tonal music?’103 This helped him to realise that a
perfectly valid music could be formed out of the language of what had appealed
to him in his youth – pop and jazz, the two‑chord riffs of John Coltrane.
The rhythmic patterns are subjected to constant repetition, but simple
repetition is not of the essence of Drumming or Phase Patterns which derive
their strength from two connected technical concepts, one (phasing) unique to
Reich, the other (the art work as a gradual process) common to a number of
visual artist and filmmakers.
Reich discovered phasing purely empirically. Sometime in 1965 he had
recorded the voice of an open‑air black preacher; later he made two identical
tape loops of a short spoken phrase which he played back over two tape loops.
He found that, because of minute differences in the motor speed of the two
machines, the phrase was heard marginally out of sync with itself and that certain
‘hidden’ sounds – not part of the original spoken material – began to appear. He
then began controlling this discrepancy by delaying one of the spools with his
thumb (but to such an infinitesimal degree that the pitch was not affected). Out
of these experiments came two tape pieces, It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out,
to my mind two of the most exciting tape pieces ever produced in the now-
passing electronic era. (They are not, strictly speaking, electronic music, since
they use no electronically-produced or transformed sounds; rather they are ‘tape
music’ or better still ‘tape recorder music’ since they arose out of the nature of
tape recorders.)
Machines, however, were only a means to an end: they made some instrumental
music possible which Reich considers he would never have arrived at ‘by listening
to any other Western or non‑Western music’.104 The mechanics of Piano Phase
(1967), the first live piece, are the same as Come Out, coloured by human fallibility
and adapted to musical rather than spoken sounds: an equal‑note rhythmic figure is
set up in unison with itself, the lead player gradually speeds up slightly until he is
one quaver ahead, and con­tinues the phasing process a quaver at a time until both
instruments are back in unison.

103
Reich, Writings on Music (ed. Hillier), p. 9.
104
See ‘Notes on Composition 1965–73’, in Reich’s Writings about Music (Halifax:
Nova Scotia, 1974), p. 53.
224 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

All Reich’s pieces exploit this phasing principle (although Drumming phases
at the distance of a crotchet, rather than a quaver, which makes it a more relaxed
experience). Yet this kind of music calls for a very special kind of performing
discipline, of which Reich has written:

People imitating machines was always considered a sickly trip; I don’t feel that
way at all, emotionally. I think there’s a human activity which might be called
‘imitating machines’, but which is simply controlling your mind and body very
carefully as in Yoga breathing exercises. This kind of activity turns out to be
very useful psychologically as it focuses the mind down to a fine point. So the
kind of attention that ‘mechanical’ playing calls for is something that we could
do with more of, and the ‘human expressive’ activity which is assumed to be
innately human and associated with improvisation and similar liberties is what
we could do with less of right now.105

The performing discipline exactly mir­rors the discipline exerted over the musical
material as it is ordered through slowly and methodically. Of his musical processes
Reich has written:

I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process

happening through­out the sounding music … Though I may have the pleasure
of discovering musical processes and composing the musical material to
run through them, once the process is set up and loaded, it runs by itself …
The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the
note‑to‑note details and the over­all form simultaneously. One can’t im­provise in
a musical process – the concepts are mutually exclusive … By ‘gradual’, I mean
extremely gradual, a process happening so slowly and gradu­ally that listening to
it resembles watching the minute hand on a watch – you can perceive it moving
after you stay with it a little while.106

Thus there are no ‘secret’ technical devices which are hidden from the listener (as
in every other music) who can hear everything that’s going on. Yet the music is far
from one‑dimensional since the phasing process unlocks a fascinating dimension
of ‘impersonal, unintended, psycho‑acoustical by-products of the intended
process’,107 which are beyond the composer’s control and repay close attention
on the listener’s part. In Drumming they are particularly magical: a huge variety
of inner melodies glide through the ‘middleground’, a bell‑like halo surrounds
the upper reaches of the glockenspiels, at times the drums sound like banjos.

105
Michael Nyman, ‘Steve Reich: An Interview with Michael Nyman’, Musical
Times, 112 (March 1971), pp. 229–31.
106
Steve Reich, ‘Music as a Gradual Process’ (1968) in Writings on Music (ed. Hillier),
pp. 34–6.
107
Ibid., p. 35.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 225

In fact it’s often very difficult to decide what instruments are playing and how the
music is notated. Similarly a quite unexpected chain of cross‑rhythms is produced
by these straightforward processes. Yet such a resultant rhythmic structure could
not be notated in any other way, and the details change, of course, with each
re‑alignment of phase.
Some of the resultant patterns are doubled by voices (men’s with the drums,
women’s with the marimbas, whistling and piccolo with the glockenspiels) which
by exactly imitating the sound of the instru­ments and by gradually fading in the
patterns, cause them gradually to rise to the surface of the music; and then, by
fading out, slowly to subside, allowing the listener to hear these patterns along
with many others which are actually sounding in the instruments.
There are obvious parallels to be drawn between Reich’s music and various
ethnic musics – especially the Balinese gamelan and African drumming. Rhythmic
structure, repetition, ritual, pulse, constant pitch, absence of modulation and
slowness of rate of change are common features. In this respect Reich is one
of a group of composers, who are more interested in ‘world music’ than in any
Western music (nothing since Pérotin in Reich’s case). The influence takes a
number of forms. Some Western musicians are devoting their lives to the study
of non‑Western instruments; and some composers are in­dulging in various kinds
of exoticism, either by using ethnic instruments in a Western context (‘the sitar in
rock trip’108) or by imitating non‑Western sounds (‘singing “Indian style” melodies
with electronic drones’). Reich’s approach seems much more fruitful, and in any
case since his music is derived from and uses a mech­anical process, it is guaranteed
against cheap (exotic) imitation:

[One] can create a music with one’s own sound that is con­structed in the light
of one’s knowledge of non‑Western structures … One can study the rhythmic
structure of non‑Western music and let that study lead one where it will, while
continuing to use the instru­ments, scales, and any other sound one has grown up
with … This is a more genuine and interesting form of influence, because while
listening one is not necessarily aware of some particular non‑Western music
being imitated.109

‘Cage and Satie’ (Musical Times, 114, December 1973, pp. 1227–9)

I rather think that influence doesn’t go A–B–C, that is to say, from [Satie] to
someone younger than [Satie] to people still younger, but that rather we live in

108
See Nyman, ‘The Music of Steve Reich’, Time Out (21 February–7 March 1971),
p. 85 (not included in this volume).
109
Reich, ‘Postscript to a brief study of Balinese and African Music’ (1973), in
Writings about Music, p. 71.
226 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

a field situation in which, by our actions, by what we do, we are able to see what
other people do in a different light than we do, without our having done anything.
 (Cage, 1965)110

It is important with Satie not to be put off by his surface (by turns mystical,
cabaretish, Kleeish, Mondrianish; full of mirth, the erotic, the wondrous, all the
white emotions, even the heroic, and always tranquillity, expressed more often
than not by cliché and juxtaposition).
 (Cage, 1951)111

Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery; how much more (or less) flattering
and sincere is cheap imitation?112 Cage’s Cheap Imitation is the most tangible
recognition of Satie’s indispensability (‘It’s not a question of Satie’s relevance’,
Cage wrote in 1958. ‘He’s indispensable’),113 and interestingly provides a direct link
with the first available evidence of Cage’s musical connection with Satie.
In 1945 Cage made a two-piano arrangement of the first movement of
Satie’s Socrate for Merce Cunningham’s ballet Idyllic Song.114 In summer 1969
Cunningham approached the work again with a view to completing it, by adding
the remaining two movements. Cage finished the complete two-piano arrangement
in October 1969. However, permission for the use of this arrangement was not
granted by the copyright holder. So Cage chose to imitate the original, with great
care and respect, but cheaply – by his accustomed resort to the I-Ching (as a
mechanical rather than inspirational guide). The I-Ching was basically used to
answer two questions for each phrase of the melodic line of Socrate: which of
the seven white-note modes was to be used, and beginning on which of the 12
chromatic notes. The original Cheap Imitation (1969) is for solo piano and was
first used for Cunningham’s dance Second Hand in 1970. The orchestral imitation
of the piano version was made in 1972, using the I-Ching to decide which of the
24 obligatory instruments capable of playing the melodic line at any point should
do so and for how long. (A maximum of 96 instruments may be used.)
To return to the history of Cage-Satie: three years after Idyllic Song Cage
organized a mammoth, 25-concert Satie Festival at Black Mountain College,
North Carolina, which included a star-studded performance of Le piège de Méduse

110
Cage, ‘Two Statements on Ives’, in A Year From Monday, p. 41.
111
In Robert Motherwell (ed.) Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (New York:
Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., 1951), p. xxii.
112
The main focus of Nyman’s review, Cage’s Cheap Imitation, received its British
première by the London Sinfonietta at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, on 4 December
1973, followed by its London première at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 7 December. Nyman
also gave a radio talk on this work, which was broadcast on Radio 3 on 4 December 1973.
113
See Cage, ‘Erik Satie’, in Silence, p. 82.
114
Satie’s Socrate, for voice and piano (or voice and orchestra) was composed in
1917–18.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 227

[Medusa’s Trap] with Buckminster Fuller as the Baron and sets by de Kooning.
During the 1950s he continued his publicity for Satie largely on paper: in 1950
and 1951 he indulged in verbal (and conceptual) fisticuffs in the letter columns
of Musical America with a critic, Abraham Skulsky, while his best-known
appreciation of Satie, the ‘imaginary conversation’ in Silence, dates from 1958.115
When that article first appeared in Art News Annual it included (for the first
time in the US) the manuscript of Satie’s Vexations for piano, a piece which
proposes 840 repetitions of a 52-beat, unbarred motif, made up of four sections
all over the same 13-bar bass theme,116 in the order: bass alone, bass + two
upper parts in rhythmic unison, bass, bass + reversed upper parts. In 1963 Cage
organized a posse of pianists to give what must have been the first performance,
at the Pocket Theatre in New York, and another with students at the University of
California, Davis in 1969.117 Of late, Cage has pursued the connection with Satie
through Cheap Imitation and the gigantic Song Books, Solos for Voice 3–92 (1970)
which is a musical-theatrical exploration of a chance remark he made in the 1969
continuation of his Diary: How to Improve the World (You will only make Matters
Worse): ‘We connect Satie with Thoreau’.118
An analysis of the musical evidence for the Satie–Cage connection is crucial
for understanding both composers, and goes deeper than that attempted by Peter
Dickinson in a Music Review article of 1967 (which, incidentally, includes the first
English publication of Vexations). Dickinson points to both composers’ hatred of
traditional attitudes which leads them ‘to the point of declaring anti-art doctrines’;
to Parade, Mercure and Relâche as precursors of ‘the kind of Dadaist happenings
that have interested Cage and the avant-garde’; to Satie’s love of incongruities
leading him to exploit whatever is to hand ‘in a deliberate employment of accident’
(that is more to the point, if it is true); while he found the combination of music,
words and drawings in Sports et Divertissements ‘close to the recent aleatory
music where the performer is given a series of indications and diagrams without
precise interpretation’.119 (The instructions to Vexations provide a more relevant
parallel: ‘Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif, il sera bon de se préparer au
préalable, et dans la plus grand silence, par des immobilités sérieuses’.120)

115
For Cage’s correspondence with Skulsky, see Richard Kostelanetz (ed.) John
Cage (London: Allen Lane, 1971), pp. 89–94; see also ‘Erik Satie’, in Silence, pp. 76–82.
116
In fact, the theme comprises 13 crotchet beats rather than bars (Cage also refers to
it as ‘thirteen measures long’ in ‘Erik Satie’, Silence, p. 78).
117
The Pocket Theatre performance even received some exposure on the American
CBS game show I’ve Got a Secret in September 1963, when John Cale – who participated
in the performance – appeared on the programme.
118
Cage, M: Writings, ’67–’72 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), p. 70.
119
Dickinson, ‘Erik Satie (1866-1925)’, Music Review, 28 (1967), pp. 139–46, p. 146.
120
‘In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to
prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.’
228 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

The essence of the matter is contained in the lecture ‘Defence of Satie’ which
Cage delivered during the Black Mountain Satie Festival in 1948.121 Here Cage
indulged a style of logical and polemical argument that he abandoned in his later
aphoristic-mosaic lecture-writings. After giving his most convincing exposition of
the distinctions between structure, form, method and material, he concluded that
it is only structure (the work’s ‘parts that are clearly separate but that interact in
such a way as to make a whole’) that today’s composers should come to ‘general
agreement’ about, the other categories being free.122
The music by, and influenced by, Beethoven, defined the structure of a
composition by means of harmony. Before Beethoven wrote a piece, Cage
maintains, he planned its movement from one key to another; that is, he planned
its harmonic structure. The only new structural idea to emerge since Beethoven
is to be found in the work of Satie (and early Webern), where structure is defined
in terms of time lengths. Before Satie wrote a piece he planned the lengths of its
phrases. Whether this is true of all Satie’s music, his sketchbooks certainly contain
complete pre-compositional rhythmic structures for the ballet Mercure and for
Cinéma, the soundtrack for René Clair’s film Entr’acte included in Relâche.123
Cage, of course, had based all his music on proportional rhythmic structures
since the mid-1930s, after having been introduced to oriental rhythmic systems by
Henry Cowell and having found no comfort in Schoenberg’s pitch manipulation
system, which provided only a method and was restricted to musical sounds
based on the chromatic scale. The rhythmic structure technique allowed Cage to
formulate this revolutionary concept (since it very simply but radically contradicts
the traditional attitude towards form and content): ‘in contrast to a structure based
on the frequency aspect of sound, tonality, that is, this rhythmic structure was
as hospitable to non-musical sounds, noises, as it was to those of conventional
scales and instruments’.124 (These ‘noises’ were for Cage initially the sounds of the
percussion orchestra and its ‘reduction’, the prepared piano, but later, notably in
the so-called silent piece, 4’33”, were any, including environmental sounds.) Cage
found this ‘hospitality’ in Satie too: ‘Just as Klee was willing to draw people and
plants and animals, so into Satie’s continuity come folk tunes, musical clichés, and
absurdities of all kinds; he is not ashamed to welcome them in the house he builds:
its structure is strong.’125
Since Cage was closely involved with Satie’s music in the late 1940s it is not
unremarkable that the music he was writing at the time of the Black Mountain
lecture should have many features in common with Satie: melody-modality,
stasis, flatness of movement (an inevitable consequence of rhythmic pre-planning)

121
Cage, ‘Defense of Satie’, in Kostelanetz (ed.), John Cage, pp. 77–84.
122
Ibid., p. 79.
123
The short film Entr’acte was directed by René Clair (1898–1981) in 1924 as part
of the Ballet production Relâche, based on a book by Francis Picabia.
124
Cage, Silence, p. 19.
125
Kostelanetz (ed.), John Cage, p. 83.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 229

and unpretentiousness. (This latter is important: compare the respectful restraint

of Cage’s handling of Socrate with the way Stockhausen imposes himself on
Beethoven in Op. 1970.) Significantly the very singular melodic line of Cheap
Imitation is reminiscent of the 1948 monody of Music for Marcel Duchamp and
A Dream, which shares with Cheap Imitation even the occasional intrusion of
‘harmony’ in the form of melody notes sounded and then sustained.
Even though Cheap Imitation may refer back to the style and purity of Cage’s
pre-chance music, it is in no way a nostalgic throwback to the earlier, highly
attractive modal symmetry. Interestingly, Cage has chosen to randomize that
parameter which is freest of the almost palpable rhythmic structure found in the
accompaniment to Socrate, namely the flowing vocal line (and the instrumental
top line when the voice is silent). (Cage, around 1960, came ‘to no longer feel the
need for musical structure. Its absence could, in fact, blur the distinction between
art and life. An individual can hear sounds as music (enjoy living) whether or not
he is at a concert’,126 and has renounced symmetry in favour of ‘interpenetrating
multiplicity’, and the multi-modal, multi-transpositional treatment of Cheap
Imitation is fully in tune with Cage’s musical experiences of the last 20 years.)
If the rhythmic plotting of Satie’s theatre and film music is closely related
to Cage’s own number manipulation, so the static, non-developmental style of
Satie’s music relates to another important aspect of Cage’s musical aesthetic.
Roger Shattuck points out that typical bars of Cinéma lend themselves to ‘infinite
repetition and do not establish any strong tonal feeling’: that is, sounds are treated
as separate objects in themselves, not as passing links in a musical continuity.127
For Cage, Satie’s empty time-structures bring about ‘a time that’s just time’, which
‘will let sounds be just sounds and if they are folk tunes, unresolved ninth chords,
or knives and forks, just folk tunes, unresolved ninth chords, or knives and forks’.128
Knives and forks were sounds instanced by Satie in a statement quoted by
Cage earlier in his Silence article, where he maintains that we should bring about
a music ‘which is like furniture – a music, that is, which will be part of the noises
of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious,
softening the noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing
itself.’ This ‘working in terms of totality, not just the discretely chosen convention’
again brings Satie and Cage close aesthetically.129 Yet their awareness of the
usefulness of environmental noise-sounds leads in opposite directions. For Satie,
furniture music would be ‘part of the noises of the environment’, whereas for Cage
the noises of the environment are part of his music; for Satie ‘it would fill up those
heavy silences that sometimes fall between friends dining together’, while for
Cage ambient noise filled those empty silences that regularly fell between the notes

126
Cage, M: Writings ’67–’72 (London: Calder and Boyars, 1973), p. 171.
127
Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France:
1885 to World War I (London: Faber, 1958), p. 134.
128
Cage, Silence, p. 81.
129
Ibid., p. 76.
230 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

of his music until about 1960. Furniture music was designed to be unassuming, not
drawing attention to itself.
This may in fact be ‘anti-art’ (depending on how you define art), since the
traditional attitude is to be interesting and dominating at all costs. No piece could
be more barren, undernourished and monotonous (on the surface) as Vexations – a
veritable Ring cycle totally devoid of any but accidental variation, the complete
antithesis of the climax-ridden bleeding-chunk music of the time (Patrick Gowers
has dated Vexations 1893 on stylistic evidence) where variety would appear to
guarantee the impossibility of boredom.130
Boredom is a double-edged sword. Satie wrote: ‘the public venerates boredom.
For boredom is mysterious and profound … The listener is defenceless against
boredom. Boredom subdues him.’131 Cage raises the question of boredom in a
recent Diary: ‘As we were walking along, she smiled and said. “You’re never
bored, are you?” (Boredom dropped when we dropped our interest in climaxes.
Socrate. Even at midnight we can tell the difference between two Chinamen).’132
Boredom is also a paradox: for most listeners, boredom began when climaxes
disappeared and lost most of their signposts.
In an essay entitled ‘Boredom and Danger’, Dick Higgins (a pupil of Cage
at the New School of Social Research at the time of the 1958 Satie article) drew
attention to the end of Satie’s Vieux sequins et vieilles cuirasses, where

an eight-beat passage evocative of old marches and patriotic songs is to be

repeated 380 times. In performance the satirical intent of this repetition comes
through very clearly, but at the same time other very interesting results begin to
appear. The music first becomes so familiar that it seems extremely offensive
and objectionable. But after that the mind slowly becomes incapable of taking
further offence, and a very strange, euphoric acceptance and enjoyment begins
to set in.133

He goes on to say that, if it can be said that Satie’s interest in boredom originated as
a kind of gesture – there is a certain bravura about asking a pianist to play the same
eight beats 380 times – and developed it into a fascinating aesthetic statement,
‘then it can be said with equal fairness that Cage was the first to try to emphasize
in his work and his teaching a dialectic between boredom and intensity’.134
Cage has never interested himself in such naked repetition, being ‘averse to all
these actions that lead toward placing emphasis on the things that happen in the

130
See Patrick Gowers, ‘Satie’s Rose Croix Music (1891–1895)’, Proceedings of the
Royal Musical Association, 92 (1965–66), pp. 1–25, p. 1.
131
Shattuck, The Banquet Years, p. 145.
132
Cage, M: Writings, p. 110.
133
Dick Higgins, Foew & ombwhnw, p. 97.
134
Ibid., p. 101.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 231

course of a process’;135 yet the ethical seriousness of performing Vexations is fully

in tune with the devotion that his own music demands. Cage set an invariable,
ritualistic ‘rhythmic structure’ for the Davis performance, which began at 5.40
one morning and was to go on till 12.40 the next morning. Each player had to play
for 20 minutes, and prepare himself for his stint by a 20-minute period of silent
contemplation sitting to the left of the currently-playing pianist. To fill the allotted
18 hours 40 minutes performers had to play 15 repetitions over 20 minutes, each
repetition being timed to last exactly 1’20’’. Although the processes involved in
making a version of any of Cage’s indeterminate pieces enable the performer to
choose any duration, whether two seconds or two days (the performance has to
fill the time available, as in the 1969 Vexations), it may have been the extremely
liberated attitude towards time expressed by Vexations that led Cage to have faith
in longer durations over the years. Although he maintains a lofty impartiality, he
did admit in 1966 that ‘I very much enjoy our current ability to listen to things for
a long time, and I notice this becoming a general practice in society’.136
Today Cage is concerned with society on a rather more fundamental level, as
it is mirrored in microcosm in the symphony orchestra. For in Cheap Imitation
nothing is left to chance (in performance, that is). A strict rehearsal schedule is
prescribed (for the first time in Cage’s music): for the first week all players must
familiarize themselves with the whole 30-minute melody, while during the second
week each player plays his part as specified. A special way of listening is required;
if any player is not up to scratch he is asked to leave, and if the quorum of 24
cannot be made up then the performance has to be cancelled (as was the first
performance in Amsterdam). But just as Cage claims he wants to improve the
world but is convinced that things will only be made worse, so he seems to be
aware of the unrealizability of his proposals.
Satie would have been flattered to know that through his music, the most
radical, ‘anarchistic’ composer of the century should be exercising his mind with
such problems. A wry smile spreads over his face …

‘Cage/Cardew’ (Tempo, 107, December 1973, pp. 32–8)

Sixty-nine pages of M are devoted to four yearly episodes of the Diary: How
To Improve The World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) begun in 1965 as a
‘mosaic of ideas, statements, words and stories’, and still going strong.137 Twenty

135
From an interview recorded for BBC’s Radio 3, London, December 1966; see
‘Cage with David Sylvester’, in Peter Dickinson (ed.) CageTalk: Dialogues with & about
Cage (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006), pp. 185–95, p. 191.
136
Ibid, p. 189.
137
Nyman’s review article covers the following publications and recordings:
John Cage, M: Writings; Cornelius Cardew (ed.) Scratch Music (London: Latimer New
Dimensions, 1972); Cage’s Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra (Yuji Takahashi
232 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

pages are devoted to Mureau, the text of a composition made up of a ‘mix of

letters, syllables, words, phrases and sentences’ resulting from subjecting all the
remarks that Thoreau made about music, silence, and sounds he heard to a series
of I-Ching chance operations. Also included is Solo 30 of the Song Books (Solos
for Voices 3–92), completed in 1970: an extended nature poem also derived from
Thoreau. Related in feeling – it is now evident that Cage’s strongest suit is his
nature writing – is the remarkably beautiful, sustained, ‘programmed’ Mushroom
Book, which includes mushroom stories, excerpts from (mushroom) books,
remarks about (mushroom) hunting, excerpts from Thoreau’s Journal, remarks
on the relationship between Art and Life, his current reading, cooking (shopping,
recipes), games, music mss., maps, friends, inventions, projects, writing without
syntax and mesostics (on mushroom names). The various sets of mesostics, which
occupy no less than one third of M, are the most ‘original’ offerings here (in that
they are a complete departure from his earlier work). A unique adaptation by Cage
of the acrostic, the mesostic runs the vertical word-row (the capitalized name of a
friend) down the middle, rather than the left edge, in such a way that ‘a given letter
capitalized does not occur between it and the preceding capitalized letter’.138 Most
mesostics are in the form of short haiku-like poems of some charm and dexterity,
as long as the forename, surname, or both, of the dedicatee.
In his writings Cage has constantly blurred the distinctions between words for
reading (to oneself) and (the same) words for performing (in front of an audience).
For instance, of the 23 writings contained in Silence, 11 are directly intended
for ‘performance’. Yet the inclusion of Mureau and 62 Mesostics re Merce
Cunningham (where syllables and words from Cunningham’s ‘Changes’ and other
sources become full-page graphic ‘explosions’ through syllable exchange and
setting in some 700 different Letraset type faces and sizes, subjected to chance
operations) disappointingly emphasizes M’s lack of real substance. For these are
performance pieces, of limited visual appeal, yet lacking the instructions that
would make performance possible. In 1968 Cage had written that his pleasure in
composition, renounced as it had been at the time in the field of music, continued
in the field of writing words. Mureau and 62 Mesostics extend this fascination with
words further than he could have visualized at the time, since they are contrasted
examples of Cage’s recent obsession with syntax, or rather lack of syntax. Cage
writes that, according to Norman O. Brown, ‘syntax is the arrangement of the
army. As we move away from it, we demilitarize language. This demilitarization
of language is conducted in many ways: a single language is pulverised, the

(piano), Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (cond. Lukas Foss), Nonesuch H-71202); Cage’s
HPSCHD (for harpsichords and computer-generated sound-tapes), Vischer, Bruce, Tudor
(harpsichords), Nonesuch H-71224); Cardew’s The Great Learning (Paragraphs 2 and 7),
The Scratch Orchestra, DGG 25 38 261).
138
Cage’s M: Writings, p. ix.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 233

boundaries between two or more languages are crossed; elements not strictly
linguistic (graphic, musical) are introduced.’139
Music may, if Cage wishes to define it so, have nothing to do with
communication; yet to conceive that one could hope to bring about a social
revolution by ‘demilitarizing’ language through the removal of its chief strength –
communicability – would seem merely fanciful were it not such a dangerous doctrine.

Cage evidently feels he is now doing for words what he did for sounds 20 years
ago. The Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra (not to be confused with
the more famous Concert for Piano and Orchestra of 1958) was, for Cage, a
crucial work in the development of the theory and practice of letting sounds be
just sounds. When writing it in 1951 Cage laid out his material on large charts.
Wondering how to get from square to square, he discovered the possibility of using
chance to make the decisions for him. This discovery was revolutionary:

Somehow I reached the conclusion that I could compose according to moves on

these charts instead of according to my own taste … Until that time, my music
had been based on the traditional idea that you had to say something. The charts
gave me my first indication of the possibility of saying nothing.140

Even if Cage had not provided us with the expressive ‘programme’ behind the
composition (the piano at first is allowed ‘to express the opinion that music should
be improvised or felt’, but by the end both piano and orchestra are based on the
same set of chart moves) our ears would tell us that the work is transitional. In
the earlier part of the Concerto the prepared piano echoes the style of Cage’s pre-
1950 music (interest in timbral variation, microtonal tunings between differently-
prepared strings of the same pitch, small-scale repetition) amidst the asymmetrical,
distinctly ‘modern’ sounds with which Cage replaced his earlier modal/melodic
symmetry (probably through contact with the young Boulez). By the end of the
Concerto the (for Cage) surprisingly dramatic orchestral sounds are found amidst
measured, timed silences, to be heard as the equivalents of the sounds, which
henceforth would have no musical, logical or moral priority over ‘no-sounds’.
By 1969, when he completed HPSCHD, Cage had long renounced silence
and was intent on filling the complete time/space once again – just as, having
brought noises into music, he could return to primarily musical sounds. The origin
of HPSCHD lies in the distinction Cage noticed between Bach’s and Mozart’s
handling of movement. In Bach he found fixity and unity, with uniform motion
in all parts; in Mozart he found scalar abundance and diversity – broken chord
figurations, diatonic and chromatic patterns all in the same small area. Extending
this principle beyond recognition, Cage wrote that he used to think of

139
Ibid., p. x.
140
In Calvin Tomkins, Ahead of the Game (London: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 103.
234 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

five as the most things we could perceive at once; but the way things are going
recently, it may be in a sense of quantity, rather than quality, that we have our
hope. When you use the word ‘chaos’, it means there is no chaos, because
everything is equally related – there is an extremely complex interpenetration of
an unknowable number of centres.141

HPSCHD takes unfocussed multi-layering to an unprecedented extreme (Cage

being ‘averse to all those actions that lead toward placing emphasis on things
that happen in the course of a process’).142 The starting point was Mozart’s Dice
Game, which – along with other related material – was subjected to a grandiose
mechanized I-Ching treatment with the aid of a computer. A performance may
consist of anything from one to seven harpsichord parts coupled with from one
to 51 tapes of similar processed sounds; it may last for any length of time, and
be combined with slides, film shows and other media in an orgy of what Richard
Kostelanetz has called ‘environmental abundance’.143
The recorded version uses only three live harpsichords and a composite of the
tapes. Cage tells us in M that, during the session when the tapes were combined,
eight at a time, a superimposition of 17 ‘sounded like chamber music’, of 34
‘sounded like orchestral music’, and ‘when we had 52 together it didn’t sound
like anything we’d ever heard before’.144 Having experienced a performance of
HPSCHD in the round, where live and tape sounds were diffused in a desultory
manner throughout the time/space, I find this recorded version presents the work
in its most effective (and palatable) form: as time (21 minutes, the length of each
tape), and space (a dense, concentrated, unrelenting mass of undifferentiated
multiple harpsichord sound which demands highly ‘focussed’ listening if anything
is to be perceived out of the jumble). The listener’s task, however, may be eased
slightly if he uses the enclosed computer printout KNOBS to ‘perform’ the record
according to instructions for increasing and decreasing loudness by operating the
volume control.

Having established to his own satisfaction that sounds can be just sounds, Cage,
in recent years, has turned his attention to allowing people to be just people, ‘not
subject, that is, to laws established by any one of them even if he is “the composer”
or “the conductor”’.145 He also envisages a music where one need no longer talk of

141
Kostelanetz’s ‘Environmental Abundance’, in Kostelanetz (ed.), John Cage, pp.
173–7, p. 175.
142
From an interview recorded for BBC’s Radio 3, London, December 1966; see
‘Cage and Satie’, Musical Times, 114 (December 1973), pp. 1227–9.
143
Kostelanetz, John Cage, p. 173.
144
Cage, M: Writings, p. 65.
145
Ibid., p. xiii.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 235

audience participation, for in it ‘the division between performers and audience no

longer exists: a music made by everyone’.146
Through his evident isolation as a composer, Cage is still taking the step towards
the socialization of music. For Cardew, these steps have already been taken: the
Scratch Orchestra, a successful experiment in such social music-making, lived and
died while Cage was still scratching his head.
Cage’s music, despite the supposed personal freedom it allows, is still confined
to a small elite of players. It takes a musically sophisticated mind to follow the
concepts behind his indeterminate pieces, just as it does to unravel and apply his
notations. Although Cardew’s compositions appear to demand the same skills and
qualities, he attempted progressively, from Octet 61, through Treatise, to Schooltime
Compositions of 1968, to devise notations accessible to a wider range of performers,
‘musical innocents’ not disadvantaged by a conventional musical education.
Cage’s current work with untrained musicians is conducted largely on the basis
of the visiting guest composer spreading his gospel among students for a few days
before moving on to another ‘star’ performance of one of his solo works. (In M
Cage writes that ‘Fame has advantages. Anything you do gets used. Society places
no obstacles. Also you become of some help to those who aren’t famous yet.’) 147
Cardew, on the other hand, sank his individuality into conceiving, founding
and, to some extent, shaping the Scratch Orchestra, adjusting his ‘composer’s
individuality’ to the varied needs and capabilities of a very mixed group of
musicians, many of them untrained. In fact it was from the group of musicians
assembled to perform Paragraph 2 of The Great Learning that the SO was formed.
Cardew’s Draft Constitution framed a number of musical, social, ethical and
educational categories that would mould the activities of the Scratch Orchestra,
modes of action and thought which would surely have been impossible without the
pioneering work of Cage but which take his views to the logical conclusion that he
seems incapable of realizing himself.
The category of Scratch Music was central to Cardew’s conception of the
orchestra, though perhaps to nobody else’s, since once it became established,
the orchestra developed of its own momentum according to the tastes, interests
and decisions of the individuals who made up this unique large-scale, regularly-
meeting, permanently-functioning if short-lived musical collective. Scratch
Music, excellently and courageously produced, is made up of four kinds of
material. There are 164 examples of Scratch Music itself, laid out randomly on
26 double-page spreads, each having from 0 to 16 separate notations. The random
method of selection of the items for each spread was chosen by Cardew for its
resemblance to the actual (or potential) situation in the Scratch Orchestra, where
each person came to a playing session prepared to play a certain piece of Scratch
Music without knowing what items the others would be playing. The sheer variety
of the modes of notation (graphic, musical, verbal, collage), not to speak of their

146
Ibid., p. xiii–xiv.
147
Ibid., p. 113.
236 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

content, perfectly demonstrates the freedom and richness of Cardew’s Scratch

Music ideal, by which members (16 of whose work is represented in this book)
were encouraged to keep a personal anthology of such notations in the manner of
a scrap book.
The second (and major) part of the book comprises detailed verbal descriptions
of the form and content of the illustrated examples, plus another five-hundred
or so arranged alphabetically and numerically by composer. The descriptions are
at times obsessively insistent, and not surprisingly are more intriguing than the
notations themselves. Cardew, who did most of the describing himself, is obviously
more fascinated than Cage apparently is by the power and precision of words. If
nothing else, this list makes a curiously compelling catalogue of a heterogeneous
collection of performable compositions, suggestions, perceptions, curios, photos,
cuttings, postcards, ads, diagrams, and sketches that evidently interested a group
of variously strong musical personalities (some of whom might never have created
anything had the orchestra not existed) during the period 1968–70.
While Scratch Music represents the most serious and dedicated side of the
orchestra’s personality, the third (and final) section of the book redresses the
balance with the 1001 Activities – a list of anarchic, irresponsible, irrepressible,
jokey, silly suggestions which clearly demonstrate that the Scratch Orchestra was
heir (in a mild, English way) to the extravagant post-Dada activities of the Fluxus
‘movement’ of the early 60s; carefree practitioners of Walter de Maria’s concept
of ‘meaningless work’.148
The first part of Scratch Music comprises the various definitions and re-
definitions of the role and character of Scratch Music that Cardew worked on
from June 1969 to January 1972, and thus demonstrates Cardew’s function as
theorist, as well as historian, file-clerk and publicist of the Scratch movement;
it also provides information on how the book was planned. A few extracts will
suffice to show how important Cardew felt Scratch Music to be:

a notebook in which he notates a number of accompaniments, performable

continuously for indefinite periods … your own personal, private document,
and as such anything at all can go in it … The aim of the Scratch books was
to establish concern and continuity. Scratch Music was proposed as a kind of
basic training for participation in the Scratch Orchestra … vessels that catch
ideas that would in the normal course of events be thrown away and forgotten …
Scratch Music is a method of uniting a group of people. Anybody can write and
play it, it can be used in education, at all levels. The superficially private and
individualistic quality of Scratch Music must be seen in perspective. It fosters

148
Walter de Maria, ‘Meaningless Work’, in La Monte Young (ed.) An Anthology
(New York: George Maciunas and Jackson Mac Low, 1963); see also Kristine Stiles and
Peter Howard Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1996), p. 526.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 237

communal activity, it breaks down the barrier between private and group activity,
between professional and amateur – it is a means to sharing experience.149

This concern for, and the role of, the individual within the musical collective found
its finest expression in the seven Paragraphs of The Great Learning (1968–71),
the first two of which were composed before the foundation of the Scratch
Orchestra. Paragraphs 2 and 7 are both ‘undifferentiated’ processes which might
on superficial hearing bear some resemblance to the ‘chaos’ of HPSCHD since the
musical space is filled with sounds of a single mode of quality and quantity. But a
brief comparison will reveal significant differences between Cage’s and Cardew’s
methods of allowing people to be people. While the performers in HPSCHD may
start and stop playing at liberty, what they play is to be performed as mechanically
as it was composed; whereas the notations devised by Cardew in Paragraphs 2 and 7
are examples of what I have called elsewhere ‘people processes’.150 These give
each performer (or group of performers, in Paragraph 2) the identical notation
and a set of rules which allows them to proceed through it, progressively, with
few restraints on personal or group independence and spontaneity – a unique
combination of freedom and restraint which largely accounts for the freshness and
vitality of these works.
In Paragraph 2 each group consists of one drummer and a number of singers.
The drummer strikes up with any of 26 notated rhythms he chooses, and repeats it
like a tape loop. The lead singer sings the first note of the first pentatonic pattern,
the other members of the group joining in when they have picked up the note
and holding it for a breath length. The lead singer, and then the group, sings the
next note, until the 4- or 5-note module is completed. The drummer then starts
on another rhythm and the same process is repeated. The pitch of the pentatonic
phrases rises progressively. Each of the seven or eight voice/drum groups
performs this process simultaneously and independently, their individual freedom
of movement guaranteeing permanent phasing and a highly individual brand of
‘interpenetrating multiplicity’.
With the presentation of HPSCHD, we are told, Cage went to great lengths
‘to insure that no order can be perceived’ – i.e., all measures to guarantee
incomprehensibility were taken. With Paragraph 2 attentive listening enables
one actually to follow the process (all credit to the recording engineers, who
have successfully preserved both the group autonomy, spatial sense of a live
performance, and the sound of the total mass): at first you hear the singers
somewhat tentatively picking up their notes, you identify the character of each
drum and the rhythm-changes, and eventually, perhaps, the character of each vocal
group as the pitch conflicts develop.
The ‘social’ contrast between the processes of Paragraphs 2 and 7 is interesting.
In Paragraph 2 the composite sound arises somewhat haphazardly, since there is

149
See Cardew, Scratch Music, pp. 13–16.
150
See Nyman, Experimental Music, p. 6.
238 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

no ‘agreement’ between the self-contained groups. Paragraph 7 moves forward

according to a process that demands the required comparative interdependence of
the singers, who are to sing mainly single words (taken from Confucius, as in the
whole of The Great Learning) a given number of times, on any pitch, again in their
own time. However, each successive pitch has to be selected from one that you hear
someone else singing. What results from this brilliantly simple form of notation
is a carefully-judged but unrestricted reducing-network, as the wide-spectrum of
pitches at the beginning narrows itself down, by the handing-on process, to a far
smaller number: this brings about an intense (but obviously fairly casually sung),
permanent, slowly-uncoiling, momentumless drone, which changes imperceptibly
as each individual vocal ‘entry’ is made.
Since the process does have an end – when all the voices come together in
unity – it seems strange that Cardew should have allowed the engineers to fade
the side out before unity is achieved. But that, perhaps, is a fitting epitaph to the
Scratch Orchestra. In the Introduction to Scratch Music, Cardew charts its decline
and fall as the internal contradictions within the orchestra grew sharper, and the
door was opened to criticism and self-criticism.151 (The absence of these forces
was perhaps the venture’s most serious shortcoming and one that can be directly
attributed to Cardew’s unwillingness to adopt a ‘star’ role and to give inexperienced
musicians the benefit of his own experience.) A ‘Discontent File’ was opened, and
at a discussion of the Discontent documents the orchestra’s contradictions were
exposed and the setting up of a Scratch Ideological Group proposed.

I and several others were glad to join this group, whose tasks were not only
to investigate possibilities for political music-making but also to study
revolutionary theory: Marx, Lenin, Mao Tsetung. Another aim was to build
up an organisational structure in the Scratch that would make it a genuinely
democratic orchestra and release it from the domination of my subtly autocratic,
supposedly anti-authoritarian leadership.152

The study of Marxist and Maoist thought has already produced demonstrable
changes in Cardew, as his current preoccupations with a ‘music for the people’,
direct political action, and denunciation of his musical past show. Mao’s ideas,
also, have now added an extra flavour to Cage’s highly eclectic thought; yet the
Diaries in M show that no real change has been – or perhaps ever will be – brought
about by them. For Cage, Mao is merely the latest thinker to be added to the
already distinguished list of his mentors, that runs from Cowell and Schoenberg,
through Suzuki, to McLuhan and Thoreau. Cage admits as much in the Foreword
to M: having been impressed by his reading of some of the works of Mao, he then
set about compromising their completely political motivation by attempting to find
a common denominator between Mao’s ideas and the a-political prescriptions of

151
Cardew, Scratch Music, pp. 9–12.
152
Ibid., p. 12.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 239

Buckminster Fuller. When he came across ‘seemingly irreconcilable differences

between the two’ he decided to listen to both.
This perversion of Mao’s political directives finds its clearest expression in
the Mushroom Book, where Cage equates mass revolutionary formulae with his
own individualistic concepts. Thus Mao’s ‘Fight self (Self-interest)’ is equated
with Duchamp and Zen; ‘Serve the People’ with Buckminster Fuller; ‘Fight Profit
Motive’, with Thoreau; ‘consumer economy, technique in command’ with anarchy.
This ‘translation’ is fully in accord with the proposals for social ‘reform’ that Cage
first laid out in A Year from Monday. As a whole, the new Diaries contain much the
same mixture as before, with rather less emphasis on such fashionable deviations
as electronic extensions of the nervous system and global communications
networks, and rather more on the more acceptable topics of the education of the
individual (‘College: two hundred people reading same book. An obvious mistake.
Two hundred people can read two hundred books’)153 and ecology (‘Kill two birds
with one stone. Stop using oil and coal. We’ll keep them there in the earth against
a rainy day. Large cause of air-pollution’ll be eliminated. We’ll use energies above
ground – sun, wind, tides. Air’ll automatically become what it was: something
good to breathe’).154 However, Cage’s attitude toward noise pollution seems rather
less enlightened: waiting at a Japanese airport a ‘jet with engines going drove
near to us. (Rare opportunity.) Was surprised to see people putting fingers in
their ears.’155
For Cage, ‘art’s self-alteration’. So, finally, is social change, as two Diary
entries – one humorous, the other presumably serious – show: ‘Been robbed so
often he’s losing his sense of property’. ‘The price-system and government that
enforces it are on the way out. They’re going out the way a fire does. Protest actions
fan the flames of a dying fire. Protest helps to keep the government going.’156 What
we are to do, in the meantime, is not clear; perhaps sit around demilitarizing our
languages till the capitalist system has withered away.

‘The Experimental Scene’ (Music and Musicians, 22, January 1974, pp. 14–16)

Since I last wrote in these pages about the state of experimental music in
England – to celebrate Music Now’s ‘Young English Composers’ gathering some
two years ago – things appear to have disintegrated.157 The feeling of (real or
assumed) communal endeavour has disappeared as activity has either dried up
or become isolated, while the Scratch Orchestra (which was the focus of a lot of

153
Cage, M: Writings, p. 61.
154
Ibid., p. 12.
155
Ibid., p. 118.
156
Ibid., pp. 10–12.
157
‘Believe it or not melody rides again’, Music and Musicians, 20 (October 1971),
pp. 26–8.
240 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

work, even that which reacted against it) has moved through an agony of self­-
recrimination into nothingness and Maoism. The banquet years of 1968–72 are
at an end. Continuity has been preserved, however, partly through the work of
the Hobbs–White percussion duo, which arose out of the ashes of the four‑man
PT [Promenade Theatre] Orchestra and performs frequently in small art‑gallery
situations. Christopher Hobbs and John White have joined forces with two other
‘survivors’, Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton, to perform their own (not each
other’s significantly) music at the Purcell Room on Saturday 5 January [1974].
What, if anything, has changed in the interim? There is certainly a detectable
hardening of attitude, a greater seriousness, as the more notorious excesses of the
Scratch phenomenon recede further into the distance of memory, and musicians
realise (once again) that they are, and can function as, musicians. With Hobbs–
White one notes an increase of professionalism in performance, resulting partly
from their regular work as session musicians and partly from a rejection of
the tendency with the PTO to shrug off mistakes and disasters with that casual
acceptance of the inevitable that experimental music has sometimes fostered. And
further evidence that experimental music is breaking out of the ghetto that it has
built for itself (or been forced to occupy) is furnished by Skempton’s willingness
to launch his piano pieces on a wider public through the agency of Faber Music.158
Yet the experimental attitude remains constant, whether in an anarchic context
(with the Scratch one was concerned with establishing restraints and controls in an
otherwise free situation; without these restraints freedom was meaningless) or with
today’s highly disciplined music and severely limited structures. The permutation
systems that Hobbs and White use exclusively in their percussion music are, of
course, the late (and perhaps the most rigorous) addition to the fund of techniques
devised by experimental composers as a means of distancing themselves from
their material.
Like any other method systems are practical rather than doctrinal, since,
as John White has said, if taste, intuition and personal choice were to be relied
on for composing percussion music, the result would be bad (or even good)
Latin American. Systems are a means of unlocking the sounds of the small
percussion instruments the duo uses (drums, bells, blocks and cymbals), number
manipulations allowing the characteristic resonance of the instruments to ring out,
unhampered by any conscious attempt to use them ‘effectively’. A cymbal crash
(to cite an obvious example) may, however, sound just as ‘dramatic’ as it does in
conventional or avant-garde music, but it does so without having any function in
a dramatic scenario that the composer uses sounds to enact. However, the number
and variety of the instruments, the complexity of the system, also guarantee that
the listener hears these pieces not as musical systems but as systems music, in
which system, like any other technique, is but a means to an end.

158
Howard Skempton, Piano Pieces (London: Faber Music, 1974). One of
Skempton’s piano pieces included in this collection, ‘One for Molly’, was written on the
occasion of Nyman’s first daughter’s first birthday.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 241

The systems expressed by Michael Parsons’ Rhythmic Studies 2 and 4 are

distinctly palpable, since two hands at one keyboard are far less able to cover the
traces of the method, and Parsons is keen that the listener does follow the process
while it is proceeding. Rhythmic Studies 4, for instance, is based on a syncopated
ragtime type of figuration heard over a regular left‑hand beat. The process that
Parsons uses superimposes a series of rhythmic patterns of increasing lengths
over the basic figure in such a way as to block out some notes of the original
pattern, revealing new melodic shapes with the remaining notes. ‘The original
figure appears once, each successive alteration is directly and, it is hoped, audibly
related to the previous one’, says Parsons.159
Systems music brings with it an inevitable rigour, which allows for charm,
even burnout and humanity, and a degree of temporal extension needed to work
the system through fully. Howard Skempton’s music (still) concerns itself with
the smallest scale possible – tiny concentrated piano pieces, severe, attractive,
solid and penetrating. Although they do not make a ‘big’ statement, they are
highly aggressive in an agreeable way since they concentrate on this tiny area
long enough for the listener to feel their gentle insistence. This persistence comes
from a moral commitment which Skempton admits that he owes to the work and
example of Cardew. When I wrote about Skempton’s music in 1971 I quoted the
following statement he had written about his music: ‘The composer is concerned
with communication of the form, and with sound as the most powerful means
of communicating the form. The form is the single idea motivating the piece.’160
To this he has now added a fourth condition: ‘The purpose of music is to inspire
confidence.’ This is evidence that Skempton and, I feel, many other experimental
composers are now becom­ing more concerned with the effect and purpose of their
music; that previously the concern was with what the music is doing, whereas now
composers are beginning to ask the question as to why the music is doing what it is.
Skempton’s music is not systems‑based, but intuition is kept strongly in check
by the discipline which form exerts over content. However, in the new piano music
by Hobbs and White to be given their first public airing at this recital the wraps
are off and intuition is given its full head. Such an empirical approach is as suited
to the resonance of the piano as systems are to percussion (interestingly systems
tend to emphasise the percussive aspect of the piano). Here taste reasserts itself as
the prime mover. Hobbs and White both share a fondness for the piano music of
an arcane and genial nature by such ‘dark horses’ as Alkan, Busoni, Medtner and
Poulenc, among others.
White began his remarkable series of piano sonatas in 1956, has continued
writing them regularly since, has now reached the eighties, and turns out a new
one every five days or so. Their style has been modified by his experience as a

159
See Parsons’s Rhythm Studies I & II for two pianos (1970) and Rhythm Studies 3
& 4 for solo piano (1973).
160
‘Believe it or not melody rides again’, pp. 26–8.
242 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

composer, but not radically changed. Systems, for instance, like indeterminate
music, have sharpened his observation of the compositional process.
These piano pieces by Hobbs and White are not in any way sentimental
throwbacks, pastiche or satire, being akin to the revival of figurative painting.
Traditional techniques, White feels, are now up for review. This piano music
reveals a consciousness of, and enthusiasm for, a ‘dead’ language, expressed in
somewhat compressed, formalised terms. What effect, one wonders, does the
experience of ten years of experimental music have on the way two composers
write traditional music?

‘Experimental Music and the American Vernacular Tradition’ (in the First
American Music Conference (Keele University, 1975), pp. 149–52)161

I should perhaps explain at the outset – (I almost said apologize) – that this
talk, like the music of Anthony Philip Heinrich (1718–1861), for which it is an
elaborate introduction, is intentionally designed as a ramble through history and
covers a large area extensively, rather than a small one intensively, if only to
counteract the tendency of this conference to give the impression that American
music didn’t exist before Ives. That ‘American’ should seem synonymous with
‘modern’ or new (Ives and Varèse being moderns in the way that Schoenberg
isn’t) is understandable, and there are two main reasons for this: the first that
the recent rediscovery by Americans of their own musical past is pretty slow in
filtering through to this country; and secondly, and more importantly, for the first
time in its history, it is only now possible to take American music seriously as an
independent phenomenon. By ‘new music’ I mean, of course, experimental music
(the Cage tradition of non-developmental music), which is the first American
music to be neither influenced by, nor imitative of, European models in any way.
Even those people who consider that Satie, Varèse and Ives are somehow ‘inferior’
because they couldn’t quite cope with the apparatus of European symphonic music
(Mussorgsky had similar problems) surely could not fail to recognize that with
experimental music we are dealing with something conceptually, technically,
philosophically and even socially separate from the avant-garde, which is a
continuation and extension of the European tradition.
The boot is now on the other foot in fact: American composers no longer have to
go to Europe to learn their trade (someone else’s trade in effect). Instead European
composers now go to the States to pillage what they see only as new compositional

161
Nyman’s article was first given as a paper presentation at the First American Music
Conference, held at Keele University on 18–21 April 1975. Organized and introduced by
Peter Dickinson, the proceedings of the conference were published in a volume which also
contained an interview with Aaron Copland, and contributions by David Harold Cox, Paul
Griffiths, Robert P. Morgan, Keith Potter, Karl Aage Rasmussen, Tim Souster, Jane Waugh,
Arnold Whittall and David Wooldridge.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 243

techniques and gambits, being apparently unable or unwilling to understand the

different musical philosophy which brought these techniques into being.
The reverse of this was the situation in the past, and what the hymnodist
Thomas Hastings wrote in l822, about one of the earliest phases of ‘cultivated’
American concert music, still carries some weight. He wrote:

We are [the] decided admirers of German music. We delight to study and [to]
listen to it. The science, genius, the taste, that everywhere pervade it, are truly
captivating to those who have learned to appreciate it: but such, we presume, are
not yet the majority of American or English auditors or executants.162

Charles Ives, forcibly fed on a diet of German academicism by Horatio Parker,

was the first American composer to have the courage, originality, vision, strength,
call it what you will, to discard the European symphonic tradition, or at least as
much of it as he found useless for his purposes. But it was more than a question
of mere creative originality. It was his background that gave him this strength,
which enabled him to reject or adapt the current models – a background in the
experimental and vernacular provided by his father, George Ives.
Though it wasn’t plain sailing, as he pointed out in his Memos – proprieties
were constantly being offended:

Some nice people, whenever they hear the words ‘Gospel Hymns’ or ‘Stephen
Foster’, say ‘Mercy me!’, and a little highbrow smile creeps over their brow:
‘Can’t you get something better than that in a symphony?’ These same nice
people, when they go to a properly dressed symphony concert under proper
auspices, led by a name with foreign hair, and hear Dvorak’s New World
Symphony, in which they are told this famous passage was from a negro spiritual,
then think that it must be quite proper, even artistic, and say ‘How delightful!’
But when someone proves to them that the Gospel Hymns are fundamentally
responsible for the negro spirituals, they say ‘Ain’t it awful!’ – ‘You don’t really
mean that!’ – ‘Why, only to think!’ – ‘Do tell!’ – I tell you, you don’t ever hear
Gospel Hymns even mentioned up there in the New England Conservatory.163

What is interesting about the first two ‘generations’ of experimental music – the
Cage/Feldman axis and the Young/Reich axis – is that their music is independent
of both the European tradition and the American vernacular. Of course, some of
today’s experimental composers did have initial contact with European techniques,
but they invariably found them, or themselves, wanting. Cage’s studies with
Schoenberg, his lack of feeling for harmony, and his consequent substitution of

162
Thomas Hastings, Dissertation on Musical Taste (Albany: Websters and Skinner,
1822), p. 194; see H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction
(New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 54.
163
Ives, Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 52.
244 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

rhythmic structures for serial and pitch structures, are well known. But La Monte
Young’s case is somewhat different. He, too, started out with serialism in the 1950s,
but chose neither to reject nor adapt but to focus so closely and obsessively on
one particular parameter – that of duration and its extension beyond any previous
known limits, so as to totally destroy any vestige of the original serial models.
For a number of years now sustained tones and drones have become almost the
sole constituent of Young’s music: and, incidentally, this practice of discarding
everything except a central preoccupation (which Young shares with Reich, Riley
and Glass), is a thoroughly American trait – and something that a died-in-the-wool
European like Stockhausen finds himself unable to emulate – as one can see by
comparing Stimmung, for example, with the music it was modelled on, Young’s
The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys.
The drones and chants of Young’s music, the rigorous need for acuteness
of intonation, are of course, indebted to Indian music practice and theory. In
fact, American experimental composers, having rejected both European and
the American vernacular, have turned instead towards non-Western musics and
philosophies. The repetitive systems of Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve
Reich all relate to the use of more or less unvarying constants in various non-
Western musics: specifically Glass’ additive techniques result from his study
of Indian rhythmic structures, while Reich has acknowledged his interest in
Balinese gamelan and African drumming, even though the ultimate source of
characteristic Reich processes lies, so he says, in the properties of tape recorders
rather than in a Balinese band session. Cage, too, in his early percussion and
prepared piano music, was influenced by Henry Cowell’s studies of oriental
music in the 1930s (though it is only in his recent book, M, that he admits this
influence openly),164 and since he claims that Zen is at the basis of all his music
since around 1950, one could fairly say that Cage originated the Eastward trend
of experimental music. (Though appearances can be deceptive: Feldman’s
music, passive and static, appears to be highly oriental, yet he claimed once that
his sole debt to oriental culture is Chinese food – but perhaps that’s all part of
the myth-making process that certain composers find necessary to indulge in to
build an acceptable creative image.)
Now obviously the question of the orientalisation which has influenced
American culture, not only in experimental music, would repay further study, and
I’m not qualified enough (nor is there time) to go into it further here, except to
append Cage’s own analysis of the situation. He wrote in 1959:

Actually, America has an intellectual climate suitable for radical experimentation.

We are, as Gertrude Stein said, the oldest country of the twentieth century. And I
like to add: in our air way of knowing newness. Buckminster Fuller, the dymaxion
architect, in his three-hour lecture on the history of civilization, explains

164
For Nyman’s review of Cage’s M: Writings, see ‘Cage/Cardew’, Tempo, 107
(December 1973).
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 245

that men leaving Asia to go to Europe went against the wind and developed
machines, ideas, and Occidental philosophies in accord with a struggle against
nature; that, on the other hand, men leaving Asia to go to America went with
the wind, put up a sail, and developed ideas and Oriental philosophies in accord
with the acceptance of nature. These two tendencies met in America, the past,
traditions, or whatever. Once in Amsterdam, a Dutch musician said to me, ‘It
must be very difficult for you in America to write music, for you are so far away
from the centres of tradition.’ I had to say, ‘It must be very difficult for you in
Europe to write music, for you are so close to the centres of tradition.’165

Surprisingly, for the master of the all-embracing collage (and I mean that,
theoretically, at least, he accepts any or all sounds), Cage has not only shown no
interest in the American vernacular, but has actively discouraged its use. After all,
his fundamental and highly personalised objection to Ives hinges on the referential
nature of the material which Ives chose to use in his music – sounds from the
American vernacular. Cage’s views are familiar from A Year from Monday, but he
gave a slightly more explicit twist to them in a recent review:

What interests me are not the Americana aspects, the tunes and all that, but what
I call the mud, the complexity of many things going on at once, in which I am
not able to know where I am, or what’s happening. Invariably in this mystery,
something begins to happen to my mind, to change it, because of what I’m
hearing. But in my experience, that change of my mind is interrupted by the
emergency from the mud of some well-known tune, generally some Protestant
church tune, and I find myself in a place familiar to others, but carefully avoided
by me, in the land so to speak of melodies and accompaniments or, I suppose
Ives would prefer it if he’s listening, if I would say melodies and precedents.166

For Cage, then, Ives was too local, not global enough. But despite the Universe
Symphony, which is cosmic rather than global, there was no reason for Ives’ music
to be global, since it is firmly rooted in a specific time and place – Ives’ own
childhood, or, better perhaps, his father’s adulthood. In fact, apart from ragtime,
the vernacular and popular elements that Ives used were already out of fashion
when he used them (not that it mattered: There were no audiences ­to identify with
tunes that they’d probably forgotten anyway!). This, of course, is a totally different
order of nostalgia from that of the new generation of experimental composers in
England, to a lesser extent in America, who use popular material which they did
not experience when it was originally popular. (I’m referring to the revival of

165
Cage, ‘History of Experimental Music in the United States’, in Silence, p. 73.
166
Cage’s original reference to the ‘mud’ in Ives’s music comes from his ‘Two
Statements on Ives’, in A Year From Monday, p. 42, but the source of the above quotation
is uncertain. Cage also expands on this theme in an interview with Joel Suben in 1983, see
Kostelanetz (ed.) Conversing with Cage (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 42.
246 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Ketèlbey in England around 1970, and the current use, by the Majorca Orchestra,
of arrangements of music by such Victorian and Edwardian masters of the salon as
Ezra Read, Hugh Clifford and Crawshaw Crabtree.167) And in any case, as far as
globality was concerned, one need only repeat of Ives what he himself wrote about
Thoreau: ‘What he said upon being shown a specimen grass from Iceland – that
the same species could be found in Concord – is evidence of his universality, not
of his parochialism. He was so universal that he did not need to travel around the
world to prove it.’168
David Wooldridge has pointed out that Ives was almost certainly unable to
hear this vernacular material in its literal state (and self-evidently the selection
of the material itself was less random and impersonal than Cage would like).
Wooldridge remarks that ‘[his] ear was preconditioned to hear these tunes with all
their attendant overtones, all the remembered and half-remembered associations
they had held for all the people who ever listened to them’.169
What then of the responses of an audience to a mixture of the popular/cultivated
when the vernacular elements were still current, still charged with emotion, when
associations were in the process of being formed, when they listened to a piece like
Gottschalk’s Union, Grande Paraphrase de Concert? It was written in 1862 and
performed on many occasions during the Civil War. One projected performance in
Baltimore in May 1862 is particularly noteworthy:

There was a riot yesterday in Baltimore. The people wanted to hang a man who
expressed secessionist sentiments. An imposing police forge guards the streets. A
bad business for me, who ought to give a concert there in two days. I understand
very well how to fill the hall, but it is dangerous. It would be to announce that
I would play my piece called The Union and my variations on ‘Dixie’s Land’.
In the first I intercalate ‘Yankee Doodle’ and ‘Hail Columbia’. The second is a
Southern Negro air of which the Confederates since the beginning of the war,
have made a national air. It is to the music of ‘Dixie’s land’ that Beauregard’s
troops invariably charge the soldiers of the North. At the point at which men’s
minds are now the hall would be full of partisans of both sections, who certainly
would come to blows. But I should make three or four thousand dollars. It is true
that in the tumult I might be the first one choked.170

167
Nyman’s interest in early twentieth-century English salon music and ragtime
furnished the material for his first non-experimental film soundtrack, Keep it up Downstairs
(1976).
168
Ives, Essays before a Sonata, and other writings (New York: Norton, 1962), p. 53.
169
David Wooldridge, From the Steeples to the Mountains: A Study of Charles Ives
(New York: Knopf, 1974), p. 17–18.
170
Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Notes of a Pianist, ed. Jeanne Behrend (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 66.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 247

Understandably he didn’t give it at Baltimore, but did play it in Philadelphia.

He commented after the performance: ‘I have played The Union. Unheard-of
enthusiasm. Circumstances gave it a real interest, which has been the pretext for
a noisy and patriotic demonstration by the audience. Recalls, encores, hurrahs,
etc.!’171 He closes the account by remarking that ‘[if] I had played it in Baltimore
at this time, when the excitement is at its height, I probably would have been
knocked down’.172
Thirty years earlier one finds a totally different audience clamouring for
Yankee Doodle, the most frequently encountered symbol of America’s musical
nationhood: ‘At the Bowery Theatre in New York City in 1833, for example,
patrons displeased with the overture, demanded Yankee Doodle instead. When
they prevailed, they “evinced their satisfaction by a gentle roar”’.173 Such a
reaction testifies to the obvious popularity of the tune. What price then a piece
of definitely ‘cultivated’ music written at roughly the same time? Anthony Philip
Heinrich’s The Minstrel’s Entertainment with his Blind Pupil, or a Divertimento
for 4 hands on the Grand Piano Forte is the fifth number of a collection of 28
very miscellaneous pieces gathered together in a volume entitled The Sylviad,
published before 1830.
The Divertimento is a chain of highly idiosyncratic waltzes, which succeed
each other with no regard for the tonal, thematic or structural logic of contemporary
European models. Now anyone with a taste for musical symbolism might view
this piece as representing the triumph of America over Europe: the light at the
end of a long struggle through a tunnel of waltzes of an admittedly eccentric
kind. This would be a fanciful interpretation since Heinrich introduced Yankee
Doodle (and Hail Columbia) seemingly into the majority of his pieces. There is
an astonishing piece for chamber ensemble entitled The Yankee Doodleiad and
a ‘Grand American national chivalrous symphony’ entitled The Columbiad, for
instance – and he did in fact actually write a piece which follows the programme
I have outlined. This is his Festive Overture The Wildwood Troubadour, a musical
autobiography, subtitled The Dawning of Musical Inspiration in the Log-House
of Kentucky. The first three movements represent, according to the composer,
‘The Genius of Harmony slumbering in the forest shades of America’ while the
last is headed ‘The harmonic studies of her votary are encouraged by the stirring
melodies of Nature, his “Alma Mater”.’
The log-house in Kentucky was Heinrich’s conservatoire. Here he taught
himself to compose, in his late 30s, after his financial empire had collapsed
around him – he was internationally known as businessman and banker before
the financial crash in Austria in 1811. His Opus 1 was entitled The Dawning of

171
Ibid.
172
Ibid., p. 67.
173
Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 11.
248 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Music in Kentucky or the Pleasures of Harmony in the solitudes of Nature, and he

introduces it, and himself, to the world as follows:

The many and severe animadversions, so long and repeatedly cast on the talent
for music in this country, has been one of the chief motives of the author, in the
exercise of his abilities, and should he be able, by this effort, to create but one
single Star in the West, no one would ever be more proud than himself, to be
called an American Musician.174

But Heinrich may have been slightly ambivalent as to whether he was an American
or a European composer. His Sylviad was, quite extraordinarily, dedicated to the
Royal Academy of Music, no less and his dedication begins: ‘A Minstrel, whose
career opened, not in splendid orchestras nor the courts of Apollo, but in the very
loghouses of North America, presents himself, with his frank address, to your
illustrious Association.’175 He continues, ‘A.P.H. first drew his breath in Europe,
and it is natural that he should there invite the Muses to some acquaintance with
a native of their soil.’176 He was probably trying to have the best of both worlds,
though what the pillars of the English musical establishment made of Heinrich’s
music one can only guess – a music full, as once said, ‘of strange ideal somersets
and capriccios. Still, I hope there may be some method discoverable, some beauty,
whether of regular or irregular features.’177
Quite deliberately I’ve left myself with no time either to adequately describe
or assess so complex a figure as Heinrich. But I would briefly like to explain my
reasons for claiming Heinrich as an American, rather than expatriate European,
composer, and a pre-experimental composer at that (in my assessment Ives, Varèse
and Satie are all ‘pre-experimental’). The distinguished American musical scholar,
Irving Lowens, who not so long ago made the astonishing statement that ‘The music
of worse composers than that of Father Heinrich … is heard today, but perhaps it is
just as well that his remains unheard’178 also wrote that only the title of Heinrich’s
Opus 1, The Dawning of Music in Kentucky ‘did not speak with a strong Bohemian
accent’, implying that this was not American music. I prefer to agree with an
anonymous Bohemian reviewer who, in 1860, the last year of Heinrich’s life, wrote
of ‘a personality like this, so absolutely untouched by any fundamental art culture

174
See Gilbert Chase, America’s Music, from the Pilgrims to the Present (Illinois:
University of Illinois Press, [1955] 1987) p. 270.
175
The Sylviad: Or, Minstrelsy of Nature in the Wilds of North America, Opus 3
(Louisiana: Conners Publications, 1996).
176
Ibid.
177
Quoted from a letter by Lydia Maria Child published in The Tribune on 5 May 1846.
178
Irving Lowens, ‘The Triumph of Anthony Philip Heinrich’, Musicology, 1 (1947)
pp. 365–73, p. 373.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 249

such as is obtained through the study of theory and musical literature, but forced
to rely solely upon its own exceedingly sensitive and innately expressive spirit’.179
Now I don’t know too much of Heinrich’s music yet, but it seems to me
that The Four-Pawed Kitten Dance is to the rest of Heinrich’s vast output, what
Cage’s 4’33” is to his, and La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 No. 7 (hold the
notes B, F for a long time) to his – the expression of a creative principle in its
simplest, most reduced form. Because what is obvious about The Four-Pawed
Kitten Dance is that, whatever its programmatic derivation, it is totally non-
developmental. For not only does the two-bar, tonic-dominant ostinato mean that
no harmonic development is possible, but the right hand part is also in no way
developmental – no eight-bar unit varies, develops or grows out of any previous
module. And on a larger, more varied scale, the Divertimento is built on the same
principles, rather like Satie’s music, for though the harmonic progressions within
each waltz section may be logical enough, even conventional, the juxtaposition
of sections is apparently random. There is no discernable logic in either the
thematic or the tonal juxtapositions. Things, again as in Satie, are laid side-by-
side following each other without preparation, or expectation.
The coda to the waltz Divertimento is an obvious case in point: there is an
elaborate build up to something grand – or so we expect. But instead a jaunty E
major tune – in 2/4; then Yankee Doodle, first in E, then ‘varied’ in the bass in C,
a sudden shift to C minor with a mock funeral march, ending with a sequence of
chromatic chords whose expected final cadence in D minor is replaced by one into
D@ major. No progress, no climax, no discernable logic, no development, growth
by accumulation, succession rather than progression – this all begins to sound
dangerously like experimental music …

179
Joseph Leopold Zvonar, quoted in John Tasker Howard, Our American Music,
three hundred years of it (New York: Crowell, 1954), p. 235. The date given by Howard for
Zvonar’s review is 3 May 1857.
250 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

‘Gavin Bryars 1971 Michael Nyman 1975’ (in Soundings 9, June 1975)
Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 251
252 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings
Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 253
254 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 255

‘Music’ (Studio International, 191, January/February 1976, pp. 64–5) [Glass]

Quite by chance it has turned out to be a propitious time to begin this column, as
experimental music shakes off its customary lethargy and coyness to advertise itself
with two important events. The first is of somewhat passing significance, since it
is unlikely to stimulate anything in particular (even though it does make us aware
of the way in which American so-called minimal music has begun to fatten itself
up of late), while the second marks the opening of what may hopefully become
a permanent showcase for experimental and other commercially undernourished
music in this country.
On 23 November [1975] Philip Glass closed his first English tour with five
sections from his grandiose Music in Twelve Parts, which has occupied him as
composer, performer and promoter since his last concerts here (unadvertised
performances at Wimbledon Art College and the RCA) in 1971.180 And in early
December Brian Eno’s ‘Obscure’ label was launched by Island Records, with four
discs covering the mainstream of experimental music – Gavin Bryars’s Jesus’s
Blood Never Failed Me Yet and The Sinking of the Titanic and ensemble music by
John White and Christopher Hobbs – and its peripheries, in the shape of a non-
rock album by Eno and music for invented, found and rediscovered instruments
by Max Eastley and David Toop. I will review in the next issue of Studio these and
any other records that may have appeared by late January.181
In order to give this column a sort of hazy manifesto to delimit part of the area
I shall cover in future, I shall initially try to set Philip Glass’s music in the wider
context of experimental music in general. This partly stems from a discussion of
the Glass concert I had with my class of art students at Trent Polytechnic, who
took me to task for attempting to perpetuate the distinction I made in my book on
Experimental Music between avant-garde and experimental music. The differences
may have been important 10 or 15 years ago, they maintained, but they now smack
of sophistry, since Music in Twelve Parts, for instance, shows that such divisions
are blurred, if not imaginary. (Stockhausen was inevitably trotted out to support
this view, but in this context he has done little more than heed the motto of the
Kensington Rotary Club: adopt, adapt, improve – the typical European response
to experimental innovation.)
If the evidence of one’s own ears was not sufficient proof of the connection
between say Cage and Glass (no matter how contradictory their methods and
materials appear to be), one need only compare the two following quotations, one
by Glass, the other by Christian Wolff (a younger associate of Cage’s from the
New York ‘School’ days in the early fifties):

180
The concerts at Wimbledon College of Art and Royal College of Art took place on
8 and 10 March 1971 respectively; see Potter, Four Musical Minimalists, p. 286.
181
See Nyman’s report in Studio International (March/April 1976).
256 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

The question in my mind was: why is it that the sense of time is so different in
this music? First of all, the thing that you notice is that it has no narrative content
as we know it, it has no melody that comes and goes and develops, so that there
is no story of any kind in the music, there’s no development in that sense. I think
that in that sense you can say that we have done away with traditional music that
has been very close to real time, to clock time. Because the music doesn’t mimic
or imitate life in that literal way, it has to do with a different time experience.
It doesn’t have to do with a series of events that are connected to each other by
any kind of dramatic structure. It has to do with an experience that has almost
no events structure at all. I mean, the rate of change is very slow. When we talk
about Music with Changing Parts, each figure is repeated for 45 to 50 seconds so
that in the course of five minutes not much has happened. It’s only over a period
of an hour and ten minutes that you get the feeling, that you begin to sense a real
shift in the music.182

Complexity tends to reach a point of neutralization; continuous change results

in a certain sameness. The music has a static character. It goes in no particular
direction. There is no necessary concern with time as a measure of distance
from a point in the past to a point in the future, with linear continuity alone.
It is not a question of getting anywhere, of making progress, of having come
from anywhere in particular, of tradition or futurism. There is neither nostalgia
nor anticipation.183

(Wolff was writing of music as different from Glass’s as anything imaginable, in

1958.)
Since Glass’s music does not set out to provide a dramatic structure (as
Stockhausen would) there are no stunning ‘effects’ which set the listener on
the road that the composer wants him to travel. Experimental pieces may in
themselves be stunning as a single overall image (Bryars’s Jesus’s Blood in a quiet
way, Part 2 of Music in Twelve Parts more noisily). The changes that you do
perceive in Glass’s music appear to be effects in the traditional sense until you
realise that such shifts are merely a means of moving the music onwards: ‘once
I’m into a section there is no such change for 20 minutes. So what happens really,

182
Glass, ‘Interview by Raymond Gervais and Robert Lepage’, Parachute (October–
December, 1975), pp. 32–4, p. 34. Glass reiterates the same idea in the following statement:
‘This music is not characterised by argument and development. It has disposed of traditional
concepts that were closely linked to real time, to clock-time’ (quoted in Wim Mertens,
American Minimal Music, p. 88).
183
Originally published as ‘Immobility in Motion: new and electronic music’, in
Audience 5/3 (Summer 1958); see also Christian Wolff Cues: Writings and Conversations
(Cologne: Edition MusikText, 1998), p. 36.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 257

rhythmically or melodically, has only to do with the notes that are introduced at
that moment of change.’184
Process and system are the names of the game, and led two of my students,
sturdy sculptors both (who hadn’t been at the concert) to ask why, amidst our
attempts at structural analysis, nobody had thought fit to mention emotion. Well
you couldn’t, since Glass’s music has become a primarily and directly sonic
experience which at its best – in Part 2 for instance – forced you to listen by
its sheer brilliance, not only through its high level of amplification, but from
Glass’s choice of instrumentation, pitch combinations and, especially, the range
and placement of the melodic superstructure. These levels are important where
all the instruments were playing rising and falling figures at or near the top of
their registers to produce a truly exciting psycho-acoustic tintinabulation, which
soon became the subject of the music no matter what was going on underneath to
produce these effects.
These are what Steve Reich termed psycho-acoustic bi-products of a given
process, and they can be allowed for but not precisely calculated since they are
often dependent on the acoustics of the space in which they are heard.185 I felt
cheated that nothing comparable cropped up in any of the other four sections,
mainly as a result of Glass’s predilection for middle/low registers, emphasised
by his use of three saxophones to play melodies and melodic resultants of the
constant keyboard chugging. (In Part 8 the voicing of the three saxophones seemed
deliberately modelled on the sound of a modern jazz reed section, while the bass
lines were obviously rock-tinged.)
At times I was puzzled as to what was calculated in Glass’s music. Certainly
the ordering of the movements was haphazard (in the best experimental tradition).
They were obviously and unceremoniously played in the order they had been
composed in, with no attempt made to arrange them in such a way as to hear each
to its best advantage. Part I was a significant departure from his earlier music since
it actually used a comparatively slow basic pulse, whereas the other sections we
heard all employed the standard fast quaver pulse, and despite the apparent variety
of structural procedures that Glass has evolved (within severely restricted limits),
what one retains is a sense of sameness.
And here one comes to what is perhaps the major flaw of Glass’s music – that
the musical material is in places not particularly distinguished. I found only two
sections – Part 2 and the first half of Part 8 (if my memory serves me aright) –
instantly appealing, largely because pentatonic music, with its Debussy/Balinese
overtones, has, given Glass’s methods, a guaranteed attractiveness. Considering
that, as I’ve said, one single musical idea has to sustain a continuous structure
over around 20 minutes, I was surprised that the level of invention was so low. Nor
could one effectively change the focus of attention to Glass’s structural processes,
since his systems, unlike Reich’s, are somewhat wayward, almost impossible to

184
‘Interview by R. Gervais and R. Lepage’, p. 34.
185
See Reich’s ‘Music as a Gradual Process’, in Writings on Music (ed. Hillier), p. 35.
258 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

follow on one hearing and also, especially in Part 8 where the cells have grown
to huge proportions, a frustrating exercise. Self-defeating too, as this analytical
approach makes it impossible to open one’s ears to the sound of the music. Yet if
one is not particularly attracted to the way Glass’s music sounds …

‘Music’ (Studio International, 191, March/April 1976, pp. 186–8)

[Obscure Records]

A Well, I just happened to come across these four records of English experimental
music on a label new to me – Obscure.186 Obscure’s the word – I don’t remember
seeing them advertised in The Gramophone. I’ve now listened to them all, and
though I have some reservations (as you’ll see), if Obscure is what I hope it
is, but fear it may not be, then it’s something that experimental music has been
desperately lacking over these last eight years or so. But perhaps you could clear
up a few problems for me.
B I’ll try. What’s puzzling you?
A Issuing four records simultaneously like this brings to mind those boxed sets of
wildly assorted European avant-garde music that DGG [Deutsche Grammophon]
used to issue every year or so, presumably to be seen to do their duty to music
and no doubt financed by the success of Karajan records.187 Is this what Island are
doing?
B I hope not. These four discs are the first of a projected, continuous series whose
purpose is to discover, record and issue experimental and other music un- or
under-represented in record catalogues. The series is under the sole direction of
Brian Eno, who …
A Yes, I noted that Eno has produced all the records and has devoted one to his
own music. I seem to remember that the DGG boxes always contained at least one
record by their house superstar Stockhausen which was used to ‘forcibly’ sell a lot
of noticeably inferior music by comparative unknowns.
B Obscure records are not boxed but available separately. And it’s just as likely
that Bryars will help to sell Eno in some circles. In any case those Eno fans who
buy his record solely on his reputation as a rock musician will be in for a shock
(surprise at least), which may well steer them in the direction of a music that they
didn’t suspect existed until now.

186
Brian Eno released ten albums in total on Obscure Records between 1975 and
1978. Nyman’s music was featured on Decay Music (Obscure 6, 1976). Nyman also
contributed to a number of other recordings in the series, playing organ on Gavin Bryars’s
The Sinking of the Titanic (Obscure 1, 1975), jaw harp on Bryars and White’s Machine
Music (Obscure 8, 1978), piano, marimba and glockenspiel on Tom Phillips and Bryars’s
opera Irma (Obscure 9, 1978), and marimba and voice on Harold Budd’s The Pavilion of
Dreams (Obscure 10, 1978).
187
See, for example, ‘Six to One’ (The Spectator, 17 January 1970).
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 259

A Yes, I see that the biographical note on the sleeve of his record puts his rock
activities in the wider context of his experimental interests.
B Well, it’s obviously because he’s a rock star that Island agreed to entrust him with
a project like this, and because of his highly diverse musical sympathies that he’s
the ideal person to run it. People now know that he’s running Obscure as a kind of
open forum and he’s consequently inundated with tapes from musicians who might
otherwise never be heard of, let alone heard. A more promising class of composers
than those who dutifully submit their scores to the Society for Promotion of New
Music in the hope of getting a single, under-rehearsed performance in front of a
minute audience. Records are a different ballgame.
A So Island give Eno a free hand?
B Nominally yes. At least they seem to accept his decisions.
A You sound a little doubtful.
B A free hand and financial backing.
A Does this free hand mean that he’s had to do everything single-handed?
B Well …
A Because if that’s so, it explains why the records are a little way off perfection.
B How do you mean?
A For a start there are any number of minor errors and inaccuracies on the sleeve
notes, some of which seem to have gone un-proof-read, and there is the occasional
mismatching between the ordering of tracks indicated on the sleeves and labels
and the ordering on the records themselves.
B Teething troubles, easily remedied in future.
A To be positive for a moment …
B Yes, why are you so critical?
A To tell the truth, before we began this interview, I randomly consulted the Eno/
Peter Schmidt ‘Oblique Strategies’ box and came up with the card ‘Emphasize the
flaws’.188 But as I was saying, I’m glad the records are so cheap – though I hope
that surface noise and the occasional distortion are not a necessary consequence of
this. £1.99 is cheap enough to allow people to make their own experiments with
these records and not regret too much if they’ve made a mistake or been misled by
an initial attraction which doesn’t last on further hearing.
B It’s about time that you started talking about the music itself.
A Point taken. Tell me, then, whether these four records represent the very best of
what’s available, or …
B As I said, these are merely the first of an ongoing series, and as such they
come from different sources and represent somewhat divergent tendencies in
experimental music. The pieces by Bryars and Hobbs and American Standard by
the American composer John Adams (the only non-English piece so far recorded)
are all part of the experimental mainstream and are published by the Experimental

188
Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies: Over One Hundred Worthwhile
Dilemmas (© Eno and Schmidt, 1975).
260 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Music Catalogue;189 Eno’s music is only indirectly related to his rock style, while
the fourth record – of New/Rediscovered musical instruments by Max Eastley
and David Toop – introduces a feature of this series which may hopefully become
more important: the record literally as a record, an archive for various types of
research projects.
A That type of concept, rather than composer-orientation, would certainly be
valuable. What other issues are planned?
B There will be a record devoted to music whose primary interest is rhythmic …
A That would be welcome, especially …
B If you’ll let me finish. There will be records devoted to Satie’s music – some
unpublished, some unrecorded – either according to genre (e.g. music-hall songs)
or period – especially his extraordinary Rose + Croix music. There are also
plans to record the complete percussion music of John Cage – totally neglected
and arguably his most interesting music. And there will hopefully be archive
recordings of old tapes of now-defunct bands of the heyday of experimental
activity in England – the Scratch Orchestra, Promenade Theatre Orchestra, Ross
and Cromarty Orchestra, etc.190 Additionally Eno’s own practical experience of
record-making and producing will lead him into areas not merely neglected by
other companies but un-conceived by them – projects that define the nature of
records themselves, the actual disc and the studio. Eno has already sent out a
set of proposals to a large number of composers, rock and straight, conventional
and avant-garde, asking each of them to produce a one-minute piece according to
certain principles (given starting and finishing notes, pulse, orchestration), 50 of
which would be linked together on record as a single ‘piece’. Other composers
will be commissioned to write pieces that specifically exploit the potentialities of
the studio in some way or other.
A When you interrupted me I was about to say that a record of primarily rhythmic
music would be very welcome. Apart from Christopher Hobbs’ attractive little
Aran and Eastley’s musical sculptures, the overall impression that I retain from
the four records is one of melodic music at very reduced tempi. Both Eno’s sides
are drifty and dreamy, Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic is dominated by
slowed-down hymn tunes and the middle movement of Adams’ American Standard
is also slow and hymn-like. Or one can look at them from another standpoint of
similarity in that the Eastley/Toop record is the only one that seems to be free of
pre-composed material. In the other three one finds a sentimental religious song,
Sousa, Ellington, pibroch music, Pachelbel, etc. And again systems seem to be the
rule structurally: Eastley’s systems are element- or motor-generated; Eno’s self-
generating; Hobbs’ based on a knitting pattern; Bryars’ Jesus Blood is repetitive

189
Christopher Hobbs founded the Experimental Music Catalogue in 1968. It was
based in 208 Ladbroke Grove, London. Bryars and Nyman also worked on the Catalogue
from 1972 to 1981.
190
Many of these projects remained unfulfilled.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 261

and accumulative in orchestration. Which reminds me that there is an overall

similarity of sonority. Both Bryars and Adams look to Hollywood studio bands …
B But if you used your ears instead of your brain then you’d notice the differences
rather than this tiresome catalogue of similarities. You’d hear immediately that
Adams’ use of Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady is as unashamedly excessive
(typically American!) as Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood is restrained (and typically
English!) But more generally you could just as well object to Reich and Glass
on the grounds that all their music is fast, systemic and based on a regular pulse.
Systems apart, this English music is the opposite: gentle, casual, slow, unassertive,
and the systems employed are often totally fallible, bringing about unexpected
solutions. This is obviously the case with Eastley’s musical sculptures, which are
activated (outdoors) by the elements (water, wind, etc.) and indoors by motors that
are themselves affected by gravity depending on their positioning. But equally the
sleazy, bedraggled nightclub atmosphere of Bryars’ 1, 2, 1–2–3–4 results from the
kind of ‘obstruction’ system that he’s so fond of. (In this case each player has to play
along with old standards he hears on his own cassette machine. The result is affected
both by technical differences of the machines and by the players’ familiarity with the
material and their ability to reproduce instantaneously what they hear.)
And again whatever surface similarity appears to exist between the Titanic
and the middle of American Standard (even down to the combination of hymns
and the spoken voice) should not be allowed to disguise the vast conceptual gap
between the two pieces. The recorded version of the Bryars ‘descriptive’ epic is
dominated by slowed down and electronically treated hymn tunes. Yet these in no
way constitute the identity of the piece which consists in effect of a vast amount of
quasi-scientific, physical, paraphysical, musical and historical data, realistic and
speculative, which Bryars has researched for this ‘reconstruction’ of the Titanic
disaster and its ‘shadow’ version foretold in fiction some years earlier.191

‘Music’ (Studio International, 191, May/June 1976, pp. 282–4)

[Fine Art Departments]

An extraordinary concert took place in Nottingham on 24 March. Four small,

diverse orchestras played arrangements of music which spanned the whole
of musical history – well, from mediaeval dances to Lord Berners, taking in
Praetorious, Beethoven, Gottschalk, Satie, Joplin and King Oliver on the way. The
finale was even more astonishing than what preceded it, as the 30-odd musicians
joined together in a ‘monster’ performance of marches from the French Revolution.
Truly experimental, since each band had prepared its own arrangements of the
pieces which were brought together without prior consultation or rehearsal.

191
The novel in question was Futility (1898) by Morgan Robertson (see also ‘As the
Titanic Went Down’, Music and Musicians, 21 (December 1972), pp. 10–14).
262 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

What was remarkable about this concert was the fact the bands came from
the Fine Art Departments of four Polytechnics. Each band had its own style and
identity, from the dry and droll Leicester LBSO to the more flamboyantly rough
Foster’s Social Orchestra from Trent Poly.192 This variety of style stemmed not
only from differences in instrumentation (one naturally uses what players and
instruments are available), but also, more subtly, from the character and musical
interests of the lecturer in charge of music at that particular Poly, who selects the
music – since he or she is most aware of what’s suitable and where to find it – and
also has most expertise in making the arrangements.
That there should be such organised music-making in fine art departments
may come as a surprise to those who are unaware of the tradition of experimental
music that has developed in selected art schools over the past ten years or so.
John Tilbury blazed the trail in the mid-sixties at the (then) South West Essex
Tech where, interestingly enough, some of the earliest performances of parts of
Cardew’s Treatise were given. Since then an interlocking network of full-time,
part-time and visiting lecturers has built up this experimental tradition. Cardew, for
instance, taught at Maidstone, Tilbury at Kingston and more recently in Falmouth,
and, for a time, at Portsmouth.
In fact, since 1969 much of the impetus has come from (what is now)
Portsmouth Polytechnic. Jeffrey Steele – one of many systems painters who have
been especially encouraging – went to Portsmouth from Cardiff in 1968. Gavin
Bryars took over the music from the short-lived Ron Geesin in January 1969,
left for Leicester in July 1970, when Michael Parsons (one of the co-founders of
the Scratch Orchestra) took his place at Portsmouth. A further interconnection is
provided by the painter David Saunders, who taught part-time at Newport (where
Keith Richardson-Jones still encourages visiting lecturers and concerts), and
went to Portsmouth while also teaching part-time at Winchester, where one of his
students was Brian Eno, who became interested in experimental musical activities
at Portsmouth. Saunders now teaches at Liverpool, and he recommended an ex-
Portsmouth student, James Lampard, for a new music lectureship there …
Apart from this regular teaching, there have also been occasional lectures
and short-term projects from a wide range of visiting lecturers, not only by those
teaching regularly at other colleges, but also by American composers such as Alvin
Lucier, George Brecht, Philip Corner, Steve Reich and Phil Glass. But the absence
of regular musical ‘instruction’ seems in no way to have deterred the growth of
musical activities, as Stuart Marshall showed at Newport. After leaving there
he went to Wesleyan University to study with Alvin Lucier, and is now Senior
Lecturer in Video and Performance at Newcastle.
The Fine Art Department of Portsmouth Poly is of course chiefly remembered
as the crucible of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, though this is only one of five musical
activities listed by Jeffrey Steele in 1971 in his document ‘Portsmouth Fine Art
Music’. As Gavin Bryars shows in his account of its origin (in the same collection),

192
Nyman established the Foster’s Social Orchestra in 1974 (see below).
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 263

the Portsmouth Sinfonia was formed one day in 1970 to take part in an Opportunity
Knocks concert, and since no one had a ‘musical’ background they only knew
famous classics, so the William Tell Overture was chosen because everyone knew
that from the Lone Ranger series.193
This essentially one-off performance had its background in performance art
and imaginative, visually-orientated realisations of indeterminate scores – such
as Ichiyanagi’s Distance (which involves making sounds three metres away from
the sound-source) and Cardew’s completely graphic Treatise. Cardew himself had
used many of his Maidstone students in a memorable 1969 performance at the
ICA of his Schooltime Compositions, an extension and simplification of Treatise
(1964–66), whose drawn notation, Cardew felt, should ideally be realised ‘by a
collection of musical innocents; but in a culture where a musical education is so
widespread (at least among musicians) and getting more and more so, such innocents
are extremely hard to find. Treatise attempts to locate such musical innocents
wherever they survive, by posing a notation that doesn’t specifically demand an
ability to read music.’194 Cardew found that the most rewarding experiences with
Treatise had come through people who by some fluke had (a) acquired a visual
education, (b) escaped a musical education and (c) have nevertheless become
musicians, i.e. ‘play music to the full capacity of their beings’.195
The Portsmouth Sinfonia, playing the classics, re-introduced purely (or rather
impurely) musical considerations. It did, of course, sever its connections with
Portsmouth, flourished independently, grew in size and pretensions, and eventually
died of more or less natural causes. But not before it had spawned the more select,
selective Majorca Orchestra, which is still ‘led’ by ex-Portsmouth students Robin
Mortimore and James Lampard. The Majorca Orchestra played both original
compositions by its members and also arrangements of Edwardian salon music (which
it has since dropped). Lampard’s earliest music for the Majorca, following a procedure
developed by another Portsmouth student, Ivan Hume-Carter, in his long-since
defunct Ross and Cromarty Orchestra, gently re-emphasises, from a very innocent
standpoint, the division of harmonic music into melody and accompaniment.196
These pieces of Lampard’s I found very useful when I started Foster’s Social
Orchestra in the Fine Art Department of Trent Polytechnic in 1974, since they
allowed me to divide the roles of the student players initially into more expert
(tunes) and less expert (accompaniments). Interestingly enough, the name of the
Trent Poly band derives from the title of a collection of simple arrangements that
Stephen Foster made in 1853 – two melody lines and simple accompaniment –

193
Opportunity Knocks was a popular talent contest show broadcast on British
television and radio from 1949–90. A popular television series about a masked ex-Texas
Ranger and his American Indian companion, Tonto, The Lone Ranger ran from 1949–57.
194
Cardew, ‘Towards an Ethic of Improvisation’, in Treatise Handbook (London:
Edition Peters, 1971), p. xix.
195
Ibid., p. xix.
196
See also Nyman’s Experimental Music, pp. 168–70.
264 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

suitable for un-ambitious, domestic, social music-making. And it is precisely

a sense of communality that these art student bands encourage, harnessing the
surprising amount of musical ability that one finds among art students, but which
would find no other regular outlet. (Foster’s Social Orchestra currently contains an
ex-jazz saxophonist, an ex-brass band cornet player, a flute player who has played
with her local youth orchestra and in folk and jazz groups, as well as three beginner
violinists, who translate musical notation into a tablature, to indicate where to
place the fingers. Gavin Bryars, in another article in the Anthology of Criticism
notes that, to parody Cardew, the early Majorca Orchestra scores provided a
musical notation that doesn’t demand an ability to read music.) And since art
students are refreshingly free from the burden of musical tradition, the repertoire
of these bands effectively de-specialises musical history, making available once
again (since John Cage was the first to view musical artefacts in this way), just so
much ‘material to be played’: for its own sake, with dedication, amusement, and a
not too self-conscious attitude towards the unintentional but inevitable errors and
accidents that are, for me, an integral part of the type of music making.197
But these bands represent only one aspect of music in fine art departments.
On the didactic level one finds the superb Art History courses at Leicester (run
by Gavin Bryars and Fred Orton) including obligatory lectures on Ives, Satie,
Cage, Fluxus, New American Music, etc. At Portsmouth Jeffrey Steele and
Michael Parsons are currently running a lecture course entitled ‘Structure in Art
and Music’ – ‘A course of lectures and discussions on fundamental concepts of
order and articulation and how these are realised in works of art and music with
comparisons drawn from other fields such as mathematics, language and social
sciences’. In my own Complementary Studies course at Trent Poly the subjects
chosen by the students for their extended essay are as diverse as Irish minstrelsy,
Ethiopian church music, Satie and the visual arts and music hall, as well as a wide
range of experimental and rock topics.
A third, equally important, function of music teaching in art departments is
neither recreational nor didactic – to assist individual students with sound projects
connected with their studio work, or indeed as a substitute for it. It says a lot for
art education that courses are flexible enough to enable students to develop their
ideas away from a visual to a purely sounding art, perhaps finally gaining a degree
in ‘Fine Art’ solely on the strength of their musical work. If only music schools
were so enlightened.

197
On Cage permitting ‘any sound from any part of musical history … to be heard’,
see ‘John Cage in Paris’, New Statesman (6 November 1970).
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 265

The National Theatre: A Venue for Music?

The National Theatre as a permanent new venue for experimental music – unlikely,
but true.198 Special Projects Director Michael Kustow, and Musical Director
Harrison Birtwistle, had planned to have six or eight small-scale concerts a month
in the foyer area of the NT.199 The first concert was given on 15 March 1976. It
was not particularly remarkable in itself – a piano and wind quartet playing Satie
and Debussy – but the environment was a revelation. Until the Cottesloe Theatre
is opened at the end of the year, all the concerts will take place in the enormous,
carpeted foyer, which is as plush and idiosyncratic as the Festival/Queen Elizabeth
Hall is boring and unsympathetic.
This ‘furniture music’ setting is obviously suitable for some kinds of music
but not for others, and when the Cottesloe is opened more formal concerts will be
given on the stage in front of the safety curtain. The acoustics are astonishingly
good from all parts of the space, even though a variety of pillars and other
structural ‘necessities’ frequently obstruct one’s vision. The foyer is in fact on
three levels, the ground floor being overlooked by two rambling ‘galleries’ (which
will also house exhibitions) reached by stairways with shuttered-concrete sides
which also obscure the view. Apart from the ability to view/hear straight concerts
from these different locations, I can imagine performances being arranged which
really exploit, depend on, this curious space, live or electronic installations which
could play on this ‘blindness’: a group of players, perhaps, placed so that they
cannot see each other but performing some task or other that normally depends
on visual cuing.
But the future of music at the NT is very rosy indeed, since the potential of the
most remarkable series of concerts – experimental and otherwise – is seemingly
unlimited. During the first concerts I remarked to Harrison Birtwistle that if all the
concerts were as successful as the first, then more money might be made available
so that theatregoers could be piped into the theatre every night. Four days later
a meeting was held and a decision was made: concerts every night, financed by
the bar takings. Not, you notice, from ticket sales, since entrance to the concerts
– which start between 6 and 6.30 – is not dependent on having a ticket for that
evening’s play. Free, informal concerts which will not only present a range of
music notoriously neglected by the twin bastions of English musical culture –
the Festival Hall and the BBC – but also hopefully providing the kind of human
concourse the South Bank still lacks.

198
Nyman’s early experimental piece The Otherwise Very Beautiful Blue Danube
Waltz was first performed in this venue on 14 June 1976.
199
Michael Kustow subsequently became arts commissioner at Channel 4 television,
having previously been director at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA).
266 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

‘Music’ (Studio International, 192, July/August 1976, pp. 71–2)

[Glass and Budd]

One aspect of the revolution is the decentralisation of taste. On a small island

that may not seem too important. I mean, it may not seem too important that
music can be made (with the new tastes) outside of the concert hall of London
and away from the media there. In America, for obvious reasons, that implication
is enormously important.

What happened in the 1960s was that composers stayed away from New York
City in droves, but were not coerced into feeling that their work was less important
for that. We’ve lost a lot of that gain recently; but it will never get back to the
’50s when nothing outside of New York could have any meaning. Americans are
not going to take centralisation seriously again – for survival reasons. But your
book – because you couldn’t see that factor/because you weren’t here/because
you are European – misses that point entirely. I mean, your book addresses itself
to Europeans and concerns itself with changes in techniques. And the simple
evidence of that is that Americans are mentioned in the book in quantity of
coverage/details and in understanding in direct proportion to how close they are
to New York City (to Europe). The farthest western composer you can ‘see’ from
your vantage point was me, and my activities were in a state that is only a few
hours’ drive from New York. There is not one mention in the book of California
composers, though a few (La Monte [Young] and Terry [Riley]) are said to come
from California. To say nothing of everybody in between.

That’s an extract from a letter the American composer Robert Ashley wrote to me
over a year ago. It’s a criticism that can obviously only be tested by visiting the States
(which I haven’t as yet been fortunate enough to do),200 and yet its unexpectedness
merely justifies Ashley’s analysis. I did feel, though, that he slightly weakened his
case when, soon after, I received a copy of his ‘Proposal to document the ideas and
work of eight American composers’, a project (which he has since completed, and
which may well get a showing in this country) ‘to document on video tape (with
sync, hi-fi audio recording) the ideas and representative works of eight American
composers, and to demonstrate the elements of a style of musical composition
that originated in the US and that has come to have international significance’. It
so happens that of the eight composers no fewer than six – Ashley’s Sonic Arts
Union colleagues (Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma and David Behrman), and three

200
Nyman was to do this when his music was featured at the New Music, New York:
A Festival of Composers and their Music, held at The Kitchen Center in Broome Street,
Soho 8–16 June 1979. Ashley was one of four American composers featured in Peter
Greenaway’s Four American Composers series, first broadcast on Channel 4 in 1983. The
other three were John Cage, Meredith Monk and Philip Glass. Nyman received a credit as
music adviser for the Meredith Monk programme.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 267

‘steady-state’ composers (La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Philip Glass) – are
featured in my book, while the other two (Roger Reynolds and Pauline Oliveros)
I knew about and rejected.
If Ashley feels that the proximity and accessibility of Europe somehow helps
to shape and influence the tastes, ideas and techniques of ‘New York experimental
music’ (and I wouldn’t agree with him), Europe has certainly been highly receptive
to this music. Cage, Feldman, Wolff and Brown, and the Sonic Arts Union, are all
well-known in England and on the Continent; Fluxus was as much a European
as it was an American pseudo-movement; while Reich etc. not only perform
regularly on the Euro-circuit (at Festivals, French Culture Institutes, German
Radio Stations, while they only have the art gallery ghetto in the States) but are
recorded (on the French Shandar label) and frequently interviewed.201 Young’s
exclusivity is protected by the Heiner Friedrich Gallery while negotiations are
currently underway for Stockhausen’s ex-publishers, Universal Edition, to put out
Reich’s early scores.
Universal Edition also handle Source magazine, which promotes the more
freakish, electronic hardware, mixed-media-oriented West Coast avant-garde, who
failed to make any impact in England through Harvey Matusow’s ICES Festival in
1972.202 Recent issues, which have all been guest-edited, show some improvement
and No. 11 (1975) contains an interesting art/music mix, featuring work by Endre
Tot, Paik, Ken Friedman, Dietrich Albrecht, Vostell, Christo, Beuys and Filliou
amongst others.203 But the experimental music of the West Coast does not travel,
perhaps because of the distance, perhaps because the composers are less concerned
with self-promotion, perhaps because they don’t need to be since many of them
have safe jobs in music schools. With the recent availability of Soundings, some
gaps in our knowledge have been filled. Soundings was founded by the young
composer Peter Garland partly as an alternative to Source, whose ‘avant-garde
posture’ seemed to Garland, in 1972, ‘less important now than it may have been
in 1967. Too much that was important really had no place in Source’.204 The tenth
and last number of Soundings will appear later this year, and the earlier issues
and supplementary monographs present not only a very rich seam of West Coast
experimental music but also reveal a cultural heritage, a whole sequence of gurus
who are of no significance in New York: issues or part-issues being devoted to
older, now-dead composers, like Harry Partch and Dane Rudhyar, Julian Carrillo

201
See, for example, ‘Uncommercial’ (20 August 1971).
202
The International Carnival of Experimental Sounds (ICES) was held in London
in August 1972.
203
See Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn (eds) Source: Music of the Avant-Garde,
1966–1973 (California: University of California Press, 2011), pp. 349–69.
204
Issue 1 of Soundings was edited by Peter Garland and John Bischoff and published
by Soundings Press, Valencia, CA, in February 1972. The last issue (no. 10) was published
in 1976. The London-based Experimental Music Catalogue distributed Soundings in the
UK and Europe.
268 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

and Silvestre Revueltas, Ives, Ruggles and Varese, and Conlon Nancarrow, the
piano roll king.
One Soundings composer, contemporary with Reich/Riley but totally unknown
in Europe, is Harold Budd who, due partly to his uncomplicated tonal music
and partly to his position at Cal Arts, appears to have had a strong influence on
Los Angeles composers in their 20s. My regular check of David Toop’s record
department at Dillon’s University Bookshop (he also carries Soundings) threw up
two records which might serve as a superficial sampling of Bob Ashley’s Eastern
taste vs Western taste: two longish pieces by Budd from 1970 and ’71 (Advance
Recordings FGR-16) and the new Shandar record (83515) of Philip Glass’s Solo
Music written at roughly the same time.
Hearing the drones which run continuously through each of the Budd pieces,
you might be forgiven for thinking that they were part of the tendency towards
orientalisation which is a feature of West Coast culture. You would find backing
for this in Peter Garland’s editorial in the first issue of Soundings:

For many, part of the current lure of the music of other cultures lies in the static
nature of the art; the example of a sarangi or rebab player who has devoted
a lifetime to the interpretation of a very old music can be just as inspiring as
the traditional image of the Western composer, forever pushing forward into
unexplored territory. Both deserve equal attention in a magazine such as this.
Too much attention has been focused on machines to the detriment of the social
and physical ground of music.205

Accordingly, this issue features an article by Richard Teitelbaum on the World

Band, an experiment to create a musical ‘global village’ by getting performers
from different musical cultures to play together in ‘open field situations …
which allowed several world musics to co-exist, interact and interpenetrate
simultaneously in the same space, and on an equal basis. No musical structure
was preconceived, but rather allowed to evolve out of the collective actions of all
participants’.206 Although there had been world music programmes at UCLA and
Cal Arts, where ‘native masters’ were hired to perform and teach, Teitelbaum’s
World Band was based near New York at Wesleyan University. Teitelbaum also
notes – showing that taste is not necessarily decentralised in the States – the strong
revival of interest in non-western music by Reich, Glass, Young and Riley, all of
whom studied with non-western musicians for various periods of time. He quite
correctly continues that the music of these composers

[also] reflects the ‘orientalising’ influence of electric technology: La Monte

Young spent hours listening to the electric ‘drone’ of telephone poles as a child,

205
Garland, in Peter Garland and John Bischoff (eds.) Soundings, 1 (Valencia, CA:
Soundings Press, February 1972).
206
Teitelbaum, ‘World Band’, in Soundings, 1, p. 24.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 269

long before encountering Indian music, and his early sustained-note pieces
reflect this experience. Though long interested in African music, Steve Reich’s
pulse music actually grew directly out of his experiences with tape loops played
on machines with slightly different speeds.207

(Would it confirm Ashley’s thesis to point out that both Young and Reich began their
careers studying in California with European masters – Young with Schoenberg’s
pupil Erwin Stein, and Reich with Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio?)
But to return to the Budd and Glass records. When I first played what I assumed
was the A-side of the Budd, I thought I detected a remarkable mesh of cultural
cross-references: the cover note for The Oak of the Golden Dreams told me that
it was realised on the Buchla Electronic Music System at Cal Arts in 1970. Yet
what I heard was a complex drone which appeared to have been produced by
acoustic organs from which gradually emerged a melody which sounded like a
saxophone imitating a sitar. I soon realised that Advance Records (like Obscure)
are not immune to getting their labelling mixed up, and that this was the B-side,
Coeur d’Orr, in which a soprano sax improvises (presumably) over two sustained
superimposed tonal chords, which complement and conflict to produce a delicious
shimmering effect, when in fact everything is static. The opening minutes of the
sax solo are remarkably cleverly articulated to sound like a sitar, but one wonders
why, as the track degenerates into a sub-Coltrane ramble. Now John Coltrane’s sax
playing, based on free modal flow rather than the traditional chord progressions,
had a strong effect on La Monte Young in the early sixties. But in a piece like
Sunday Morning Blues (unavailable except on the rare bootleg tape), Young
somewhat systematises Coltrane’s style into the repeating-figure manner which
became the source for the ‘process’ music of Reich, Glass and Riley. Perhaps
the incongruity of Budd’s launching of this sax solo above this mellifluous drone
(the D-flat major track of which has the very Californian title The Candy-Apple
Revision) is a deliberate protest against this systematisation, and perhaps, too,
against Young’s own drones whose components are calculated with mathematical
exactitude. (But I doubt it: Budd seems to be too instinctive a musician to bother
about these things.)
The genuine Oak of the Golden Dreams, though produced completely
electronically, is more remarkable and suggests that in the hands of a sensitive
musician like Budd an electronic synthesiser can actually be coaxed into sounding
musical. The delicate melodic tracery that Budd spins over a single-note drone is so
convincingly phrased that at first I thought Budd was playing a keyboard. However,
the speed of the flourishes suggests that it is not a keyboard but a sequencer which
stores the notes of his carefully-tuned (by ear, he stresses) cantilena, but which
enables him, in real-time, to alter their ordering, their duration and attack. This
is one of those rare cases where machines seem to be successfully imitating men –

207
Ibid., p. 23.
270 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

the reverse of the ‘men imitating machines’ that Steve Reich finds a ‘useful’
exercise in his own music.
And here we come to a major difference between Budd and Glass (and by
dubious logical extension, between LA and NYC): that whereas Budd, despite the
intervention of a machine, manages to rely on his intuition, Glass, playing solo
organ on this album, adopts the opposite to this non-intellectual approach and uses
additive systems (as is well-known) almost as a formal check against spontaneity.
Thus whereas the permutations of Budd’s melody tend to drift subjectively, the
strict development of line in Glass is rigidly controlled; and rhythm, which in The
Oak of the Golden Dreams flows freely and spontaneously, in Glass’s Two Pages
and Music in Contrary Motion is pinned against a grid of a regular quaver pulse.
In the first of the Two Pages, where Glass’s system is heard at its clearest, each
step in the broadly logical expansion and contraction of the melody (which is not
melodic in the same sense as Budd’s, merely a linear continuity that for want of
a more precise word one calls ‘melody’), can be clearly perceived – not through
the melody itself, which loses any qualitative significance, but in a single note
achieving prominence from within the melodic cycles. This shift of attention is
fundamental to Glass’s music, and explains why an apparently monophonic music
can become, or appear to become, contrapuntal. Budd’s music, and much other
Californian music, exists on a single plane, with the focus just on the simple input,
on primary colours, on anti-abstraction and on genuine anti-illusion.
Significantly, Budd’s music developed from these long sustained works
into short, uncomplicated lyric pieces, with unambiguous, guilt-free romantic
harmonies – his Madrigals of the Rose Angel from 1972 are to be found in
Soundings 7–8, and his more recent music may appear in due course on the
Obscure label.208 Glass’s work has shown a logical development from the unison
music of Two Pages, through the parallel lines of Music in Fifths and Music in
Similar Motion (available on the Chatham Square label at Dillon’s) and the multi-
directional lines of Music in Contrary Motion and Music with Changing Parts
(also on Chatham Square) to the vast Music in 12 Parts (which I reviewed in
the January/February issue, and which is reported to be appearing some time on
Virgin). However, the directness of the solo medium, and the clarity with which
the processes are articulated, make the new Shandar record of Music in Contrary
Motion Glass’s most successful so far.

‘Music’ (Studio International, 192, September/October 1976, pp. 192–4)

[John Cage]

The philosophical, conceptual and technical principles behind John Cage’s work
since 1950 should be well-known by now. However, I make no apologies for

208
Harold Budd’s The Pavilion of Dreams was released on Obscure 10, in 1978 (for
more on Obscure, see above Nyman’s article in Studio International, 191, March/April 1976).
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 271

printing in full the following impromptu address Cage gave to the members of
the Hague Residence Orchestra during the rehearsal of Atlas Eclipticalis209 at
the Festival La Rochelle in France on 3 July 1976,210 since it is a fascinating
document, directly linking, for the first time that I’m aware of, the compositional
concepts with their practical realisation:211

I’m going to thank you for the work that you have given to this music. But as with
everything it is always possible to improve the situation,212 and with this large
number of people 213 I thought it worthwhile to let you know directly what I was
doing when I made it, so that as you perform tonight you can give yourselves, I
hope, to the work rather than something that has nothing to do with it.
Let’s approach, first of all, not the musical question but the question of how
we act as human beings in a performing situation. This is not a piece of theatre,
but is rather a piece of music, and what we are here to do is to produce sounds.
In the late 1940s I was very troubled, and I have become less troubled through
the very fortunate circumstance of studying Buddhism with Daisetz Suzuki in the
late 1940s, and since then I have continued my interest in that direction. Basically

209
Composed during 1961–62, the material consisting of ‘instrumental parts (86) to
be played in whole or part, any duration, in any ensemble, chamber or orchestra (within a
specified instrumentation); with or without Winter Music of 1957 (and now Solo for Voice
45 of 1970). Each part is written in space equal to a time at least twice as slow as clock time.
Arrows indicate 0”, 15”, 30” and 45”. Space vertically equals frequency. Since equal space
is given each chromatic tone, notes not having conventional accidentals are microtones.
Specific directives and freedoms are given regarding duration of tones. Loudness is relative
to the size of notes. Tone production is never extraordinary. Percussion parts are a graph of
the distribution in space of the instruments, as various and numerous as possible, chosen
by the performer. The composition means involved chance operations together with
the placing of transparent templates on the pages of an astronomical atlas and inscribing the
positions of stars’ (Catalogue of Cage’s Compositions, Peters Edition, 1962). This was the
world première of the complete simultaneous performance of Atlas, Winter Music and Solo
for Voice 45 – the latter realised with great brilliance by Joan La Barbara.
210
This is a slightly expanded version of Cage’s address, based on Nyman’s original
transcript. All footnotes belong to the original text.
211
The most striking evidence of the possibility, indeed the temptation, of divorcing
Cage’s ideas and concepts from his music, was the behaviour during the performance of
Daniel Charles, a French critic and aesthetician who has seemingly dedicated himself
to Cage’s work, and who will publish a book of interviews with Cage (entitled Pour les
Oiseaux [For the Birds]) later this year. Charles laughed and talked his way through the first
hour-and-a-half and then left.
212
This conflicts with Cage’s delight in the fact that things change, over a period of
years, ‘without our having lifted a finger’.
213
It was only the prospect of hearing the full orchestration for the first time that
led Cage to agree to go to La Rochelle. He also performed his Empty Words, a vocal
pulverisation of extracts from Thoreau’s Journals.
272 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

the idea of Kagon philosophy, which is central to Zen Buddhism, is that creation
consists of beings, like ourselves, who have feelings, and other beings, like sounds
or like stones, that don’t have feelings. So we have a creation of sentient beings –
senses – and non-sentient beings, and this is what the universe consists of.
Now each of these beings, from a Buddhist point of view, is at the centre of
the universe. Now when you make a connection – that is to say when you laugh
at something and make a connection between yourself and it – you do something
to that centredness.214 One might say that you momentarily lose your own centre.
You will have a situation more compatible with the intention of this piece, and
actually a marvellous social situation, if you behave at your own centres, and that
when you produce a sound, you don’t try to get the sound to come from you, but
that you rather act simply as an intermediary who, through some magic,215 is able
to bring this sound, which has its own centre, into existence.
Now how does this relate to what I have just heard you rehearsing? When Mr
Dufallo [the conductor] gave you the freedom to stretch or relax or to leave, there
are various ways of doing this and he suggested that there were. When you stretch,
don’t stretch as an actor, stretch because you’re really stretching, not because
you think it will amuse somebody but because due to the long period of time 216

214
A single sound, supposedly issuing from its own centre, one can comprehend. A
multiplicity of sounds, with their centres interpenetrating in a desultory fashion (as they
should do in any performance of Atlas, since each sound or constellation of sounds is
always preceded and followed by a perceptible silence) makes comprehension – that is,
the making of independent sound-events comprehensible – very problematic. The sounds
themselves have little intrinsic interest, which makes listening to them over a period of
2 hours 40 minutes (in this case) highly disorienting. This can be a pleasurable experience
at times, often for a long time at a stretch. But the tendency, partially conditioned by the
structured, controlled music of recent years, for the ear (mind) automatically to attempt to
create connections between independent, isolated sounds, means that one is persistently
trying to make ‘sense’ of what one hears. And what sense can you make of this abstract
sound assemblage? Very little. One noted with delight a chance unison, or octave, or
doubling, or harmonious chord (Richard Bernas’s realisation of his part in Winter Music
threw up, from deliberate choice, some refreshingly assonant harmonies) or something that
had some physical, bodily, pulse relation with something else.
215
Neither these, nor any other musicians, could possibly believe in this magical
bringing of sounds into existence. The production of a sound – especially memory-,
expression- and culture-free as Cage wants it (as one sees later in his talk), is not only very
difficult (considering the orchestral musicians’ cultural conditioning) but is also a highly
conscious activity. It is, however, one which needs a phenomenal degree of skill and control
(to say nothing of interest and involvement which most performers lack, since playing
Cage’s music does not afford remotely the same kind of gratification that playing the music
of the symphonic tradition gives. The musicians of the Hague orchestra would say that it
gives no gratification whatsoever).
216
This version was designed to fill 2 hours 40 minutes. Each page contains five
systems, each lasting eight minutes, and four whole pages were performed. The conductor’s
function is simply that of a clock – his arms describe a 360-degree circle which represents
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 273

you couldn’t do anything else. So don’t stretch the way he stretched, which was
what several of you did – you were imitating him and you were simply stretching
because it seemed more entertaining than to do something else. Now if you leave,
when you leave, don’t try to distract other members of the orchestra. Simply leave.
And there will be refreshment for you, which you can thank the Lord for [laughs]
and then return. And of course when you do leave, leave when you have a gap in
your part.217
Now I’m told by some of you – and it’s true – that with such a larger group
of people, it’s hard to expect them to change their minds quickly. But again a
reference to Buddhism: the Buddha was asked whether things happened gradually
or whether they happened suddenly, that is to say, can we suddenly change our
minds or do we have to be educated and persuaded over a period of years? In some
cases things happen slowly but in other cases thing happen rapidly. For instance,
if a seed were to germinate rapidly, it wouldn’t be a seed. And if lightning were to
take place slowly it wouldn’t be lightning. It is possible for human beings, more
than for dogs and certainly more than for insects, to act nobly and to change their
minds quickly. This is perhaps what distinguishes us more than anything else.218
Now the advantage of having an attitude of a multiplicity of centres – sounds
at their centres, people at their centres – is that people wouldn’t feel the necessity
to encroach upon others. We could have – though we may not get it – we could
have a better life if, in a circumstance like this evening’s, we are able ourselves,
nearly 100 people, to experience the activity of bringing this piece into existence,
without making fun of it, and doing it as well as we can. We will not only have
accomplished something for ourselves, but we will have given an image to an

the length of one system, 8 minutes. Each performer has to ‘place’ his sounds, according to
their spacing on the page, within this clock movement.
217
It was this permission to go to the fridges and drink iced drinks (they should
have been provided for the audience, too) that was the most obvious ‘human’ cause for the
disruption of the performance. Those players who did want to take their task seriously could
not possibly have done so in the face of the constant progression to and from the fridge which
started almost as soon as the first player had his first extended silence. Instrumentalists are
trained to play their instruments, nothing else, and Cage was perhaps unrealistic in asking
the players to be aware of what was going on around them while simultaneously giving
permanent ‘freedom’ to drink.
218
And certainly Cage’s words had a magical effect on the players at the rehearsal.
Almost everybody, players and the smattering of friends and critics, were deeply affected
by the persuasiveness and charm of Cage’s words. The musicians tried another 8-minute
system and played like angels. But just as it’s possible for 86 musicians to have their minds
‘changed’ in a flash, so it is equally possible – and much more likely – that by the evening
their minds would have changed back to where they were before Cage beguiled them. But
from a musical point of view nobody had really taken into account the unpredictability of
the time factor: it’s fine to rehearse for 8 or 20 minutes or so, but when you have to keep
going (or stopping and starting) over a period of over 2½ hours then the situation is a
dialectic one: things are bound to change.
274 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

audience larger [than ourselves], and it will be like the action of a stone going into
a pool, it will ripple out, and it will have a good effect.219
Now what is the most difficult thing in this piece to perform? It literally is
those periods when you have nothing to do. Notice that in your own lives, apart
from your activity as a rehearsing musician, the most difficult point in your life is
when it seems to you that you have nothing to do. If, at that point when you have
nothing do, you can focus your attention and keep your curiosity alive, you will
enjoy your life far more than not. So instead of feeling the compulsion, when you
have nothing to do, to make fun of something, or to distract somebody, use your
faculties, use your senses to listen, for instance, to what is going on, and if you’re
tired of listening, use your eyes to see what is going on. But don’t try, as our
nations do, to upset the whole applecart.
Now if one of you, in spite of what I’m saying in this direction, decides to
revolt – I have no control. I have tried to make a piece in which it is evident
that maybe the conductor, that maybe the composer, that everyone has renounced
control.220 So that I will not act as a policeman. But you have an opportunity here
to be an individual in your own right, and coming from your own centre, and I
would be, of course, delighted if you do that nobly.
Now coming from the activity of being a human being to the activity of a
human being producing a sound. Your whole experience in the past of performing
music makes you think that you have to give some emotion from you to the sound.
But I have tried to do in this piece, through using chance operations to compose it
and through getting the position of the notes from the position of stars on maps of
stars, I have tried to give up my feelings about how music should be and certainly
about how it would get more expressive, and should let the sounds come from their
own centres. And I have a faith that if those sounds do that – if they’re allowed to
do that – that we will have something that’s magnificent to hear.
One of you, while we were having the intermission, said that shouldn’t we
have sounds which had crescendo and diminuendo? Now these simple ideas that
we get in our human head, of things getting louder or gradually getting softer, are
one thing, but what I think would be more beautiful is if we let the sound do it

219
Strangely enough the audience divided themselves into the curious, the
uninterested and the dedicated – that is, they left or stayed – not because they were annoyed
(or entertained) by the antics of individuals in the orchestra, but because they were bored,
annoyed or entertained by (or at least had their attention sustained by) or impressed with
the music.
220
I’ve already noted that the performers, in order to produce the sounds that Cage
wants, cannot renounce control, and when they did and behaved ‘badly’ then Cage was
upset, perhaps justifiably so. Although Cage may not control – in the sense that Beethoven
controls – precisely what and when a musician plays, he is controlling the social situation:
that a large number of people have been forced (asked, and paid) to play a score created (no
matter how, why) by an individual (Cage), in front of a larger number of paying spectators
(who had the freedom to leave if they were not interested in what was going on).
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 275

itself. Now when you move to an extreme situation, which I don’t think you yet do
in this performance, when you move, for instance, to trying to make a sound softer
than you ever made a sound, that sound, through your intensity of trying to make
it soft, will be unpredictably changing in dynamics; and not in an expressive way,
but in the way that the veins in leaves or that the ripples in water or in any of the
other things that we notice in nature have that variety, have it.
I don’t know if I’m making myself clear, but I’m trying. When you make a soft
sound, make it so soft that you’re not sure that it was produced. Don’t project it,
don’t give it a push, just bring it into existence, let it fly out of its own nest. And
let most of them be so soft that you had never heard them soft. Certainly when you
hear a loud sound from someone else, don’t automatically make your soft sound
less soft.221 If you set out to make a soft sound, make it as soft as you possibly can.
And if you’re going to make a loud sound, make it so loud that some one of us
will jump. Besides making life boring, we can also make it surprising and it will
surprise us more if we don’t fill it with our intentions but give ourselves to the
production of just our simple work.
So you have two things to do in this piece: you have, on the one hand, a great
deal of the time nothing to do. Try to learn to do that beautifully. And when you
make the sounds, make them with some extremity, as though you were in a forest
and had never found this sound before and you were delighted to discover it. This
piece doesn’t have any of my ideas or any of my feelings in it – it’s just sounds.222
Now one thing that happened with regard to the rhythm. Let me point out that
when Mr Dufallo came to a new system, 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, there tended to be a burst
of concerted activity on the part of the whole orchestra. Now take a more refined
attitude towards the notation, look at it more exactly and you’ll see that you don’t all
start immediately the moment the system starts. Try to distinguish details of distance,
do everything you can to keep the piece from becoming the activity of a group of
sheep. Let it be the activity of 86 people who have come together probably …
Give attention to those details of dynamic and of microtonality, and of when
to play duration: if you have, for instance, a series of five short sounds, don’t play

221
The tendency to play loud seemed to be unavoidable, so we had the spectacle of
the piece becoming a human process, progressing gradually (and uncontrolled by any one
individual) from a situation at the beginning where soft sounds predominated, to one where,
by the end, everybody appeared to be playing loud. A magnificent process, but, alas, not
Atlas Eclipticalis.
222
One wonders, then, whose ideas Atlas does contain. Of ‘sounds being sounds’
Cornelius Cardew has written: ‘Cage calling his music “sounds” (rather than music) therefore
represents an attempt to remove it from the human sphere (categorically impossible, since
the activities of human beings can never be non-human), from which he promises himself a
double advantage: (a) it would absolve him from his human responsibility for his actions as
a human being, and (b) it would give his music the superhuman “objective” authority of a
phenomenon of (blind, unconscious) nature’; in Stockhausen Serves Imperialism (London:
Latimer, 1974), p. 113.
276 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

them regularly, 1–2–3–4–5. Try to make the spaces between them as distinctly
different as the difference between stones. If there are five stones in a space, and
they were dropped there. Let them have their own pace rather than the pace you
give them by measuring them. If we can become, as human beings, a little less
close to that business of being able to measure, if we can get a little more into
the unknown …

‘Hearing/Seeing’ (Studio International, 192, November/December 1976,

pp. 233–43)

Max Ernst, around 1950, speaking at the Arts Club on Eighth Street in New
York City, said that significant changes in the arts formerly occurred every three
hundred years, whereas now they take place every 20 minutes.

Such changes happen first in the arts which, like plants, are fixed to particular
points in space: architecture, painting and sculpture. They happen afterward
in the performance arts, music and theatre, which require, as animals do, the
passing of time for their realisation …

Observe that the enjoyment of a modern painting carries one’s attention not to a
center of interest but all over the canvas and not following any particular path.
Each point on the canvas may be used as a beginning, continuing, or ending
of one’s observation of it. This is the case also with those works which are
symmetrical, for then the observer’s attention is made mobile by the rapidity
with which he drops the problem of understanding structure …

The tardiness of music with respect to the arts just mentioned is its good fortune.
It is able to make deductions from their experiences and to combine these with
necessarily different experiences which arise from its special nature. First of
all, then, a composer at this moment frees his music of a single overwhelming
climax. Seeking an interpenetration and non-obstruction of sounds, he renounces
harmony and its effect of fusing sounds in a fixed relationship. Giving up the
notion of hauptstimme, his ‘counterpoints’ are superimpositions, events that
are related to one another only because they take place at the same time. If he
maintains in his work aspects of structure, they are symmetrical in character,
canonic or enjoying an equal importance of parts, either those that are present at
one instant, or those that succeed one another in time.
 John Cage (1963) 223

223
Cage, ‘Happy New Ears!’ [1963], in A Year from Monday (London: Calder and
Boyars, 1968), p. 31. [Apart from some minor editorial changes and additions, all the
footnotes in this article belong to the original text.]
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 277

I think experimental music is much closer to art than to mainstream music. I

think that if one’s producing single entity works, then it’s very much like doing a
picture, it’s less like following an argument. In a way it has that sort of snapshot
effect, the whole thing is encapsulated as a single statement rather than following
the strands of developmental logic, and contrasts, and recapitulations, and how
things are pitted one against another, contrasting sections, and so on. I think that
it’s not necessary, really, to view experimental works in time, whereas I think
that with all other music it is. Obviously it’s a necessary condition of music that
it’s experienced in time, but I think that time isn’t a factor which governs its
course in experimental music.
Gavin Bryars, in conversation with John White and Michael Nyman
(July 1976). All Bryars and White quotes in this article are from this
conversation.

Because of the difference of medium, there can be no exact equivalence between

individual music and visual works on the material and perceptual level. Sounds
are experienced differently from visual forms, and specific analogies are
generally misleading. It is on the basis of common theoretical principles and
their underlying attitudes that the association between musicians and systems
artists has been developed.
 Michael Parsons (1976)224

Points and Lines

Setting aside the paradoxical condition of ‘blankness’225 I suppose the most

reductive visual ‘event’ would be a single point. A literal translation of this point

224
Michael Parsons, ‘Systems in Art and Music’, Musical Times, 117/1604 (October
1976), pp. 815–18, p. 816.
225
Musical blankness: John Cage’s so-called silent piece, 4’33”, a timeframe
in which to observe the sounds of the environment; visual blankness: Rauschenberg’s
white paintings. Cage quotes Rauschenberg’s ‘A canvas is never empty’ (‘On Robert
Rauschenberg, Artist, and his Work’, Silence (London: Calder and Boyars, 1961), p. 99) and
notes that ‘The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later’. Still, in 1964, Cage
felt that ‘Whether or not a painting or sculpture lacks a centre of interest may be determined
by observing whether or not it is destroyed by the effects of shadows. (Intrusions of the
environment are effects of time. But they are welcomed by a painting which makes no
attempt to focus the observer’s attention.) Observe also those works of painting, sculpture,
and architecture which, employing transparent materials, become inseparable from their
changing environment.’ (‘Happy New Ears!’, p. 31.)
It’s worthwhile perhaps dwelling a little on Cage, since he appears to have had a more
liberating influence – both in terms of technique and sensibility – on visual artists than any
other composer in the last 25, or maybe 75, years. He has himself noted that the music/art,
art/music influence works in different directions at different times: ‘When starting to be
abstract, artists referred to musical practices to show that what they were doing was valid,
278 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

into sound, if that point were the sole content of some ludicrously minimal graphic
score, would consist of a single note. As far as I know such a puny piece does
not, nor ever will exist, although I do remember somebody suggesting a kind of
microdot version of Wagner’s Ring cycle, to be realised by speeding up a complete
recording of the opera so fast that it would be all over in a second or so.226
But there is one graphic score that consists of a single horizontal line, 31⁄10
inches long, printed on a white card 5 by 3 inches and placed in an envelope on
which is printed ‘the enclosed score is right side up when the line is horizontal and

so, nowadays, musicians, to explain what they are doing, say “See, the painters and sculptors
have been doing it for quite some time”.’ (‘Lecture on Something’, in Silence, p. 144).
Questions of influence are so difficult to pinpoint exactly, and so generalised in effect,
that I shall make no further reference to the influence of one art form on another. Cage
himself acknowledges the influence of the very much younger Rauschenberg (at the time
he was writing ‘Lecture on Something’), not only in that the white paintings gave him
‘permission’ to realise the silent piece he had conceived some four years earlier, but also,
for instance, by opening his mind to the possibility of including historical musical objects in
his own music. Speaking of his distaste for certain aspects of the music of Charles Ives he
said: ‘What had put me off Ives was all the American business. I didn’t like that. You see,
in modern painting I was devoted to Mondrian; just as I had chosen Schoenberg in music
so I had chosen Mondrian in painting (during the 1930s). And it was not through my own
inclinations but through the excitement and work of Robert Rauschenberg that I came to be
involved in representational work. If, then, I could accept representation in painting I could
of course accept the Americana aspects of Ives’ (Alan Gilmour, ‘Interview with John Cage’,
Contact, 14 (Autumn 1976), p. 19).
This puts in a rather different light the suggestion that Cage allowed Rauschenberg
and Johns ‘to consider a wider choice of materials and approach. As with Cage’s “sounds”,
anything and everything was possible through his “Theory of Inclusion”’ (Mario Amaya,
Pop as Art (London: Studio Vista, 1965), p. 51). There is no reference to any such ‘theory’
in Cage’s writings, and this is a mild indication of the way in which the ideas and music of
Cage (and of other composers) can be so easily misrepresented and misinterpreted. I have
therefore included only quotations from composers, musicians or artist-participants in this
article (though musicians, myself included, may be equally prone to misinterpret the visual
arts, even if they can at least clarify the ‘purely’ musical issues).
Since writing this article I encountered a comment by Robert Morris which reinforces
the position I have adopted: ‘There may indeed be a general sensibility in the arts at this
time. Yet the histories and problems of each, as well as the experiences offered by each art,
indicate involvement in very separate concerns. At most, assertions of common sensibilities
are generalisations which minimize differences.’ (In Space (‘Notes on Sculpture’, 1966),
reprinted in Über Kunst (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1974), p. 19.)
226
Cf. the pre-electric proposals in Marinetti’s ‘The Variety Theatre’ manifesto of
1913 (Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973),
pp. 129–30): ‘Play a Beethoven symphony backwards, beginning with the last note. – Boil
all of Shakespeare down to a single act’; and ‘we unconditionally endorse the performance
of [Wagner’s] Parsifal in 40 minutes, now in rehearsal in a great London music-hall’.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 279

slightly above centre’.227 This is La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 No. 9. If a

performer realised this score ignorant of Young’s interests at the time, or simply
chose to disregard them, he might be inclined to treat the line simply as a visual
metaphor for a melody, since one conventionally speaks of a melodic line, a bass
line (in traditional music based on tune and accompaniment) or of the interweaving
of lines (in contrapuntal music). But in 1960 (and to a modified extent ever since)
Young was ‘more interested in concurrency or simultaneity than in sequence …
I was really interested not only in a single note, but in chords, while other musical
systems have placed great emphasis on melody and line or sequence’;228 he wrote
(and re-wrote a number of times), ‘Draw a straight line and follow it’; composed
a ‘musicalised’ version in the form of two notes, B and F, ‘to be held for a long
time’ (Composition 1960 No. 7); and performed Composition 1960 No. 9 at one
sustained pitch.
Whether we speak of reduction (the musical composition to a single sustained
line or chord, the painting to a single stripe) or, more correctly, of beginning from
zero,229 how are these visual and musical fundamentals articulated, or perhaps
re-articulated if you view the line piece in terms of reduction? The painting is on
a canvas as large as or maybe larger than, a traditional size canvas; the line piece
could go on for as long as, or longer than, a traditional symphony (how long is
‘long’ in ‘to be held for a long time’?).
In comparison with the complex profile of the traditional musical work, the
Young line piece might be said to fall in line with Lawrence Alloway’s definition
of hard-edge painting: ‘The whole picture becomes a unit; forms extend the length
of the painting or are restricted to two or three tones. The result of this sparseness
is that the spatial effect of figures on a field is avoided’.230 Alloway also remarks
that the surface of hardedge painting is ‘immaculate’. But can the ‘surface’ of the
sustained note, or drone, or chord, be described as immaculate? Conceptually and
as it appears on paper it is immaculate, uninflected, flat – call it what you will.
But once you begin to listen to the musical stripe, you immediately perceive that
musical ‘tones’ (to adopt Alloway’s word) act differently on the ear from the way
visual tones do on the eye.
Listening to this seemingly unvarying persistence of sound induces perceptual
changes of a different order from, say, standing in front of a Frank Stella painting
for the same amount of time.231 This is even the case where the drone is produced

227
In Jackson Mac Low and La Monte Young (eds.), An Anthology (Munich: Heiner
Friedrich Gallery, 1970), unpaginated.
228
Young, Selected Writings (Munich: Heiner Friedrich, 1969), pp. 32–3.
229
‘The most important point for me in your book is the distinction you make between
“avant-garde” and “experimental” music (and, by implication, musicart, art …). The origin
is at zero.’ (George Brecht, personal correspondence with Nyman, 18 June 1976.)
230
Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art (New York: Studio Vista, 1969), p. 45.
231
I made the comparison with painting because of the visual presentation of
Young’s musical idea; a better analogy might have been a Flavin fluorescent fixture (for its
280 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

electronically with sine waves (no overtones) or with wedged-down notes on an

organ (no articulation). You might hear your own melodies, apparent decorations
being produced, harmonics being reinforced – a whole host of psycho-acoustic
effects – or you may become aware that the drone is merely serving as a background
to the sounds of the environment. The work thus becomes open-ended or open-
sided, open-profiled, so that the supposed hard edge is softened or rather, added to;
but this vertical and horizontal accumulation that the drone ‘attracts’ is of a totally
different order from conventional musical linearity.
Even, or especially, in an electronic realisation with a ‘perfect’ surface, the
apparent stasis of the continuous line produces movement; singularity produces
variety. This is the purpose behind Composition 1960 No. 7 and, especially,
Young’s Drift Study:

Sine waves have the unique characteristic among soundwave forms of having
only one frequency component. All other soundwave forms have more than
one frequency component. When a continuous frequency is sounded in an
enclosed space such as a room, the air in the room is arranged into high- and
low-pressure areas. In the high-pressure areas the sound is louder, and in the
low-pressure areas the sound is softer. Since a sine wave has only one frequency
component, the pattern of high- and low-pressure areas is easy to locate in space.
Further, concurrently sounding sine waves of different frequencies will provide
an environment in which the loudness of each frequency will vary audibly at
different points in the room, given sufficient amplification. This phenomenon
can rarely be appreciated in most musical situations and makes the listener’s
position and movement in the space an integral part of the sound composition.232

In a live performance, say by string instruments, the mechanics of bowing, with

their inherent unevenness, introduces a wide range of other unpredictables. In
a letter to John White in 1971,233 Cornelius Cardew wrote that ‘In the old days
(La Monte Young, etc.) a bow could last a minute and all kinds of things could
happen in it. So much could happen within it that it didn’t seem terribly important
how it began or ended (anyhow, usually at the end of the bow one would simply
just turn around and come back again).’ Cardew was speaking of the performance

‘persistence’), or a LeWitt wall drawing (for its ‘roughness’ – ‘Imperfections of the

wall surface are occasionally apparent after the drawing is completed. These should be
considered a part of the wall drawing’ (Arts Magazine, April 1970)); or ‘badly finished’
boxes by Robert Morris; or the reflective and transparent art works Cage refers to in
footnote [225]. But all such comparisons are of little real value.
232
Young, Selected Writings.
233
Programme notes for the Queen Elizabeth Hall concert performance of White’s
Tuba and Cello Machine, 17 May 1971, published as two booklets of ‘Machine Letters’ –
Cardew to White and White to Cardew.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 281

of White’s Tuba and Cello Machine which they were preparing for the Queen
Elizabeth Hall performance. In an earlier letter he’d written:

These two big large instruments have very overloaded spectra, especially in the
higher reaches, and the partials in these high reaches are all out of tune because
of the actual dimension of the column of air, and the calibre of the string that is
vibrating … So as the piece progresses attention focuses more and more in the
conflicts and resolutions amongst these upper partials, so much so that we as
players lose our capability of tuning the actual fundamental notes we are bowing
or blowing. So – all Machine music representing a decay process anyway – we
start with the two worlds in reasonably good alignment as far as most ordinary
criteria go, and gradually drift apart.234

This ‘drift’ obviously links Tuba and Cello Machine with the Young Drift Study
superficially. More fundamentally, although White’s piece is not strictly linear
since it is not a single (sustained) line, it does repeat the same melodic information
in different permutations and combinations throughout its potentially considerable
length, and is therefore a ‘version’ of Young’s line piece. This ‘interpretation’ is
not as loose or fanciful as it seems. Howard Skempton recently remarked to me
that he considered his Waltz (1970) to be related to Young’s ‘open fifth’ score,
even though it is a melodic, tonal, modular piece and is thus a totally different
experience. For Skempton it is simply a decoration of the line piece. In fact
Skempton went so far as to say that ‘all “systems music” is a version of “Draw
a straight line and follow it”’ (Young’s Composition 1960 No. 10).235 The point I
am making is not that Young should be credited with the composition, or at least
the conception of most experimental music since 1960,236 but that the musical and
perceptual consequences of the fundamental concept/image ‘line’ in music are of a
totally different order from the function of a line in the visual arts.237

234
Such acoustic details make one appreciate the ultimate simple-mindedness of the
various attempts in the past to find analogies between sounds and colours. What colour is
middle C on a flute; what colour is that same note on a tuba, etc? And if a ‘blue’ chord is
combined with a ‘yellow’ chord, is the result a ‘green’ chord? Or if the equation is colour =
key, then the subtle and often rapid changes in even a short musical piece would need to be
paralleled by an impracticable number of changes of shade.
235
See Parsons, ‘Systems in Art and Music’, pp. 816–17.
236
Once you have decided, as Young did, that a line ‘is a potential of existing time’,
you could claim that almost all music, usually perceived linearly, is a realisation of Young’s
line pieces, or the line pieces are reductions of all previous music.
237
Not that all graphically notated music was necessarily realised ‘naturalistically’
– see a line, play a line, see a circle, play a circular sound/a circular instrument, etc. Earle
Brown’s December 1952 consists of 31 horizontal and vertical blocks, of different lengths
and thicknesses spaced over a single sheet. A naturalistic visualisation of this would consist
logically of chords, clusters, sustained sounds, etc. A more ‘symbolic’ but not unrelated
realisation made by John Tilbury during the 1960s, treated the horizontal rectangles as
282 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

And of course there are the social consequences of performance which self-
evidently distinguish music from the visual arts: the nature of the sounds employed
to realise the line, the receptiveness or lack of it, of the audience, as we find in
Al Hansen’s account of a performance at the Cooper Union of Young’s tape of
2 Sounds:238 ‘one, a contact mike on a tin can whose open end was being rubbed
in a circular movement on a pane of glass; the other a contact mike on a cymbal
with a drum stick or drum stick head or brush stick being moved about in a circular
motion on a cymbal. This made a sound not unlike a wagon wheel creaking, which
was repeated for at least 15–20 minutes and it seemed like three hours. Members
of the audience became quite distressed. Many people started stamping their feet
and chanting.’239

Music and Movements

So although the line piece may be related to Minimal Art conceptually, musically
it appears to cross a lot of frontiers, while chronologically and stylistically it was
performed in the atmosphere of Happenings and Fluxus. Although it is tempting
to align (unnamed) music ‘movements’ with (named) art movements, it is both
an impossible and dangerous game to play – the more so since there are parallels
and connections (Cage/Rauschenberg, for example). For instance Happenings – in
Allan Kaprow’s hands at least – grew out of, and away from, the same Abstract
Expressionism that Minimal Art is said to reject. Kaprow was influenced in this
shift from objects to environments and performance by Cage in his New School
class in the late 1950s. Young began composing in California in the mid-1950s,
developing sustained-note music out of the very pitch-oriented serialism that Cage
himself had rejected in favour of rhythmically-structured ‘noise music’ in the mid-
1930s. Cage adopted chance methods, developed various forms of indeterminacy
and new notions of time, accepted the sounds of the environment, conceived
of music as theatre acting in some intersection between art and life etc., from
1950 onwards. Young’s reductive serialism, purely musical, could be seen to be
a reaction against Cage in the same way as Barbara Rose considers the so-called
ABC artists’ ‘reserved impersonality and self-effacing anonymity as a reaction
against the self-indulgence of an unbridled subjectivity, as much as one might
see it in terms of a formal reaction to the excesses of painterliness’.240 Very neat;
but Young did not discover Cage until 1958.241 And it would be wrong in another
sense, too, since it implies an equation of Cage with Abstract Expressionism –

melody with thickness representing intensity, and length, duration; the vertical blocks are
harmony, with width again representing intensity and height frequency.
238
Also used in Merce Cunningham’s ballet Winterbranch (1960).
239
Al Hansen, A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art (New York: Something
Else Press, 1965), p. 35.
240
Rose, quoted in Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art, p. 274.
241
See ibid., p. 280.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 283

whereas Cage adopted chance procedures and indeterminacy precisely in order to

bypass his own personality, his ‘tastes, memories and desires’. Additionally one
could not call Cage’s own pre-chance music self-indulgent, let alone subjective
or unbridled. But from another angle George Brecht sees a close connection
between Cage and Pollock in their use of chance methods. And if ‘painterliness’
is to be equated with Morton Feldman’s desire for a ‘sound world more direct,
more immediate, more physical than anything that had existed heretofore’242 and
with Cage’s attempts to ‘let sounds be themselves’, then one should speak of a
continuous, unbroken tradition of experimental music from Cage/Feldman/Brown/
Wolff of 1950 right through to the present day, since whatever structural concerns,
whatever iconography, whatever seeming contradictions between one ‘movement’
and another, there remains this consistency: that composers ‘treat sound not as
material to be ordered and put into meaningful symbolic forms as a medium for
human expression, but as something autonomous and impersonal’.243
To return to La Monte Young: his discovery of Cage in 1959 did have a
decisive influence on his music, especially in the use of chance procedures and
visual/theatrical materials in Vision and Poem. His association with Fluxus did
have an influence on the way that he presented his work: in the form of reductive
verbal scores. His preoccupation with sustained sounds was obviously part of his
Fluxus work, but it survived Fluxus and, coupled with a growing interest in precise
intonation, Indian chanting, a permanently-installed sound continuum and a very
un-composerly exclusivity, has continued with his Theatre of Eternal Music, to
the present.
It is possible to see Cage’s work, like that of Rauschenberg, as being able to
cross over what seem to be mutually-exclusive media, aesthetic, material, external
forms. What remains consistent, of course, what unifies everything he does is his
unflinching adherence to various chance procedures, mainly the I-Ching, which
means that all his works are informed with the same spirit, the same attitude to
materials, whatever they are, the same style. Thus, while he was indulging in
the ‘environmental abundance’, of Musicircus and HPSCHD in 1969,244 he was
also composing the highly reductive Cheap Imitation, in which multiplicity was
superseded by singularity, as Satie’s melody line, stripped bare of its harmonic,
expressive and textural context (Socrate) was transformed intervallically by
means of chance procedures. Thus the rhythm remains the same, the melodic
profile is retained, but the distances between one note and the next are altered. This

242
‘Liner Notes’, originally published in Kulchur, 2/6 (Summer 1962); see also Give
My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman (Cambridge MA:
Exact Change, 2000), p. 5.
243
John Tilbury and Michael Parsons, ‘The Contemporary Pianist’, Musical Times,
110 (February 1969), pp. 150–52.
244
See Richard Kostelanetz (ed.), John Cage (London: Allen Lane, 1970), pp. 171–2,
and 173–7.
284 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

is ‘minimal music’ done in Cage’s terms and difficult to place in any particular
aesthetic area (apart from Cage’s own).245
Certain younger composers like Reich and Lucier would not cross frontiers in
this way, since like many of their contemporaries and associates in the visual arts,
they have, after a period of experimentation, clearly defined their aesthetic stance,
their preferred materials, and the procedural area in which they choose to work.
With English experimental composers, what would be seen (in the art world) as
a radical and perplexing shift of position, in music appears to be just a change of
emphasis. Michael Parsons has admirably summarised this position:

Whereas in the Scratch Orchestra situation we were interested in going beyond

established limits and conventions, I think now all four of us246 are interested
in working within strictly defined limits, and even in imposing much greater
restrictions on what we do than is usual in traditional music. I don’t see any
contradiction or reversal of attitude here, just a change of emphasis. Writing
pieces for the Scratch Orchestra was essentially a process of establishing
restraints and controls in an otherwise free situation; without these restraints
the freedom was meaningless. Conversely, if one works within defined limits,
differences and variations become more apparent.247

What is interesting here is the parallel with, say, Reich’s violent rejection of Cage
in the 1960s248 – that is, if one takes, as one should, the Scratch Orchestra as being
the most developed form of English Cageianism. In England the transition was
accelerated, so that the ‘changeover’ happened in the space of two or three years.249
This radical ‘shift of emphasis’ was accomplished in the hands of the same
composers who then went on to write what might be loosely termed as various
kinds of ‘systems music’. Not only that, but the two compositional approaches
indicated by Parsons were being used at the same time – the shift from one to the
other was gradual and phased. In fact such a shift is more concerned with materials
than processes: among the Scratch Orchestra ‘Improvisation Rites’ one finds a
quasi-system from Michael Parsons:

Before playing jump up and down 25 times. While playing, jump once for
each sound you make. You may save up your jumps, up to 25, but not more

245
For more on Cage’s Cheap Imitation, see ‘Cage and Satie’, Musical Times, 114
(December 1973).
246
Christopher Hobbs, Michael Parsons, Howard Skempton and John White.
247
Unpublished communication, 1973.
248
‘See ‘Steve Reich: Interview’ below, published in the same issue of Studio
International as this article.
249
See Rod Eley’s ‘A History of the Scratch Orchestra 1969–72’, in Cardew’s
Stockhausen Serves Imperialism (London: Latimer, 1974) for an account of the
contradictions, musical and otherwise, that developed in the Scratch Orchestra.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 285

(i.e. you can play up to 25 sounds without jumping and then do your jumps all
at once). When you’ve had enough, make it clear that you’re not doing this rite
any more.250

As the materials become more musically defined and refined, so the demands made
on purely musical skills increase and the systems employed become somewhat
more complex and specialised. English systemic music, in principle, is closer
to American systems art than is Reich’s ‘process’ music (though the condition
of adapting procedures and materials to the sometimes limited capabilities of
performers and instruments is one that must be unknown to visual systems artists).
Significantly, Reich wrote to me that ‘to me the term “systems art” is
something unknown. So I leave it to you to make analogies between that [British]
movement and “process” art’. In his statement ‘Music as a Gradual Process’
Reich distinguished between the older (basically European) serial music where
the series itself is seldom audible, and the newer (basically American) art, ‘where
the perceived series is usually the focal point of the work’.251 (Reich was thinking
specifically of Sol LeWitt’s open white cube grids of the 1960s.) Mel Bochner’s
definition of serialism is especially relevant to English systems music:

Seriality is premised on the idea that the succession of terms (divisions) within
a single work is based on a numerical or otherwise predetermined derivation
(progression, permutation, rotation, reversal) from one or more of the preceding
terms in that piece. Furthermore the idea is carried out to its logical conclusion,
which, without adjustments based on taste or chance, is the work … [when]
numbers are used it is generally as a convenient regulating device, a logic
external to both the time and place of application.252

Compare this with what Michael Parsons has written of English systemic music:

As in the visual work described,253 the use of numerical systems in this kind
of music is objective, in the sense that, once the elements to be used in a piece
have been chosen, it can give a detachment which makes it possible to find ways
of combining them not dependent on aesthetic preference. A musical system
is not conceived abstractly, but is embodied in the form of a specific sound
or instrumental technique. It may emerge gradually through investigation of

250
Nature Study Notes (Experimental Music Catalogue, 1969).
251
Such as Schoenberg, Webern, etc., based on the permutation of a ‘row’ of all 12
semitones; see Reich’s ‘Music as a Gradual Process’, in Writings on Music (ed. Hillier),
pp. 34–6, p. 35.
252
Quoted in Battcock (ed.) Minimal Art, pp. 100–01.
253
That of Malcolm Hughes, Michael Kidner, David Saunders, Jeffrey Steele etc.
286 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

the character of the sound; once chosen, it is not modified by free choice, but
involves a willingness to accept the unforeseen.254

Three Musical Systems in Action

Reich noted that whereas Cage has used compositional processes, random
systems, there is no audible connection between the process and the sounding
music: obviously, since their intended purpose was to create maximum disorder
rather than any perceived order amongst materials of maximum variability. When
random procedures are used where the limits of material are precisely fixed,
chance becomes perceptible and the variety of the piece is a by-product of chance.
In the percussion duo music by Christopher Hobbs and John White, numbers,
both in series and in random distribution within specified limits, are used to
determine bar-lengths, the rate of expansion or contraction of a figure, the number
of repeats, and so on.255 Against a regular, but by no means fast, pulse, Hobbs and
White deploy the rather dry sounds of a very limited, rather gentle palette – small
drums, bells, woodblocks, cymbals; the number systems ensure that, on a stable,
often severe surface, these sound-points are presented as a gently implacable
procession of small, but perceptible, shifts of lengths, ordering and combination.
Since these sounds are predominantly dry, and the number of instruments used
somewhat restricted, they tend to simply combine rather than mix to produce
an overwhelming, or any sort of sensory appeal.256 They are, like much English
systems music, concerned merely with the clear and perceptible articulation of
time, as Michael Parsons has pointed out: it is possible, quite often, to ‘hear’ the
numerical system as it is directly translated into sound.
Where, however, a developing rather than permutative system is used (the
gradual growth of points into ever-lengthening ‘lines’ of reverberation of a large
number of sonorous metal percussion instruments), the perceptual consequences
are unexpected – especially since the notation appears to notate lines, but in
fact only indicates the length of a vanishing line, as the sound decays. When
four independent, but systemically related, sets of these rhythmic patterns
are superimposed (each set contains short figures to be repeated a number of
times, all but one beat in each figure one unit longer than the previous one), the

254
Michael Parsons, ‘Systems in Art and Music’, p. 816.
255
See White’s note for his ‘Photo-Finish Machine’, in Recent English Experimental
Music, Audio Arts (cassette), 3/2 (1976). Audio Arts was a British-based sound magazine
founded by Barry Barker and William Furlong in 1973. From 1973 to 2006, 25 volumes
of four issues each were produced, reflecting a wide range of the contemporary arts. Tate
acquired the archive in 2004 and exhibited part of the collection at Tate Britain in 2007.
Vol. 3, no. 2, which included music by composers such as Skempton, Hobbs, Bryars, White
and Nyman, was published in order to complement the November/December 1976 issue of
Studio International, whose theme was ‘Art and Experimental Music’.
256
Unlike the music of their American near-counterparts – Reich, Riley, Glass, etc.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 287

gradual transition from points to lines which you would expect if the system
were a purely visual one, does not happen. Instead, predominantly fast motion,
suddenly and unexpectedly at a given point some seven minutes into the piece,
becomes slow. The cause is obvious: whereas with a single augmentation set the
elongation process is more or less perceptible (not at every step, since with such
short increments a 12-beat note is not distinguishable from a 13-beat note), when
all four sets are combined the effect of a phenomenon that does not exist in the
static visual arts takes over – that of contrapuntality, which is a more complex,
unpredictable phenomenon than superimposition.257 Some three-dimensional
serial objects appear to present a similar contradiction between conceptual order
and perceptual chaos. Witness Mel Bochner’s description of possibly the same
LeWitt work that Reich referred to in ‘Music as a Gradual Process’:

When one encounters a LeWitt, although an order is immediately intuited, how to

apprehend or penetrate it is nowhere revealed. Instead one is overwhelmed with
a mass of data – lines, joints, angles. By controlling so rigidly the conception
of the work and never adjusting it to any predetermined ideas of how a work of
art should look, LeWitt arrives at a unique perceptual breakdown of conceptual
order into visual chaos.258

In Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, 1971 (Obscure 1) we find
what amounts to a curious reversal of this order/chaos phenomenon. A found tune,
a tramp singing a sentimental religious song, is initially presented unaccompanied:
made into a tape loop it repeats without break or variation. Since the tramp is not a
trained singer, there are certain deviations, in time and tuning, from the sophisticated
norm, so that during the opening four minutes or so of unaccompanied repetition,
your ear becomes accustomed to accepting these ‘deviations’. The overall plan of
the piece is simple: while the tune continues to repeat unvaryingly (since it’s on a
loop), the instruments are introduced, individually or in groups, at stages during
the piece. When the first instruments are brought in, with a ‘correct’ harmonisation
of the tune, one experiences a sudden shock, since the tune suddenly shifts gear as
it’s ‘straightened out’, slightly cramped into the standard container of traditional
harmony. (Only as far as the tuning of the melody is concerned, since rhythmically
the situation is still flexible, if not unpredictable, as the accompanying musicians

257
I refer here to a piece of mine, Bell Set No. 1 (Obscure 6) which was composed
as a ‘rationalisation’ of the ‘imperfect’ system of Steve Reich’s Four Organs. The contrast
between the two pieces illustrates very succinctly that sound has an ‘uncontrollable’ force
that transcends the ‘logic’ of numerical or other systems. (Its own logic is more powerful,
more resonant, than paint, for example.) Although Reich’s additive numerical system,
applied to a genuine ‘points becoming lines’ process, contains several ‘leaps’, Four Organs
sounds seamless; the additive system of Bell Set is numerically seamless, but the music
‘leaps’. See also ‘Steve Reich: Interview’, Studio International, 192 [below].
258
Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art, p. 101.
288 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

have to follow the slight rhythmic vagaries of the absent tramp.) The found object
is gradually ‘accepted’ into the increasingly sensuous setting – though the earlier
instrumental additions obviously have a stronger effect on one’s perception of the
tune than the later ones, even if on another level one hears the piece as a gradual
increasing of instrumental richness, and the original tune loses its initial central focus.
Discussing Jesus’ Blood with Gavin Bryars, John White said that:

Listening to Jesus’ Blood I suppose one goes through several phases of

identifying familiarity, and then alienation of some sort and then with any luck
one plunges in over the top, rather like waking up after half falling asleep at
3 o’clock in the morning, talking with people, and having second wind. Are you
deliberately interested in that process of the second wind of listening?

Bryars replied:

Certainly, and of playing in that piece. I’ve never played it for longer than 35 or
40 minutes but I’m not averse to the idea of playing it a lot longer. The durations
of the performances have been conditioned by external factors – the length of
a spool of tape, the length of a reel of film, the length of a cassette – all those
things have conditioned how long a performance is, rather than questions of how
long the duration ought to be, given the material, the question of exploiting the
material, making use of it to full advantage. Questions of that kind have never
arisen with that piece at all.

This attitude towards time and form/content, not only sets English experimental
music apart from traditional music but also from its American counterpart, say the
music of Reich. It does, however, show that it is part of the heritage of Cage, who
stated that Christian Wolff’s Duo II for Pianists was:

[Evidently] not a time-object, but rather a process the beginning and ending
of which are irrelevant to its nature. The ending, and the beginning, will be
determined in performance, not by exigencies interior to the action but by
circumstances of the concert occasion. If the other pieces on the programme
take forty-five minutes of time and fifteen minutes more are required to bring the
programme to a proper length. Duo II for Pianists may be fifteen minutes long.
Where only five minutes are available, it will be five minutes long.259

259
Cage, Silence, pp. 38–9. The difference is also important; each performance of
Jesus’ Blood contains the whole process (the staggered introduction of the instruments) no
matter how short, or long, the performance is; with the music of Wolff (or Cage) only that
amount of the process that fits the allotted time will be played. For Reich’s attitude towards
duration see the second interview below (‘Steve Reich: Interview’, Studio International, 192).
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 289

Again, by analogy with the visual arts, one is tempted to call Jesus’ Blood a modular
structure. One finds a more developed, modular procedure in Howard Skempton’s
Waltz for piano.260 Where Bryars’ structure consists of the same module repeated
over and over again, in an increasingly rich setting, with no potential time limit,
Waltz is both more varied (there are four distinct modules) and fixed (the ordering is
ABAAA CDBDC DBDBA AABAB DABCA BDCAB). Like a three-dimensional
structure, Waltz is both modular and (to stretch a point) serial. Modular in that the
sets are each of 16 bars, each falling clearly into two eight-bar halves, each half
ending with the same chord sustained for two bars; thus each module contains two
exact, near-exact or symmetrical repeats. It is serial in that three of the sets are
identical – the bass line (D), and its harmonic implications, is the foundation of A
and C. The harmonic variable has been controlled, therefore, while melodically A,
C and D are differentiated: D has no melody, admittedly, but it is possible to hear
it as having either no melody or merely absence of melody, since we’ve become
familiar with D from A.
In terms of traditional formal relationships one could view B as an ‘answering
phrase’, a dependent clause of A (Skempton said ‘it came naturally’ after writing
A); to view, but not to hear, as the random repetition and reordering of the sets is
such that it separates itself from any hint of phrase functionalism. It’s not only this
whole-set permutation that creates, over an 8–10 minute period, non-directional
movement, but the fact that all four sets stabilise themselves, both at their half-
way point and at the end, on an identical tonic chord. This is the ‘home’ chord
of traditional tonal music, a chord which can only assert its ‘homeness’ by also
proclaiming ‘awayness’, which Skempton’s Waltz does not do.
No traditional piece of music would, could, ever have allowed itself to short-
circuit in the way that Waltz does. To hear the piece as a classical paradigm is
wrong (and, with its modular extension, impossible), but the C major chord does
give the clue as to what Waltz is about. For Skempton, Waltz was simply a method
of extending a single sound, the sound of that C major chord, or, rather, the interval
of the tenth [seventeenth]): the notes C and E heard in the first bar. Not only in the
first bar, but all through – since the whole structure is merely a melodic extension
of this interval – and in this sense Waltz is a 1970 ‘updating’ of Young’s 1960 ‘hold
a fifth’ piece. So set A is a simple melodic decoration of C/E, a simple going-away
and return (the bass line too), while set C presents two chromatic ‘directional
signs’ approaching the chord from different directions (Example 4).
Thus Waltz is the temporal extension of a single sound, different only in
method and result from all the other procedural devices for objectifying sound
that have been developed since Cage’s chance methods of the 1950s. But if, as
Michael Parsons rightly maintains, systems are ‘another way of making the music
objective, so that, not being used to express anything, the musical material is
free to be expressive as sound’, then Waltz admirably demonstrates that musical

260
See Recent English Experimental Music (Audio Arts (cassette), 3/2).
290 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Example 4 Howard Skempton’s Waltz © Howard Skempton (reproduced by

permission)
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 291

modular structures, unlike visual ones, do not necessarily preclude lyricism, and
that constructivism is not automatically synonymous with severity.
The Cageian experience of allowing sound to be ‘occupied with the performance
of its characteristics’ has, of course, altered the way one perceives the particles of a
musical structure. John White, very much consistent with Skempton’s conception
of Waltz, remarked that:

One thing that struck me about every performance of [Bryars’] The Sinking of the
Titanic (Obscure 1) was that there was one point I could relate to very strongly
as a listener; that whatever the associations, whatever the foreknowledge of
what the piece is about, there was one spacing of a chord in the original tape – I
think it’s a chord of A-flat major with the Cs doubled in the upper parts. There’s
just that incredibly pregnant quality about that particular sound, so that whether
it had been about ‘The Titanic’ or whether it had been about some completely
other subject, that particular contact with the piece, and the way it recurred,
made me focus and lose myself as a listener in considerations other than that of
the extra-musical parts of the piece.261

White notes that this is the way that many people experience music: ‘As far as
I’m concerned many people listen to a lot of classical music just from phrase

261
Alvin Lucier defines the role of the single chord in traditional music when he
says that ‘the better the piece is, the better the composer is, the more meanings one chord
or one sonority has in the piece. The idea of the chord functioning one way in one key and
functioning another way in another key, and that it’s at that point where you don’t quite
understand what the chord is going to do, makes the very interesting points. Or when the
theme comes back, but the orchestration and the accompaniment and any other parameter might
not be the same – that’s when the symbolism is very strong because the one item symbolises so
many different things. It’s very powerful – it’s like an image in a poem that you can take a look
at from many, many angles.’ (Lucier, unpublished interview by Douglas Simon.)
The best known example of the different functions of a single note occurs in the 10th
note of the first theme of the first movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony which, in the
exposition, is a C-sharp which proceeds in one tonal direction, but which is ‘altered’ to a
D-flat (the same note on the piano) in the recapitulation and goes in a different direction.
Needless to say experimental music has removed this plurality of meanings.
292 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

to phrase, waiting for the really good bit to come up, more or less switching off
after the eighteenth variation of Rachmaninov’s Paganini Variations, until the
exciting bit towards the end comes up.’ And he also pointed out that when new,
but non-experimental modern music crops up in concerts quoting familiar or older
source material:

These are made to seem so novel; but in fact possibly the objective should have
been to please people with some nifty keyboard work, so that one could just
go straight to the thing instead of all this messing around. This sets up a rather
strange kind of antagonism to conceptual music.

This ‘messing around’ occurs because

[In] those kind of pieces there’s this welter of contemporary acceptable

dissonance and a-rhythmic context, and it just seems an awful shame to drown
these good sources, when in fact one’s intuition, one’s way of expressing
oneself, probably transforms the sources anyway. These composers seem to be
very diffident about expressing some sort of passion for the materials.

This kind of attitude – White has written that ‘My compositions are all about
obsession with particular sounds and rhythms’ – informs the whole of his output,
whether using systems or not, pitched musical sounds or unpitched percussion
sounds. How such an approach cuts across seemingly contradictory categories is
best illustrated by quoting the following statement that White wrote specially for
this article:

The systemic pieces262 present the ‘obsessional units’ and the ‘spreading’
of them without any supplementary ‘scene-setting’ material. The PTO-style
pieces263 present larger basic groups of ‘obsessional units’ and less stringent,
less dissecting styles of treatment. The feeling is towards ‘furniture music’. The
so-called ‘intuitive’ music264 presents ‘obsessional units’ and their treatments
(transformations) in a landscape of possibly contrasted or unrelated material.
The action is of ‘setting’ the units to their best advantage from a theatrical point
of view.265 The experience of the new kind of musical structures (post-Webern)
makes for some unorthodoxies in forms applied to apparently traditional melodic
and harmonic material. (Snapshots rather than cinematographic developments.)

262
For example ‘Photo-Finish Machine’, in Recent English Experimental Music,
Audio Arts (cassette), 3/2 (1976).
263
For example Christopher Hobbs’ ‘Aran’ (in Recent English Experimental Music,
Audio Arts (cassette), 3/2 (1976)).
264
For example, the piano duets by White (and Hobbs) (in Recent English
Experimental Music, Audio Arts (cassette), 3/2 (1976)).
265
Rather more developed examples of Skempton’s chromatic scales in Waltz, perhaps.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 293

These ‘cinematographic developments’ are found in traditional music, such as the

Brahms F-sharp minor Piano Sonata which White says is ‘full of these noises of
development, it’s the development noise, the pedal notes, the sequences, and the
kind of rumbling angry sound that developed and always hangs about in German
works. But not a single statement or single sense of obsession with an actual
sound, with those kind of obsessive moments.’266

Listen to this Space

The drift away from systems and processes to intuitive may or may not be of
significance; Alvin Lucier would say not since he sees all types of performed
music as imposing systems in some way or another: ‘What composers of the past
did – this is a funny idea – was to have those sounds sort of locked in instruments
and then treat them abstractly or not abstractly, but treat them with another system
on them.’ More specifically he draws attention to Cage’s use of systems:

Now, I’ve had experience with John Cage where he was doing a speech piece
and I was doing the panning and the equalisation just to give it some electronic
qualities – and he was content to look at the dials and look at the numbers on the
dials and by I-Ching, by using chance procedures determined what the values
should be. That’s composition and that’s imposing one system on another, a
chance system on a Vernier system – John Cage looks at all the possibilities
and then subjects them to chance operations. That to me is artifice and I don’t
want to do that. I know that’s where art is but now I’m thinking of the physical
sounds, I just want to understand how they will hit an object and reflect around
or diffract around and I want to use that. So while I’m not dealing with sounds
in superimposed systems, which makes composing hard, I’m trying to deal with
physical realities of sound which is the hardest thing of all.267

Lucier’s composing-as-real-time-research is made clear in Stuart Marshall’s

article.268 It is a social and environmental project, qualitatively different from other

266
The kind of music that has led to disturbing avant-garde attitudes such as the
following: ‘Sounds, then, are not part of music, however essential they are to its transmission.
And neither are paint, pigment, or canvas parts of paintings, nor masses of bronze parts of
sculptures, nor pages and letters parts of poems. Sounds, in fact, are not even what musical
notation specifies … What scores do specify is information about music-structural components,
such as pitches, relative attack-times, relative durations, and whatever other quale-categorical
information is functionally relevant.’ (Benjamin Boretz, ‘Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art
from a Musical Point of View’, in Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone (eds) Perspectives on
Contemporary Music Theory (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 34.)
267
Lucier interview by Douglas Simon in Big Deal (Summer 1976).
268
Stuart Marshall, ‘Alvin Lucier’s Music of Signs in Space’, Studio International,
192/984 (November/December), pp. 285–9.
294 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

environmental art (from both musical and art fields) in that Lucier’s purpose is
to explore, experience and discover the environment, rather than just ‘use’ it.269
Younger, especially New York composers have recently taken Lucier’s lead (as an
alternative to repetitive, systems music) but have reduced the social/environmental
event to the private event of researching ‘the musical instrument as bodily
extension, with a thoroughness previously unknown – articulating a ‘pure’ acoustic
system with little or no imposition of any other musical or structural system.270
Lucier’s music research of the sounding, non-sounding, sound-reflecting
environment, raises some interesting questions of spatial perspective, its musical
simulation and one’s perception of it. Lucier has said:

I always seem to fail in thinking up an idea if it’s two-dimensional or if it’s a

linear idea. All the music that you know, from Gregorian chant to Stravinsky, is
two-dimensional in conception. I mean it’s perceived by the ear but it’s sort of
a flat perception. Now when you went from chant to polyphony, you had that
illusion of some kind of depth or another dimension, but it’s only an illusion
just as with a painting you can paint perspective in but it’s really not there,
you’re still on a flat two-dimensional surface, and I think I don’t succeed very

269
The equivalent would be for Earth Artists to study the principle of geological
faulting, etc. Again artists are obliged to use static phenomena as their raw material, although
they have the advantage of dealing with physical size: three-dimensional objects are more
immediately impressive than their musical ‘equivalents’, notes of extremely long duration.
Monumentality in music can be achieved by the employment of more than normally large
numbers of performers (nineteenth-century ‘Monster Concerts’, Cage’s Musicircus, etc.).
What is the equivalent to human body-size as a reference point in assessing musical scale?
270
For instance, Joan La Barbara’s Hear What I Feel which ‘is a search for new
sounds. Last season during a series of concerts with poets and writers I discovered some
unusual sounds by reacting emotionally to the words and letting the emotion rather than
the intellect direct the sound. Continuing my experiments in finding new ways to inspire
unorthodox sounds, I decided to delve into the area of psychology and place myself in an
extraordinary situation. The visual sense is one of my strongest senses and therefore one
of my strongest needs. Perhaps because I’m near-sighted I’ve always been very aware of
what I’m able to see – and how my perceptions of objects differ when aided by corrective
glass. I chose to block that sense, depriving myself of visual stimulation and/or information
in order to heighten the reactions of my other senses. For concert situations I try to spend
one hour in isolation with my eyes taped shut, also denying my hands any sensation other
than that of air and dust. I prefer to spend that hour in a space outside the concert room
in order to include the discovery of new surroundings as part of the piece’s sound and to
experience the shock of suddenly bringing the solitary state of mind, created by being alone
with one’s own thoughts, into a space occupied by other people and respond to this without
the advantage of visual information. The piece involves vocalising my immediate responses
to touching a variety of unknown substances, chosen by persons other than myself. I do not
know what the materials are until the end of the experiment when I remove the tape from
my eyes’ (La Barbara, programme note).
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 295

well when I’m thinking in two dimensions, only when I’m thinking in a third
dimension in space.271

In a recent letter Lucier amplified this idea: ‘Most music until now has been
conceived two-dimensionally up and down across the page, even though sound
moves out in all directions. Harmony, like perspective, only gives the illusion of
space, of depth. I have learned how to make perceptible these spatial characteristics
of sound’.
Most of the music I have considered so far has tended to reduce two dimensions
to one, spatially, while increasing emphasis on an awareness of the temporal
dimension. In traditional music, in a symphony for instance, various quasi-
spatial devices, which act as a kind of perspective, were used. Some examples:
on the small scale you find simple devices or rather facts of the harmonic system,
especially melody and accompaniment with various kinds of decoration, textural
emphasis; contrasts of instrumental groupings (woodwind/strings, solo/tutti) again
with various degrees of gradation. On a larger scale there are structural devices,
which also draw attention to the primary and the secondary – the ‘main theme’,
transition, etc. The main structural, quasi-architectural force is of course tonality
itself, with its hierarchies of tonal (key) areas, with its consequent emphasis on
past, present and future. Only the opposition of instrumental groups could be
considered spatial in a genuinely physical sense.272
Both the instrumental hierarchy and listener-location are at one with the
‘harmoniousness’ of tonal music: except in special cases, one is intended to hear
the symphony orchestra more or less as if issuing from a single source, and one
listens to music from a fixed position. Cage, of course, sought to remedy this
situation in the 1950s:

271
Lucier interview by Douglas Simon.
272
The best account of traditional ‘hierarchic-tonal’ music is given by the avant-
garde composer György Ligeti (in Die Reihe, 7 (Universal Edition, 1960), p. 16): ‘The
individual moments of hierarchic-tonal music were not restricted to maintaining their mere
“presence”, they also included the “just past” and at the same time pointed forward to the
immediate “future”. That they were able to do this was a consequence of the – historically
conditioned – “cadential” successive ordering of the harmonics. The music was, thanks to
this faculty for embracing the immediate future, able to negotiate points, as it were, and
even fork off into several parallel lines of events, but the formal course of the music was
limited to a single direction of movement in time. The onward flow of the music was further
protected by the generally even pulse of the music’s metre. If unexpected events did occur
– as for instance interrupted cadences or sudden modulations – they would immediately be
confronted in the hurrying imagination of the listener with the hoped-for and expected, not
experienced as any hesitation in the flow of time, but rather as a diversion or branching off,
always of course in the same direction as the general current. This sort of successivity gave
an aura of logic to the tonal forms, hence their “similarity to language”.’
296 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

In connection with the physical space of the performance, where that

performance involves several players (two or more) it is advisable for several
reasons to separate the performers one from the other, as much as is convenient
and in accord with the action and the architectural situation. The separation
allows the sounds to issue from their own centres and to interpenetrate in a way
which is not obstructed by the conventions of European harmony and theory
about relationships and interferences of sound. In the case of the harmonious
ensembles of European musical history, a fusion of sound was of the essence,
and therefore players in an ensemble were brought as close together as possible,
so that their actions productive of an object in time might be effective. In
the case, however, of the performance of music the composition of which is
indeterminate of its performance so that the action of the players is productive
of a process, no harmonious fusion of sound is essential. A non-obstruction of
sound is of the essence.273

The paradox with Cage’s ‘Assemblage’ music is that though his de-organising
compositional method ensures non-differentiation, the distribution of sounds, and
of musical visual and gestural events in space destroys the traditional central focus,
and enables the listener/viewer to form his own hierarchies and relationships as he
wanders physically or perceptually around the sound-space. In this way as Cage
has said, the listener can chart his own course around and through a piece of music
in his own time, as one is able to do with a static visual art work, which can be
similarly altered by its environment – lighting, placement, etc. With the traditional
musical work, the composer can get side-tracked from his chosen path; but the
listener is obliged to follow this track, and its return to the main (linear) route – it
is impossible for him to opt out, even though in a work of maximum (composed)
variety the listener (as John White pointed out) is able to switch off and wait for
events to occur that are more interesting and involving. There is a lot of ‘wastage’
in traditional music which explains why in a repetitive permutative systemic/
process work one can take a preferred ‘image’, a mere fragment, and extend it for
a long duration without any provision or need for variety.
But in at least one respect Cage’s de-focused time/space music shares one
‘disadvantage’ with traditional music: that once a particular event or configuration
is passed, then it has ceased to exist. A traditional work-as-object can of course be
repeated, but in a Cage work-as-process – where the music’s audible (as distinct
from conceptual and procedural) identity, can differ radically from realisation to
realisation – the experience is unrepeatable, which of course was Cage’s intention
(I’m speaking of live, rather than recorded, performances). The dancer [Yvonne
Rainer] saw the temporariness of dance as a disadvantage:

I remember thinking that dance was at a disadvantage in relation to sculpture

in that the spectator could spend as much time as he required to examine a

273
Cage, Silence, p. 39.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 297

sculpture, walk around it, and so forth – but a dance movement – because it
happened in time – vanished as soon as it was executed. So in a solo called
The Bells [performed at the Living Theatre in 1961] I repeated the same seven
movements for eight minutes. It was not exact repetition, as the sequence of the
movements kept changing.274

I’m not aware of a comparable statement or attitude towards repetition by

composers, but repetition or near-repetition does have the effect of creating stasis,
an entirely non-traditional emphasis and concentration on the here-and-now (very
little happening for a comparatively long period). Persistent repetition is both a
method of amplification of ‘hidden’ details in short figures, and also a method of
seemingly ‘freezing’ time, making sound as tactile and object-like as it has ever
been in the history of music.

Pop Art Parallels?

I indicated earlier that it is a mistake to attempt to mate music with the vast array of
mutually exclusive art movements. Not merely a mistake, but also, in some cases,
impossible. What, for instance, is the musical equivalent of Pop Art, if there is one?
Cage has remarked that ‘What is so interesting about modern art and Pop Art in
this country is that it has more and more trained our eyes not on the most noticeable
things, but on things generally overlooked.’275 In his open and indeterminate music
Cage allowed of and allowed for the use of environmental sounds and noises, in
fact the qualitative/quantitative equivalence of musical and non-musical sounds;
and the equivalence of sound events of a visual, theatrical, non-sounding kind. He,
and others, also welcomed electronic technology into music. Fluxus continued
the ‘theatrical’ tradition, reducing multiplicity to singularity. The work of George
Brecht runs on a continuum, in dealing with observed ‘facts’, from poetry, through
musical scores, proposals for art works, to musical performances and three-
dimensional objects. Fluxus (and the Scratch Orchestra) also introduced common
objects as musical instruments – not only natural objects (made of wood, stone,
metal, etc., as traditional musical instruments are) but toys, toy instruments and
other commercial artefacts.
Given these sound sources scores could either take the form of processes
realisable by any sound producers, or specific scores, such as Brecht’s Comb
Music, could be written for instruments which were overlooked by Beethoven and
Co. But if you want to play traditional instruments, what then? Brecht replied as
follows when I asked about a particular performance in which Fluxus artists and
their friends had played traditional instruments:

274
Yvonne Rainer, quoted in Barbara Rose’s essay ‘ABC Art’; see Gregory Battcock
(ed.) Minimal Art, p. 290.
275
Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, ‘An interview with John Cage’, in The
Tulane Drama Review, 10/2 (Winter 1965), pp. 50–72, p. 61.
298 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

If you’re trying to play a piece with people who aren’t trained, you’re bound to
use something known. And what are you going to use? If you try to use a Mozart
symphony, you aren’t going to get very far; or if you try to play [Cage’s] Atlas
Eclipticalis, you’re not going to know what’s happening either – you won’t get
the point. So you really have no choice but to use something that was more or
less known, and if it’s known it’s by definition been around a while, so you fall
back on popular favourites.

History repeated itself only a few years later when the Portsmouth Sinfonia was
first formed. A group of art students at Portsmouth Art School, having previously
been concerned with the ‘abstract’ music of Cage and Cardew, bought some
classical instruments, and, searching around for a piece to play, they hit on Rossini’s
William Tell Overture, since everybody knew the tune – not, significantly, from
hearing it at concerts, or on records, but as the signature tune to the Lone Ranger
series on TV. Starry-eyed aping of their classical ‘betters’ was also a factor in the
Sinfonia’s attitude. But the ‘commodity’ aspect of serious music is in a way a
reversal of what happened in Pop Art, where specialist ‘high’ artists took over the
imagery and methods of specialist ‘low’ artists. For in music non-specialist ‘low’
musicians adopted in a limited way the material and mode of behaviour of ‘high’
musicians. And today it is not only the familiarity but especially the respectability
of the classics that is played upon by the makers of Radio and TV commercials.
The evident equation with ad men is of ‘classic’ with classiness.276
Earlier manifestations of a Pop Art spirit in music (some Ives and Satie, for
instance) put ‘common’ music from outside the concert tradition – hymns, popular
and nationalistic songs, dance tunes in Ives’ case, cabaret and musical hall songs
in Satie’s – into a ‘serious’ context. With the following results, as far as Ives was
concerned:

Some nice people, whenever they hear [the words] say ‘Mercy Me!’, and a little
highbrow smile creeps over their brow: ‘Can’t you get something better than that
in a symphony?’ These same nice people, when they go to a properly dressed
symphony concert under proper auspices, led by a name with foreign hair, and
hear Dvorak’s [sic] New World Symphony, in which they are told this famous
passage was from a negro spiritual, then think that it must be quite proper, even
artistic, and say ‘How delightful!’ But when someone proves to them that the
Gospel Hymns are fundamentally responsible for the negro spirituals, they say,
‘Ain’t it awful! … you don’t ever hear Gospel Hymns even mentioned up there
in the New England Conservatory’.277

276
Some pop musicians and groups have also attempted to ‘legitimise’ their music by
performing with symphony orchestras.
277
Charles Ives, Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick (London: Calder and Boyars, 1973), p. 52.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 299

For Ives these materials were neither banal nor even iconic images since they
were, as near as possible, representations of the natural, spontaneous musical
expression of real people who were not ‘musicians’, but whose music performed a
useful function in their daily lives. This differs both from Pop Art in the 1960s and
also from Cage’s deliberate adoption into his ‘abstract’ music of what he termed
‘banal sounds’, when discussing his Water Music of 1952:

I was already interested at that time in avoiding the exclusion of banal elements.
In the development of 12-tone music there was an emphasis on dissonance, to the
exclusion of very careful treatment of consonances. Octaves as well as fifths and
particularly dominant sevenths and cadences became things that one shouldn’t
do. I’ve always been on the side of things one shouldn’t do and searching for
ways of bringing the refused elements back into play. So I included sounds that
were, just from a musical point of view, forbidden at that time. You could talk
to any modern composer at the time and no matter how enlightened he was he
would refuse to include banal musical sounds.278

These were the sounds from musical history that had been excluded not only by
Schoenberg but also by Cage in his percussion, noise, prepared piano and modal
music of the 1930s and 1940s. The forbidden chords and individual sounds
that Cage began introducing in the 1950s gradually elongated as he replaced
discontinuity with continuity, and in his sound collages a vast range of familiar
material would appear, not, Cage would say, for its referential or symbolic
qualities, but just to fill an allotted time-space. Christopher Hobbs has said that the
inclusion of these materials, along with the use of the transistor radio as a musical
instrument, guaranteed that indeterminate and improvisatory performances were
full of melody and familiar music during the 1960s.
Cage’s attitude to the use of past art simply as ‘material’ was clear:

There are oodles of people who are going to think of the past as a museum
and be faithful to it, but that’s not my attitude. Now as material it can be put
together with other things. They could be things that don’t connect with art as
we conventionally understand it. Ordinary occurrences in a city, or ordinary
occurrences in the country, or technological occurrences – things that are now
practical simply because techniques have changed.279

In a way, the return to melody could be seen as a parallel to Pop Art’s reintroduction
of a quasi-representational iconography – not naturalism since it was evidently
filtered through attitudes towards the painting surface and modes of presentation
that could not have happened without Abstract Expressionism. The same goes
for the Cage experience and the re-introduction of melody, harmony, tonality,

278
Kirby and Schechner, ‘An interview with John Cage’, p. 61.
279
Ibid., p. 53; see also Kostelanetz (ed.) Conversing with Cage, p. 133.
300 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

harmoniousness etc. But the differences in the origins and symbolism of the
respective iconographies is interesting, since experimental music has not drawn
on that area of music that could be seen as being closest to commercial art, comics,
etc. – namely pop music. There was no reason why pop should not have been
used in live and tape collage-type performances, but identifiable occurrences are
few – Gavin Bryars did use Barry Ryan’s hit Eloise in one of his pieces, for what
John Tilbury called ‘the sheer sensuality of the sound’,280 but it was significantly
combined with a section from Schubert’s String Quintet. (The only true ‘pop’
work that comes readily to mind is James Tenney’s treatment of Elvis’ Blue
Suede Shoes.281)
By ‘significantly’ I mean that the images that music drew on were, by and
large, taken from musical history rather than current daily life. Except of course
that the classics, through almost continuous presentation in concerts and on
records, radio TV etc. are part of almost daily life. (This demonstrates to what
extent contemporary music is primarily a museum culture: the largest, most
powerful and most anachronistic media – the symphony orchestra and opera – still
dominate musical life as they have for the past 200 years and still receive the most
money from public funds.) Various methods and approaches, degrees of respect
and disrespect, have been been found in the experimental attitude towards the
classics, from the seemingly destructive disrespect of the Scratch Orchestra to the
evident love of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, whose renditions would have appeared
highly disrespectful to the seasoned music-lover, if he’d heard them. Cardew’s
prescription for the Popular Classics category of the Scratch Orchestra’s repertoire
runs as follows:

A qualified member plays the given particle, while the remaining players join in
as best they can, playing along, contributing whatever they can recall of the work
in question, filling the gaps of memory with improvised variational material. As
is appropriate to the classics, avoid losing touch with the reading player … and
strive to act concertedly rather than independently.282

Numerous systemic re-articulations of patterns, fragments etc., from traditional

music have been used, though rarely are whole melodies the main focus of the
work, filling the whole ‘frame’ in the way that, say, Jasper Johns’ targets do. There
have been ‘untreated’ performances, however, of a poor relation of symphonic
music – that is, English salon music of the period 1900–1930.283 These are

280
John Tilbury, ‘Music’, in Ark Magazine, 45 (Winter 1969), p. 43.
281
The young English composer John Lewis has based some recent repetitive systems
music on reggae (see Parsons, ‘Systems in Art and Music’, p. 817).
282
Cardew, ‘A Scratch Orchestra: draft constitution’, Musical Times, 110/1516 (June
1969), pp. 617–19, pp. 617–18.
283
The reworking of classical and light classical sources is a specifically English
phenomenon.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 301

pieces which appeal to English experimental composers for a number of reasons:

lyricism, directness and modesty of scale and scope. John White feels that a
descriptive piece by Albert W. Ketèlbey, for instance, ‘is very factual. I suppose
his definition of his compositional state would have been getting straight to the
point … compression is the name of the game, which I think is a very respectable
and archetypal way of going about it.’ Gavin Bryars observed, however, that such
a sectional descriptive piece is not necessarily proto-experimental: ‘Although
it doesn’t actually go anywhere, I don’t think that a piece like Bells Across the
Meadow is a single-entity piece. I think Ketèlbey’s pieces are close but I don’t
think they’re intended that way, and I don’t get that sense from them.’
Be that as it may, the low-key unambitiousness of salon music does serve as
a paradigm for English experimental music at least. Both avoid what the avant-
garde composer, Harrison Birtwistle, once referred to as the

‘Ninth Symphony syndrome’, the striving towards the big statement, the final
solution. If you look at Matisse’s drawings, you’ll see that they appear to have
been done by a single stroke of the pen. They are intuitive drawings, but not only
that, they are complete. You don’t feel that colour is missing. But in music you
can’t do this. The composer finds himself in the predicament of always being
expected to make his pieces ‘fully worked out’, or ‘important’ or ‘interesting’.284

This striving for bigness, the overwhelming statement, the inevitable ‘improvement’
from one work to the next, is perhaps one of the most dangerous legacies of the
musical tradition, a problem which experimental music, both in England and in the
States, has solved by simply ignoring its existence.
Where the ‘large-scale’ is attempted, as in, say, Cage’s Concert for Piano and
Orchestra (1958), Cardew’s The Great Learning (1968–71) or Bryars’ The Sinking
of the Titanic (1970–) methods are found to avoid, to torpedo the conventions and
demands of the ‘Ninth Symphony syndrome’. The Sinking of the Titanic is a unique
example, combining ongoing research, both musical and otherwise, interest in
‘found’, mainly salon, music, a form of indeterminacy and a return to music with
a ‘subject’ other than its own materials. When talking to Bryars, I noted that the
recording of the piece in a way defined a work that is not susceptible to definition.
Bryars replied:

I’ve defined that sounding version of the piece. Getting that particular sound out
is a bit of a relief because that’s now a single element, whereas before it was the
assemblage of a lot of elements, so that now it can be taken as a datum for some
future performance without having to assemble the elements that it comprises.

And when asked about the musical, visual and conceptual levels of the work
Bryars said:

284
Michael Nyman, interview with Harrison Birtwistle, 1973 (unpublished).
302 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

It’s visual in the sense of there being slides to look at in some performances,
and also in the sense that the manner in which it’s performed live is a little bit
different from other pieces on a programme. When Christopher [Hobbs], John
[White] and I performed it in Antwerp this year, we did it in quite short sections
which were characterised by dealing with different sounding aspects of the
realisation. We used a pre-recorded tape to guarantee absolute continuity despite
the discrete sectional way of playing, and these sections were footnotes to other
parts of the music. For example, at one point the three of us, on bassoon, tuba,
and cello, played a series of short slow fragments of music, the titles of which
are Autumn (the hymn tune), Aughton (another hymn tune) and Autumn (a piece
of light music by Cecile Chaminade) and the confusion between these pieces
which I did not name, is an integral element of this ‘footnote’ – a sort of rebus.

At other times we would be doing things which may have appeared odd – John
was winding up an alarm clock, I was playing a music box and Chris was tapping
out Morse messages and none of these elements is at all arbitrary. And at other
times we’d be playing instruments – tuba, bassoon and cello. So that given the
title of the piece, given the slides and the restrained, slightly stoical manner in
which we performed, there emerges a sense of something other than the music
going on, and in that sense it becomes not a musical piece but a conceptual
piece in the terms you mean. But further than that, I also consider that reading
the score, or rather reading the published notes,285 is a hermetic performance –
you’re doing some sort of reconstruction as you go along and this is an aspect of
the piece that I’m interested in developing in other works.

Music is Music is Music

I have deliberately emphasised the differences between the visual and sounding
arts because it seems to me that there is no point in making generalisations about
interconnections and influences, since these tend only to oversimplify the essential
nature of music and musical life, of sounds and structure, of scores and performance.
Music’s processes and materials, and its social, cultural and historical contexts, are
entirely its own, if only because the transmission and reception of sound is subject
to its own (natural) laws and (cultural) organisation. Ultimately music – for better
or worse, and no matter how beneficially it seems to be affected by the conceptual,
aesthetic, philosophical, and procedural attitudes of the climate that the visual arts
have created286 – essentially stands alone, feeding off itself (as I hope I have shown
in the case of experimental music’s Pop Art parallels).
That is not to say that music ignores this artistic climate. Edgar Varèse, for
instance, was highly sympathetic to the Futurists’ iconoclastic desire to glorify the

285
In Peter Garland (ed.) Soundings, 9 (Valencia, CA: Soundings Press, June 1975).
286
Louise Varese, Varese, A Looking-Glass Diary, Vol. 1: 1883–1928 (London:
Davis-Poynter, 1973), p. 106.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 303

machine age in music, and to close down the ‘hospitals for anaemic sounds’ – the
concert halls. Yet how did Varèse react? In the fifth issue of Picabia’s 391 he asked:
‘Why is it, Italian Futurists, that you slavishly imitate only what is superficial and
most boring in the trepidation of our daily lives’, adding, at other times, that ‘The
Futurists imitate, an artist transmutes’.287 He reacted as a specialist, a musician (as
does, just to confuse the issue, Stockhausen to experimental music!).
Cage remarked that he was not surprised that so many painters turned up at his
composition class at the New School of Social Research in the late 1950s ‘because
I had, before that, in the late ’40s and the early ’50s, been part and parcel of the
Artists Club. I had early seen that musicians were the people who didn’t like me.
But the painters did. The people who came to the concerts which I organised were
very rarely musicians – either performing or composing. The audience was made
up of people interested in painting and sculpture.’288
Yet despite the impression given by performances of some of his works,
that anybody could participate, no matter how unskilled,289 the ideas behind and
contained in his indeterminate works were difficult to grasp, the process of making
the parts from the given ‘score’ was a complex one, and performance required
dedication and highly developed musical skills. And why was it that the Scratch
Orchestra, the most flexible, least specialised musical group that has probably ever
existed, felt so aggressively out of place when asked to participate in a multi-media
Chicago Conspiracy Trial event at the Roundhouse in 1970? They objected to the
proceedings not because of the nature of the cause the event was celebrating, but
because it wasn’t sufficiently like a concert, even though the Scratch Orchestra’s
own concerts took on many bizarre forms. Their concerts on Regent’s Park boating
lake or by the seaside remain, nevertheless, concerts.
Why, also, does Steve Reich now wish to be judged by his peers, by musicians
rather than by artists, to try to make the grade alongside Bach rather than, say
Richard Serra? And why did John White feel the need to ‘sneak’ back into the
concert world some four or five years ago? He said recently that: ‘There seemed
to be this terrific need to escape from anything that seemed like a proper concert,
and yet one used some devious way of getting back into something approaching
the concert hall, like an art gallery.’ Now he welcomes ‘the stuffed-shirt kind of
concert again because I’ve had enough of concerts on bomb sites and it’s quite
nice to see people dressed up again’.
Perhaps this is a sign of creeping conservatism in today’s experimental music;
more likely it is the pernicious conservatism of music itself. It is possible to make
a graph that would indicate that as the material (but not the ideas) of experimental
music gets closer to that of traditional music, so it becomes more specialised and

287
Kirby and Schechner, ‘An interview with John Cage’, p. 67.
288
There are some that are suitable for non-musicians, such as Musicircus and 33⅓,
but these reflect a relaxation on Cage’s part after the severe, restrictive works of the late
1950s and early 1960s.
289
See Nyman, Experimental Music, pp. 97–107.
304 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

cocooned from the art world, even though artists may still ‘turn on’ to it. Steve
Reich’s music has developed in sophistication from Pendulum Music (which non-
musicians could, and did, perform) so that he will soon have to phase himself out
of his performances simply because he will not be able to cope, as a performer,
with the technical facility which his music will demand. (I wonder whether visual
artists’ appreciation of his music has developed in the same way too.)
With Cornelius Cardew’s music during the 1960s the opposite was the case:
his early scores were only suitable for musicians, his later ones available to an
alternative class of performers. He found that the most rewarding performances of
his totally graphic score Treatise had been given by people who, by some fluke,
had a) acquired a visual education b) escaped a musical education and c) have
nevertheless become musicians, i.e. play to the full capacity of their beings.290
Hence the outcrop of music in art colleges, which still continues, but mainly in
the form of small instrumental groups, playing traditional music.291 Because of
the very special nature of Alvin Lucier’s music, a piece like Vespers is also more
successful when performed by untrained musicians. Lucier has said that: ‘Often I
find that people who have never played a musical instrument before – people I just
get off the street, so to speak, before the concert – do the best job on it because they
don’t have any pre-conceived ideas about how to make something interesting. You
see I want to make the space be the interesting thing and not the personalities of
either myself or the people who play the piece.’292
Nor should one deny the importance of art galleries as concert halls. (Reich and
Co. have now moved up market, but younger composers in New York still find that
most of their performances take place in lofts and in the art environment in general.)
Galleries and museums may recently have tended to emphasise music-as-art (or as
an extension of art), but their enlightened openness and independent funds do give
composers the opportunity to develop without the creative restrictions that the
‘stuffed shirt’ concert ritual imposes. A music which is dependent for patronage,
interest, finance and approval (by large audiences and music critics who are
really at home only in the opera house) eventually has to succumb to the dulling
conservatism of the musical establishment, or still be considered elitist, freakish or
just plain inadequate technically. This will continue as long as the musical education
system remains totally consumed with permanently reproducing itself in its own
image. It is inconceivable that a music college should employ painters and sculptors,
in the way that art colleges employ specialist music teachers. Why, you couldn’t
even learn the banjo at the Royal Academy of Music if you wanted to …

290
‘Towards an Ethic of Improvisation’, in Treatise Handbook (London: Edition
Peters, 1971), p. xix.
291
See Nyman’s article in Studio International, May/June 1976, pp. 282–4.
292
Lucier, interview by Douglas Simon in Arts in Society (Summer 1972).
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 305

‘George Brecht: Interview by Michael Nyman’ (Studio International, 192,

November/December 1976, pp. 256–66)

This interview was conducted in Cologne between 30–31 July and 2 August 1976.

MN You’ve said that in England you’re known as a composer rather than as an

artist. You were associated in the late 1960s with Cardew and Tilbury and with the
Scratch Orchestra in its early days.293 Water Yam 294 is obviously the centre of this
musical focus. Some of the cards in the box are self-evidently scores for musical
performance – such as Piece for Voice, Candle Piece for Radios. Yet paradoxically
those cards that have ‘classical’ instruments in their titles – such as String Quartet
and Flute Solo – are not ‘musical’ at all, since no sounds are produced: the string
quartet don’t play their instruments, they just shake hands; the flautist takes his
flute to pieces and puts it back together again. After the ‘Volo Solo’ series John
Tilbury said that, as a pianist, he saw Incidental Music as being about the piano,
about what it’s like to be a pianist, rather than about piano music.295 Did you have
any awareness of this; did you set out to encapsulate some general ‘truth’ about
musical performance in these events?
GB Not that that was a special aspect of it, or that it was more important than any
other. The incidentalness of Incidental Music is especially evident with the three
dried peas or beans that are attached to the keys with adhesive tape.
MN What do you mean by incidentalness?
GB Because what you’re trying to do is to attach the beans to the keys with nothing
else in mind – or that’s the way I perform it. So that any sound is incidental. It’s

293
Brecht came to live in England, for a period, in 1968. In October of that year
he performed an event, Suitcase Eclipse, with Cornelius Cardew, Christopher Hobbs,
John Tilbury and Mark Boyle (light show) and in the following month he put on, with
Cardew, the ‘Evolution of the Soda Fountain 1920–1940’: a lecture with slides and
musical accompaniment at the Arts Lab, Drury Lane. In May 1969 he took part in the
ICA performance of Cardew’s Schooltime Compositions (he was engaged in ‘Making A’).
In September 1969 he documented the principle of Landmass Translocation, which was
put into practice by the Scratch Orchestra in November at the Chelsea Town Hall, in the
realization of the ‘Journey of the Isle of Wight Westwards by Iceberg to Tokyo Bay’. Apart
from a few minor editorial changes, the footnotes in this article belong to the original text.
294
Water Yam, ‘the collection of scores for music, events, dance, the play for Joseph
Cornell, the movie flip-book, and so forth’ (Brecht, in Art and Artists, October 1972), has
gone through a number of editions: about 70 cards were published in Fluxus in 1963, who also
put out an enlarged edition of 100 cards in 1966. The Experimental Music Catalogue has sold
a more recent edition of the cards by John Gosling. Cardew and Tilbury performed Brecht’s
events in the 1960s, and one of Tlibury’s ‘Volo Solo’ concerts of late 1970 was devoted to
Brecht’s work. Some of the ‘musical’ events were part of the Scratch Orchestra’s repertory
and Comb Music, for instance, is included in the ‘Scratch Anthology’ (EMC, 1971).
295
An interview Nyman conducted with Tilbury on 12 December 1970 for a Polish
magazine. There is no evidence that it was ever published.
306 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

neither intentional nor unintentional. It has absolutely nothing to do with the thing
whether you play an A or C, or a C and a C-sharp while you’re attaching the beans.
The important thing is that you are attaching the beans to the keys with the tape.
MN But because you are attaching them to the keys rather than to the piano
frame,296 there’s more likelihood that you might make a sound.
GB Well, if you do it very slowly and silently.
MN There’s certainly an exercise aspect to it, but it’s not like La Monte Young’s
opening and closing the piano fall without making a sound297 – that’s kind of an
external discipline. Yours is an inner discipline, which the performer can …
GB Yes, I don’t tell you what to try for.
MN The performer ought to understand whether sounds are to be produced or not.
GB And I sometimes take La Monte’s instructions ironically – that you can hear
something anyway (laughs).
MN Sound-producing instruments have been made mute (the violin, in Solo for
Violin, is polished, not played) and non-sounding instruments, or non-instruments,
for instance, combs …
GB … are made sounding. That’s right.
MN There was a lot of this kind of ‘reassessment’ by Fluxus artists …
GB … what they were there for and how they were used. Mainly it was putting
them onto a more equal level with other sound-producers. All ‘instruments’,
musical or not, became ‘instruments’.
MN And the piano becomes a table. Is Piano Piece 1962, where a vase of flowers
is placed on a piano, necessarily a performance piece?
GB No, because the score says ‘a vase of flowers on(to) a piano’, so you could just
observe a vase of flowers on a piano, and that would be a realisation.
MN So generally you make no distinction between the event-as-performance and
the event-as-object?
GB I made an object out of Three Aqueous Events. It consists of a board with a
metal ring (like you use in a bathroom attached to the wall) in the middle with a
glass of water in it. And on the upper left there are letters that say ‘ice’ and in the
lower right it says ‘steam’ and it’s all painted white. The letters stand out a little
bit so you can still read it. That’s an event score realised as an object, so to speak.

296
An obvious reference to the fact that Fluxus artists used not only the ‘musical’
parts of the piano but also the ‘furniture’ parts.
297
Piano Piece for David Tudor No. 2 (October 1960): ‘Open the keyboard cover
without making, from the operation, any sound that is audible to you. Try as many times as
you like. The piece is over when you succeed or when you decide to stop trying. It is not
necessary to explain to the audience. Simply do what you do and, when the piece is over,
indicate it in the customary way’. This seems to me to be an exercise for David Tudor’s
version of Cage’s ‘silent piece’, 4’33”, at its first performance in 1952, when the pianist
indicated the beginnings and endings of the three ‘movements’ by opening and closing the
keyboard cover. Brecht’s final comment perhaps refers to the fact that the purpose of the
so-called silent piece was to demonstrate the non-existence of silence.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 307

And once in a while I would make an object first and then make a card later. I think
the ladder with the different colours on the rungs298 was originally an object, and
I wrote the card later. So I don’t feel very much one way or the other since every
object is an event anyway and every event has an object-like quality. So they’re
pretty much interchangeable.
MN How do you resolve your interest in time with a desire to make objects?
GB For instance, I was making chance paintings during the 1950s. With the sheet-
paintings I was making in ’56–7, where you crumple a bed-sheet and pour water
on and then ink, depending on the quantity and distribution of the water, and the
time you leave it till that crumpled mass is practically dry, you’ll get hard edges,
Whereas if you open it before it’s dry you’ll get more cloudy edges to the forms.
Also at the time I was very concerned with the philosophy of science and that
ties in too, because I was already questioning the premises in physical science –
what does time mean in science, what are the irreducible elements that come into
the scientific consideration of time? So I was reading Reichenbach and all those
people who were writing about time in science, and relativity, time in relativity,
and so forth. All those come together – that’s the connection, I think, between the
visual arts and time in science which I was already concerned with. I also felt that
every object was an event, from physical science; not only from physical science
but also from reading Zen thought.299 It seemed to me that from the viewpoint of
nuclear physics you could hardly consider the structure of an atom without feeling
that an object is becoming an event and that every event is an object. If you define
an electron in an atomic structure there’s no object-like quality to it – it’s described
probabilistically as a field of presence of the electron, and in oriental thought you
get similar intuitions.
So you’d have the piece from 1961, Play Incident. It’s not only an object. It
looks static but when you drop the ping-pong ball through one of the two holes
above and it strikes the nails inside, it has a musical aspect. And it has a time
aspect not only while the ball is making music within the piece, but if it falls out
through one of the apertures at the side and you put it back, or you leave it where
it is, it’s already a performance.300 Or there’s the solitaire game, or the medicine

298
Ladder, ‘Paint a single straight ladder white/paint the bottom rung black./Distribute
spectral colors on the rungs between.’
299
Brecht’s interest in oriental thought goes beyond Zen Buddhism. He said in the
interview that ‘although probably my attitude could be more easily related to a Zen Buddhist
or Dogon attitude, the Buddhist outlook on life didn’t come from nowhere, and if you read
The Upanishads you find practically all the themes that you find in Buddhism later with a
different emphasis, or if you take Zen Buddhism as related to earlier Indian Buddhism. It’s
a continuum, there’s really no way to separate it out.’
300
The Play Incident is an upright ‘box’ built on the principle of the child’s bagatelle
game. A pingpong ball is dropped into one of the two holes at the top and it falls down past
a series of nails nailed into the backboard and it gives ‘a kind of tinkling music’. The nails
are all the same size but not all driven to the same depth. The ball falls either into either one
308 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

chest where the spectator is invited to change the pieces around or even exchange
them with other pieces. These were both in the ‘Towards Events’ show in 1959.301
MN The event scores are in card form, and are collected in a box entitled Water
Yam; the cards are admittedly separate entities, but on the other hand the ‘collection’
as a whole is a multi-layered assemblage. I remember John Tilbury saying that one
shouldn’t look at a single card in isolation, but that it’s more like reading a book – by
looking at the cards you get a sense of the whole, and that in turn affects the way
you approach any individual card: cards influence each other. There are, in fact,
certain recurrent ‘themes’, a characteristic iconography in Water Yam. Were you
aware of this?
GB No, because the cards were done over such a span of years, and I think that
if Maciunas hadn’t come along I probably never would have put them together,
because when I started, I just sent them to my friends when I had a few cards done.
I probably would never have thought of putting them all together.
MN But you had had them printed in the same way as they are now?
GB Yes. But John Tilbury was right on, I think, in saying that Water Yam was like
reading a book. I hadn’t thought of that relationship before, between Water Yam
and The Book of the Tumbler on Fire. But it seems that they have in common that
they are field phenomena, that there is no hierarchic order, for example, in either
one, that nothing is made to seem more important than something else.
MN You might say that whereas any single piece by Cage represents a field, your
total output is a field.
GB Yes, that’s right. The Book of the Tumbler on Fire, for example, is a field in
itself, which is part of a larger field. So, for example, once I started the Book in
1964, I didn’t hesitate to put into it pieces that were done before that time, and
presumably will go on forever, too. So that’s true, each piece is part of a field.
MN What does The Book of the Tumbler on Fire consist of?
GB Boxes with objects, event scores, performances, all kinds of assemblages,
pieces I did …
MN In what sense is it a book?

of the five divisions at the bottom (which contain objects of various kinds) or it falls out of
a hole in the side.
301
The ‘Towards Events’ show at the Reuben Gallery, New York City, held between
16 October – 5 November 1959, was Brecht’s first professional show. It was subtitled ‘an
arrangement’. Brecht told me he used this word in the sense ‘of a musical arrangement, and
also in the sense that things are arranged rather than made. The poster for the show was also
made in a musical way. That is, you had the text running over most of the left hand side,
and down the right hand side you had a time notation, so that each line of the poster was to
be read over a certain period of time.’
The solitaire game consisted of a special deck of solitaire cards made for playing a
special game of solitaire. There was a table in the gallery on which there was a grey velvet
cloth, and people would sit down and play. The rules had been adapted from an existing
solitaire game ‘so that the way you played it you either won the first time or you kept
circling, you never ended.’
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 309

GB What is a book?
MN One knows what is a book conventionally …
GB A book is a field too.
MN But it is physically arranged in such a way as to make it difficult to appreciate
as a field, because it’s a linear continuity, unlike a box full of separate cards.
GB So it seems. It is more like an object but if think about it, you don’t enter a
book even on the first page without your past, your mind, coming into it, and your
mind has memories, too. So even your reading of the first page is conditioned by
your previous experience. And once you’ve finished the book your experience
goes on; your idea of the book from a later point will be different, will change as
your memory of it changes, or the experience of the book will change your later
experiences. So any book is also part of a field.
And when I think of field situations, I think again of field in physics, the
probabilistic field of presence of an electron, and also field in semantics. In the
1950s I was very interested in semantics, as I still am. There was a very interesting
book which came out near the end of the 1950s called The Field Theory of
Meaning, in which it was shown that the meaning of a word, rather than being
related to the structure of a sentence, for example, was related to a field. So, as I
recall – it’s a while back, actually – the author did psychological research to try
to see how individuals related certain words to other words, and then he would
place these in a three-dimensional field. For example, the word ‘father’ would be
at the centre of, let’s say, a sphere, and somewhere near the word ‘father’ would
be, semantically, the word ‘mother’ for someone, according to the testing that had
gone on, and a little farther away would have been ‘house’, a little further away
would have been ‘money’302 … And so the importance to me of that way of seeing
semantics was again the field approach.
MN But to return to the Water Yam cards: is there any significance to be attached
to the different sizes of the cards: two cards often differ in size even though they
contain the same amount of, or lack of, information.
GB It does have something to do with it, and the way that the printing is put on the
cards, too – the margins and the space between the words, it all comes into it. But
there are no rules for it. I guess it’s like objects in boxes – there’s no reason why a
tooth is a certain distance from …

302
At the ‘Strategy/Get Arts’ exhibition in Edinburgh in 1970, the contribution
of Robert Filliou (Brecht’s ‘partner’ at the ‘Cadille qui sourit’ at Villefranche-sur-Mer)
consisted of what seems to be a participation art version of a psychological test. Those
who wanted to ‘play’ were given blocks, glue and a small wooden board, asked to inscribe
the blocks with such words as ‘family’, ‘money’, etc. and to glue them on the board with
what you considered to be the most important at the centre and the others in some sort of
positional relationship. (Some, like me, dropped the blocks from a height and glued them
where they happened to fall.)
310 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

MN We’re getting back to graphic notation, perhaps, where spaces between things
are often of importance. Would you say that this spacing and layout should have
some effect on the way you realise the event?
GB Yes, I’d think so. They’re never squeezed, there’s usually enough space
around, a kind of emptiness.
MN But then some are pretty dense.
GB The Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event),303 which was the first notated event,
is pretty dense. Two Definitions looks pretty dense, but then the definitions are
printed something like they’d look in a dictionary. So there was a reason for it.
MN I suggested in my book that you weren’t responsible for those 1966
Fluxversions of some of your events.
GB Yes, you were right about them. Some of those realisations were very much
Maciunas – like the orchestra with their arms through the holes, and also the
clarinet piece with the boats.304
MN Would you dissociate yourself from these realisations?
GB No, because it’s implicit in the scores that any realisation is feasible.
MN Any and every?
GB Any and every. I wouldn’t refuse any realisations.
MN You’d admit that these 1966 versions are gag-like. Was it Maciunas who
listed ‘gagging’ as one of the backgrounds to Fluxus?305
GB Yes.
MN Were there any Fluxus events which you would consider were pure gags?

303
Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event) was Brecht’s first (1960), most public and most
Cageian event, in that there is no single focus as there is in the later ‘monostructural’
(George Maciunas’ word) events. The score consists of a set of instructions for performance
in and on any number of motor vehicles assembled outdoors. Brecht has written that the
later events became ‘very private, like little enlightenments I wanted to communicate to my
friends who could know what to do with them, unlike Motor Vehicle Sundown, which had
more the quality of an elaborate public performance.’ (See happening & fluxus catalogue,
Cologne, 1970.)
304
It was not the realization of the Concert for Clarinet, 1962 that, in fact, used
boats, but the Fluxversion II of the Symphony No. 3, 1964, whose text runs: ‘at three/from
the tree/all night/at home/on the floor/the yellow ball/in the water.’ Maciunas’ version (‘in
the water’) runs: ‘Equal number of wind instrument players seat themselves opposite each
other. A large pan with water is placed between the two groups and a toy sailboat is placed
on the water. Performers blow their wind instruments, preferably playing a popular tune,
towards the sail of the sailboat, pushing it to the opposing group which tried to blow it away
from themselves. Piece ends when boat reaches edge of pan.’
305
About gags and art, Maciunas wrote: ‘Fluxus art-amusement is the rearguard
without any pretension or urge to participate in the competition of “one-upmanship” with
the avant-garde. It strives for the monostructural and non-theatrical qualities of the simple
natural event, a game or a gag. It is the function of Spike Jones, Vaudeville, gag, children’s
games and Duchamp’ (happening & fluxus catalogue). (Brecht has a particular fondness for
the music of Spike Jones and his band.)
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 311

GB I can’t think of any. Compared to the total number, I think there were very few
which could be considered gags.
MN Did they exhibit some other form of humour then, or were they totally serious
and deadpan?
GB The kind of humour I most appreciate is … take the example of putting the
vase of flowers on the piano. Some people think that’s humorous and some people
might think it wasn’t humorous, that it was critical of the concert situation, or
other people might say it was a kind of homage to the piano, right? Like you give
flowers sometimes to the woman you love. There are so many different ways you
could take it, but if somebody saw it as humorous then I’d appreciate the fact that
you weren’t quite sure. It wasn’t obviously a gag, but it was possible to take it as
one if you wanted to. That’s the kind of humour I liked – ‘borderline’ humour.306
MN From what I’ve read I can’t imagine you and your Fluxus associates sitting
around in a café or bar discussing the ‘problem’ of the function of traditional
musical instruments.
GB Never, never. Usually it was … Maciunas would come and say ‘I’m going to
nail the piano keys down tonight. Would you mind bringing in the nails?’ So he
would go and sit down at the piano and I’d put a handful of nails for him to use.307
It was all very flat, very practical.
MN But presumably, though you talk of the various ways of interpreting the
‘significance’ of putting a vase of flowers on a piano when you wrote the card, you
didn’t see it in all those different ways?308
GB No, not in one particular way.

306
Of Brecht’s concept of ‘borderline’ art: ‘Sounds barely heard; sights barely
distinguished – borderline art. See which way it goes (it should be possible to miss it
completely).’
307
A reference to Maciunas’ Carpenter’s Piano Piece in which the performer nails
down each key of the entire keyboard starting with the lowest note and ending with the highest.
308
As regards interpretation (or rather misinterpretation), I read Brecht a review of
his New York show in Artforum (February 1974) which seemed to want to turn his work
into something it wasn’t. The reviewer referred to the Clothes Tree which had three bowler
hats hanging on it, and said that the bowler hat linked Brecht ‘with the age of Magritte,
and in that it stands as a link with the art – or anti-art – of the pre-American dominated
avant-garde.’ Brecht replied: ‘The bowler hat sends people off. That’s a misunderstanding
because it was really through chance that there were so many bowler hats in the Onnasch
show. The Clothes Tree originally had three different kinds of hats – the second version
had one bowler hat but also a deerslayer and a chauffeur’s hat. But these disappeared in the
meantime, and for the Onnasch show people put other hats on, bowler hats. So it turned out
very Magrittian; but the piece has nothing to do with that – it can be any hats. I don’t have
anything particular about bowler hats, they’re not symbolic or anything – they don’t mean
Wall Street or Charlie Chaplin. The bowler hats are an exception, not the rule. If you looked
at a lot of my boxes, you practically never find two similar things. Sometimes you find very
common objects like combs more than once, but most of the time they’re just things that
turn up. Common things by definition turn up more often than uncommon things.’
312 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

MN It was just a fact … that you noticed.

GB I don’t know whether I did in that particular case. I don’t know whether I’d
seen someone do that or whether it just came to mind. I think it just really came
to mind.
MN It’s surely a question of context. If someone gives a recital in a concert hall,
puts a vase on the piano, then that has one kind of effect because the audience has
been culturally conditioned as to what to expect in that sort of place. But if it is
done in an art gallery or loft just after someone has nailed the keys down or fed
it with hay,309 then it may be interpreted as being ‘about’ the piano as a musical/
cultural object, or some such.
GB Yes, it’s changed by its context. I never think about this, but there seems to be
a certain relation – in the context of this conversation – between putting a vase on
the piano and a Duchamp readymade. But let’s hypothesise that putting a vase of
flowers on a piano, or seeing someone there, is equivalent to noticing a bottlerack,
the Duchamp bottlerack. In what sense would they be equivalent? Well, that the
context would change the situation. So a frequent point has been made that the
bottlerack in the back room of a café in France is not the same as a bottlerack in
the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris. So would you say I’ve given more emphasis to
that distinction or have contributed to wiping it out?
MN Do you distinguish in your own work between a common-or-garden chair and
an art object you’ve created?
GB Some, not others. Like the Chair with a History. This is a chair with a book
in it, and in the book is written everything from the time I bought the chair and
book up to the present. I went out to buy a wooden chair in Nice – and that was
quite a piece, because it turned out not so simple to get a simple wooden chair.
Then I bought a leather-bound red notebook in which I noted where I’d found the
chair, and I think I glued the receipt. Anybody who sits in the chair can write in the
book. So the chair and the book kind of go together, and it wouldn’t seem right to
substitute another chair somehow.
MN But presumably the process has come to an end now.
GB Oh no, it’s still going on. I think Schwarz still has it with the same book as far
as I know. And in principle the book can be replaced by another one when it’s full.
It just keeps going on. So it’s open. But in other cases the chair was lost or thrown
away; another chair could be substituted and it wouldn’t make any difference.
MN The dating of the Chair with a History is in a way the opposite of Duchamp’s
suggestion to ‘inscribe, on a precisely indicated day, hour, minute, a readymade
which could be looked at for any time before the moment.’310 I would assume

309
La Monte Young’s Piano Piece for David Tudor No. 1 (October 1960): ‘Bring
a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The
performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over
after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to.’
310
See Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds.) Salt Seller: The Writings of
Marcel Duchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 32.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 313

that this approach also differs from your observation, and subsequent notation
of events.
GB He’s putting the emphasis on dating. So you say there’s an ashtray on the floor
and I’m going to date that tomorrow the first of August 1976 at 10am. Whereas if
you wanted to compare that with my pieces – say the Three Telephone Events –
you could the next time the telephone rings, but you don’t know when it’s going to
ring. Conceivably you could call somebody up so you’d know, but even then you
wouldn’t know if they’re there unless you’d prearranged it. And that’s the outside
of my …
I would be more interested if the event just happened. If the telephone rings,
then it’s interesting if that becomes the piece. I’m not interested in arranging it
first. It’s as though Duchamp, in that note, was more interested in the irony of
putting a particular date on a piece which he’d already found, whereas for me it’s
the way things happen naturally that’s interesting. Maybe the telephone doesn’t
ring all day, or maybe in two seconds it will ring.
MN But the Three Telephone Events do not happen naturally since you’ve limited
the piece to those three particular occurrences. You are in fact controlling the
situation.
GB I’m not just saying ‘next time the phone rings, do what you like’, that’s true.
It’s left as open as it can be and still have some shape.
MN So that each realisation of Three Telephone Events has the same structure.
GB That’s true, and in that sense I’d say focused rather than controlled by the
score, but I’m not very interested that it’s my score. It’s been remarked to me that
out of all the people who heard water dripping, I’m the first person to make a score
out of it, so in a way the score calls attention to the fact that water dripping can
be very beautiful – many people find a dripping faucet very annoying; they get
very nervous. It’s nice to hear it in an appreciative way. But it’s not important that
I made it. I can imagine that in China and Japan people have been appreciating
dripping water for centuries.
MN Not important to you …
GB It may be important to you as a musicologist, but it’s not to me, like those
cards aren’t copyrighted, and outside of one signed and limited edition I was
invited to make for a gallery,311 I’ve never made any money from Water Yam –
the various Fluxus editions or John Gosling’s edition. It’s ironic in the same way
as Duchamp’s making an edition of a found object, there’s a lot of irony in it.
It’s appropriate that the Water Yam scores should be just floating around like the
objects I’ve made, so to speak.
MN Do you prefer to keep the origin of individual events a secret?
GB I don’t think it’s relevant to the pieces, really.

311
Brecht was invited to do the signed and limited edition by the Paris gallery owner
Daniel Templon and Ben Vautier.
314 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

MN But you have admitted the origins of one or two – the Motor Vehicle Sundown
(Event) and Flute Solo,312 and you’re not sure about the vase on the piano. But you
don’t think this is relevant anyway?
GB Well, can you see any relevance?
MN It’s not necessarily relevant to the realisation of the event … I think I’ve
discovered the origin of String Quartet in the preface to the Second String Quartet
of Charles Ives, where he describes the string quartet as consisting of four men
who, amongst other things, ‘shake hands.’313
GB Really? I didn’t know that (laughs). Fantastic. That’s really beautiful.
MN Did Bach derive from Villa-Lobos? 314
GB No.
MN Because if it did, then one possible realisation could consist of a performance
of one of the Bachianas Brasileiras.
GB If that was the source, I don’t think I’d tell anybody. That would take all the
interest away.
MN People might be interested in why you make a connection between two
apparently unrelated things.
GB But Bach would be a very minor piece if Villa-Lobos was the origin. It would
put it in the category of a riddle. I’ve nothing against riddles, but riddles usually
only have one answer, whereas Bach has a range of answers
MN But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have observed the ‘logical’
connection between Bach and Brazil that you find in the Villa-Lobos title, and

312
‘In the Spring of 1960, standing in the woods in East Brunswick, New Jersey,
where I lived at the time, waiting for my wife to come from the house, standing behind my
English Ford station wagon, the motor running and the left-turn signal blinking, it occurred
to me that a wholly “event” piece could be drawn from the situation. Three months later the
first piece, explicitly titled an “event” was finished, the Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event).’
(See happening & fluxus catalogue.)
When I asked Brecht to provide a note on his ‘musical background’ for the ‘Volo Solo’
programme book, he responded ‘less evasively than is my natural style’ and recounted the
following story that his father had told him of his experiences in the Metropolitan Opera
Orchestra: ‘There is the story of the soprano who was bugging everybody with temper
tantrums during rehearsal. At a certain point the orchestra crashed onto a major seventh and
there was silence for the soprano and flute cadenza. Nothing happened. The soprano looked
down into the orchestra pit and saw that my father had completely taken apart his flute,
down to the last screw. (I used this idea in my 1962 Flute Solo.)’
313
The first page of the score of the Second String Quartet contains the inscription
‘S(tring) Q(uartet) for four men who converse, discuss, dispute, fight, shake hands, are
silent and then go up the mountain to contemplate the firmament’. (I was only able to find
this translated into French, so my translation back into English may not be exactly the same
as the original.)
314
Heitor Villa-Lobos was born in Rio on 5 March 1887. His enormous output includes
nine compositions entitled Bachianas Brasileiras, written between 1930 and 1945, of which
the best-known is No. 5, subtitled ‘Aria, Dansa’ for soprano and orchestra of cellos.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 315

seen that if you juxtapose just those two ‘illogical’ words in an event score, then a
lot of other solutions are opened up.
GB (long pause). Yes, I think sometimes the result of the score is beyond the score.
It can’t be deduced from what’s on the card. I think Bach is like that, and also the
Christmas Play for Joseph Cornell.315
MN I mentioned this sort of consistent iconography in Water Yam – there are
certain constraints, household fixtures like chairs, tables, stools …
GB Yes, but that has to do with ordinariness, that doesn’t have to do with a special
love for chairs.
MN So your use of tables and chairs differed from La Monte Young’s?316
GB I’m not so sure. Part of the point for me, in using tables and chairs, was that
they were about as ordinary as you can get. And sometimes, when I put some in
a show, they were really overlooked by people. At the end of the opening, a table
that I had put there with some very special objects on would be covered with
glasses and there’d be rings on it. So it succeeded pretty well. Whereas it was
always evident with La Monte’s pieces that it was a specifically musical piece. But
even so … I remember the first performance at the Living Theatre of that piece317 …
they were ordinary beat-up benches and tables.
MN You said that it’s a mistaken idea that your work should be put in Pop Art
shows.
GB Well, not especially mistaken, but it’s not the point of the work. I think my
motive for making a clothes tree that has hats and coats and umbrellas on it, is
not the same motive as, say, Jim Dine making a picture with a necktie. It’s not
wrong, for example, to put my Clothes Tree in the Pop Art show at the Hayward
Gallery,318 but it’s only one of the possibilities – in other words all possibilities are
acceptable. Everything that can be done is all right.

315
When I asked Brecht why he had written that play for Cornell, he replied ‘I don’t
know. It seemed to come into his world somehow, the atmosphere of his world’. He sees
a connection between his boxes and Cornell’s ‘but it’s very remote. There is so much
nostalgia in his work and I have a horror of nostalgia’.
316
The first version of Young’s Poem for Chairs, Tables and Benches, Etc., or Other
Sound Sources (1960) involved dragging, pushing, pulling or scraping these sound sources
over the floor according to timings worked out by consulting a random number table or
telephone directory. Once a decision has been made as to what size units are to be used
to measure the available time – a quarter of a second, hours, days, years – random digits
determine the duration of the performance, the number of events, their individual length,
the point at which they are to begin and end, and the assignment of each sound source to
the selected durations.
317
Probably on Mayday 1962 (at least this is the first mention of Poem in the
Chronology in the happening & fluxus catalogue).
318
‘Pop Art Redefined’, arranged by John Russell and Suzi Gablik, July–August
1969, included Brecht’s Silence (l966) No Smoking (1966) and two realizations of earlier
event scores – Chair Event and Clothes Tree.
316 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Sometimes things go full circle. I once bought a chest of drawers with a mirror on
top – like you’d fine in a cheap hotel – in the Salvation Army for 10 dollars. And
then I painted little rainbow colours round the bottom of one leg, and then I had
it in the loft in New York. A guy saw it there and he wanted to have it for a while
– he was thinking of buying it, and he paid to have it sent from New Jersey to his
apartment in New York City. And then he decided that he didn’t want to keep it,
so he shipped it back to me and I sold it back to the Salvation Army. A lot of my
object pieces have been lost in one way or another, lost or stolen, or not returned,
simply wandered away.
MN What if some gallery owner wanted to show all your objects from, say, 1959
to 1976?
GB Well, the way they went missing was a natural process, as they only exist
anymore in the memory. I don’t feel bad about it.
MN So a retrospective would be an unnatural interruption of that process?
GB In my case, yes. I think that would not be in keeping with the works. A lot of
works I’ve tried to open to all circumstances – like making works that people could
change, chairs that people could sit in. So if you leave a work open, why close it
all of a sudden? And a retrospective would be a closing in a sense, wouldn’t it?
MN The ultimate openness is that the work can be stolen?
GB I had a project once to make a work specifically to be stolen.
MN Did you ever realise it?
GB No.
MN You couldn’t think of a suitable object?
GB I guess so. I put it in a notebook and never got around to realising it. It was
going to be insured for a certain sum and then if it was actually stolen the insurance
money would have gone to help Gaudi’s cathedral in Barcelona.
MN I missed your Chemistry of Music lecture at the Arts Lab.319 I know that you
showed the slides but was there any verbal material to accompany or illustrate the
slides?
GB Actually there isn’t any. It starts with the music. I used Walter de Maria’s tape
that runs for about 20 minutes. It starts with drumming – a figure on the drums like
boom-biddy-boom-chick, and very, very slowly this drum figure becomes crickets
chirping, partly imperceptibly, and at the end it’s totally crickets. I play that, then
I’m dressed in a white lab coat. The slides are projected on a big square screen that
stands on the platform. And then, for example, in the slide where there’s a man
playing the flute, I attach a firework that makes a whistling sounds. I attach that
to the place on the screen where the embouchure of the flute is, and I set it off, so
there’s a fire and a whistling sound. For almost every slide there’s a firework that
goes with it. And for the final one – Mount Fuji – there’s a little rocket set into two
wire rings on the top that shoots up in the sky.
MN So the lecture simply lasts the length of the tape?

319
Brecht performed The Chemistry of Music at the Drury Lane Arts Lab, London,
in 1969.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 317

GB Yes.
MN What’s the origin of the tape?
GB Walter had given it to me once, before I left New York, and then years later he
asked for it back. It was the only copy.320
MN Was the purpose of the Chemistry of Music simply to amuse?
GB No.
MN But in a chemical process there has to be some change brought about in and
by the elements used, so what about the visual elements you’ve chosen?
GB It’s quite amusing to me the way it works. I guess you could say that if there’s
something unique about what you might call my ‘art’, something you don’t see
in other places, then it probably comes from the fact that I’ve been a scientist.321
There’s also that I’ve studied oriental philosophy, plus the art side – it puts these
three areas into a common field. So maybe the works are sometimes like art,
sometimes there’s some way between art and science, like the crystals, or between
art and oriental thought, like some event scores, or in the field of all three. So
the Chemistry of Music is a part of that concern between the relation of art and
science. You could look for things that are specifically musical in it – like the
Walter de Maria tape – or you could consider the whole time-sequence of the slide

320
Walter de Maria is best-known, in the experimental music world at least, from
his contributions to the first edition of An Anthology of Chance Operations, Concept Art,
Anti-art, Indeterminacy, Improvisation, Meaningless Work, Natural Disasters, Plans of
Actions, Stories, Diagrams, Music, Poetry, Essays, Dance Compositions and Mathematical
Compositions, edited by La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low in 1963. (A second edition
was published by Heiner Friedrich, Munich in 1970 – for Gavin Bryars’ shrewd review
of the second edition see Art and Artists, October 1972.) The second edition includes De
Maria’s Art Yard (1960), the important Meaningless Work, On the importance of Natural
Disasters, Beach Crawl, Piece 1 for Terry Riley, Boxes for Meaningless Work, Surprise Box
(all from 1960) and the 1961 piece Column with a Ball on Top (‘I have built a box eight feet
high. On top place a small gold ball. Of course no one will be able to see the ball sitting way
up there on the box. I will just know it is there’).
De Maria was, according to Brecht, never part of Fluxus. (It is mistaken to consider
An Anthology as part of, or representative of, Fluxus.) According to Brecht, de Maria was
‘a great drummer, very very subtle’, and used to play drums with the Velvet Underground
rock group. Brecht said that he thought La Monte and Jackson Mac Low ‘wanted to put
out a book to reflect what was happening at the time and so they asked various people to
contribute. So there’s no real direct connection between Fluxus and An Anthology except
that Maciunas did the layout and also collected pieces at the same time’.
321
From 1950 to 1965, when he left America for Europe, Brecht worked as a
research chemist. He dates his professional career as an artist from his ‘Towards Events’
show in 1959, so his two professions overlapped for about six years, even though he had
been a practising artist since the early 1950s. He has recently begun growing crystals
in his Cologne flat – a continuation of his interest both in chemistry and the ‘intermedia
between science and art’, between object and process.
318 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

images as musical, or you could consider the fireworks as an aspect of chemistry.

But none of that was calculated or really conscious, it just came together.
MN Does it go beyond visual punning?
GB Oh, I don’t think of visual punning.
MN Isn’t the Fuji slide visual punning?
GB Whatever you want to take it as. Maybe it’s a comment on Japanese art, since
it’s a slide of a Hokusai print; or maybe it has to do with earth science, because
volcanoes do blow up sometimes.322
MN A comb becomes a musical instrument, a volcano has an aperture like a
clarinet, and also becomes an instrument. Is that all right?
GB It sure would do. If you saw a volcano exploding it sure would be a good
musical piece. Maybe Gavin Bryars could do The Explosion of Krakatoa.323
MN But again, what changes take place?
GB You see the change when it’s performed – there’s a pinwheel attached to the
mixer on the slide-image and maybe there’s another firework attached to another
part. So there was a definite kind of process going on. And maybe you could
wonder how the slot machine turned out to be in three-quarter time.324

MN You started painting as an Abstract Expressionist.

GB That was how I began in the early 1950s. For me it was the most exciting way
to paint at the time. Pollock’s was the most exciting work to me. I never liked De
Kooning very much; Kline was elegant and so was Motherwell, but he never fitted
quite completely into Abstract Expressionism, he was kind of tangential.
MN But you soon got disenchanted with Abstract Expressionism.
GB Well, I realised that the point of Pollock was chance, and I had already known
of Cage’s work since, I guess, 1951.
MN How did you discover Cage?
GB I met a musician at a party in New York and he mentioned Cage and told me
a little about his work. Then I lost track of him for a while and moved to New
Jersey and started to study statistics in 1953. So the chance/randomness that I was
studying in science, for scientific reasons, I was also trying to apply to painting.
I thought, well Pollock’s way of using chance was only one possibility, and I
knew, from having studied statistics, random number tables, and so forth, lots of
other ways that chance could be used. So I applied all the ways I could think of in
drawing and paintings. That came together in ’55–’56.
MN What did the random number paintings look like?

322
The interview was recorded before the spate of volcanic eruptions during the late
summer of 1976.
323
A reference to Bryars’s The Sinking of the Titanic.
324
Brecht replaced the original three ‘images’ on the fruit machine with a 3/4 time
signature, the sforzando indication and a bass clef. Fruit machine and Mount Fuji pieces are
illustrated in Art and Artists, October 1972.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 319

GB I’d take, for example, Cartesian coordinates and choose the points using
random numbers for the x and y coordinates, then connecting the dots. Or, in other
works, instead of placing points regularly, placing them at random. Or rolling
marbles dipped in ink over plywood, so that irregularities in the surface appeared
in the resultant form.
MN You were saying that you’d thought you’d given too much attention to
Pollock’s work in Chance-Imagery.325
GB In comparison with Cage.
MN Between the writing of Chance-Imagery in 1957 and its publication in 1966
you’d experienced Cage, his teaching and his music first hand. How did you hear
about the Cage class at the New School for Social Research?
GB I first heard of it from Kaprow. Once, coming home from New York in my car,
he mentioned Cage was going to do a class.
MN How did Cage approach the class? Did he talk about his own work; did he
recognise the fact that none of you was a musician?
GB In the first class he talked about the properties of music in terms of dynamics,
durations, envelope and so forth. First he asked who everybody was, what you did,
why you were there, and did you know anything about music. Most people didn’t.
There weren’t any musicians, trained musicians.326
MN Did he give you projects to realise individually or collectively?
GB Individually, on some chosen topic. We’d work on it before the next class,
bring it back and perform it. Some pieces were made on the spot.
MN But he also provided straight information; the course was part-didactic, part-
practical.
GB He often brought new scores; he’d say this is Morton Feldman’s latest
piece …
MN From what you say, and from looking at your notebooks,327 it’s obvious that
there was far more work done in the class than appears from, say Al Hansen’s
account.328
GB Yes, there was a lot of work done because you figure that there was maybe
eight or ten or a dozen people, and each person did a piece practically every week.
MN I remember when Stockhausen graced the Scratch Orchestra with his presence
at a rehearsal, and afterwards I asked some of his acolytes what he’d thought about
it. They said he was rather dismissive because he felt that it was not susceptible
to improvement. The Scratch Orchestra was still in its non-critical phase then and

325
See Chance-Imagery (New York: Something Else Press, 1966).
326
Apart from Brecht the participants at the New School class included Allan Kaprow,
Dick Higgins, Florence Tarlow, Jackson Mac Low, Al Hansen, Scott Hyde and Richard
Maxfield. Others just visited: Harvey Gross, George Segal and Larry Poons.
327
Paradoxically, for someone who doesn’t know or mind what has happened to most
of his art works, Brecht has preserved notebooks, certainly as far back as 1958.
328
In A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art (New York: Something Else Press,
1965).
320 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

this attitude was itself dismissed as being irrelevant. Was Cage concerned with the
idea of improvement?
GB Oh yes. One of the first pieces I did in his class was one where there were three
light bulbs – blue, yellow and red, I think – and they were connected to switches,
and there was a score which was arranged from a table of random numbers that gave
the duration and the colour. And so someone was pushing the switches according
to the score and there were three performers, one on piano, one on cellophane and
I don’t remember the other. So the colour corresponded to the instrument, and the
performer on that instrument would do something on that instrument during the
time his light was lit. We performed it in the class and everybody was to give their
thoughts about the situation and Cage, who had played piano, said ‘I never felt so
controlled before’ or ‘Nobody’s ever tried to control me so much.’ So I learned that
lesson there, I realised that I was being dictatorial in that situation, which makes
you think of an orchestral conductor.
MN So you moved away from rigid control, but you still retained clock time or
some form of counting.329
GB There are counts, but they naturally vary, they’re not clock time.
MN Later pieces were less clock-like, using candles for instance. Did this reflect
a general concern at the time?
GB There was a general feeling that clock time was not the way to do it. But the
problem that I’d posed for myself with the Candle Piece for Radios, for example,
was that the duration of the piece shouldn’t be set beforehand but that it should
come from within the piece itself. It was done at the Living Theatre and I chose
birthday cake candles, or rather halves of birthday cake candles. Whereas Cornelius
arranged the performances at the Roundhouse, rather thicker candles were chosen.
MN Are there other events that are natural processes and that end through no
intervention of the performer?
GB Drip Music.
MN How does that end? Isn’t that just an arbitrary decision by the performer?
GB It depends on whether you shut it off or whether you let the water run out.
If you’re using the piece I built with the glass vessel, you could just let it run till
it stops. But the Drip Music in the bathroom that we’re hearing now, that will
end when the reservoir fills. I can’t hear it so well now because the refrigerator’s
running.
MN … performing La Monte Young’s line piece …330
GB … us old colleagues forever working together …

329
E.g. Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event) (1960): ‘counting out (at an agreed-upon
rate) a pre-arranged duration’; Spanish Card Piece for Objects (1959–60): ‘the number of
five-second intervals within which that number of sounds is to be freely arranged’; Card-
Piece for Voice (1959): ‘duration of sound, approximately in seconds’.
330
Young’s Composition 1960 No. 10 to Bob Morris, ‘Draw a straight line and follow
it’ was, in accordance with its own instruction, ‘re-composed’ in an unchanged form 29
times in 1969, each time with a different date.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 321

MN Fluxus seems to have contained, apparently successfully, so many seeming

opposites and contradictions. Was there anything that made you uncomfortable?
The extreme violence of some activities, for instance, seems completely opposed
to your work?
GB I never felt embarrassed or disturbed in any of the Fluxus concerts. I
understand there was some excitement when Paik snipped off the necktie of a
first-row spectator in one of the Canal Street performances. I wasn’t there. Watts
later told me the spectator was a psychiatrist.331
MN You say there was no consciousness that certain performances were ‘musical’
while others not.332 So that trained musicians, like La Monte, were in no way
tempted to ‘pull rank’?
GB In a concert situation? No. The ones who showed up never did, like Phil
Corner, for example. He always fitted perfectly into performances.
MN Did you perform only your own pieces or each others’?
GB In a Fluxus concert? Everybody performed each others’ pieces if they wanted
to. Sometimes if a person made a piece and he was the only one who knew how it
went – like Ben Patterson with his pieces with the coffee, the interview – he had to
do that. But most of the time they were pretty interchangeable and people would
perform each others’ pieces.
MN So a lot of people were drawing lines?
GB I only saw one performance of that I think, which was done by La Monte. I
don’t remember anybody else realising that.
MN How did he do it?
GB With chalk and plum bob, I think, or straightedge – I can’t remember. But he
did it over and over and the line kept getting wider, of course. It was as controlled
as possible, but it should always be in the same place. A question of precision and
accuracy.
MN This emphasis on control link La Monte with you. Were all Fluxus activities
as controlled as this?
GB I’d say that control wasn’t the central concern, if it was any concern at all.
But the thing was to do things as simply and as well as possible with no special
concern for control – but no necessary laxness either.
MN Degree of discipline …

331
April–May 1964. Was this the concert where ‘Paik suddenly leaped down to
where Cage was sitting, removed Cage’s jacket and slashed his shirt with a wickedly long
pair of scissors, cut off his necktie at the knot, poured a bottle of shampoo over his head,
and then rushed out of the room’ (Calvin Tomkins, Ahead of the Game, 1965, p. 129)? And
was John Cage the psychiatrist?
332
In a letter to me (18 June 1976) Brecht wrote: ‘Nam June Paik and Joe Jones
came straight out of musical backgrounds. Later, too, Phil Corner. I think, too Chieko (now
Mieko) Shiomi, naturally Takehisha Kosugi, and Toshi Ichiyanagi. In any case the situation
was such that your question whether what occurred was more musical or more performance
was simply not the question (nor was there any other – they simply occurred).’
322 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

GB Well, different people have different tastes, different ways of doing things.
MN Cardew saw Water Yam as a course of study, a training in performance
discipline, with the emphasis very much on control.333
GB There’s a semantic difficulty here, since I don’t like the words discipline
and control, or even emphasis. Water Yam implies no discipline, no control, no
emphasis. On the other hand, I could agree with him – it offers the possibility
of changing one’s way to go, and if you want to perform those pieces any more,
you’d perhaps acquire certain ways to move through life. There’s nothing emphatic
about them.
MN In Fluxus concerts were any concessions made to the audience, any attempt
to ‘communicate’; was there any awareness, even, that an audience was there, any
attempt to entertain, to perform for, rather than just before an audience? 334
GB The situation was pretty relaxed. I don’t think it was so much done to entertain
anybody or perform for them either, although that is implicit in the scores. But
there was a kind of give and take. It wasn’t certainly as quite as a conventional
concert hall performance, because after all the ones I’m thinking of were done
in a loft, and perhaps the windows were open and you heard noises outside, and
then somebody would leave to go downstairs and come back up. There was a kind
of constant coming and going, you know, so you’d move aside if somebody was
leaving even if you were performing the piece. For me, while I was performing,
there was a total situation which didn’t especially have to do with me or with the
audience, the people in the room, or with the people going up and down the stairs.
And anything that occurred in this total situation would naturally be taken into
account and one would act as one would act in any situation.
MN Why wasn’t Fluxus taken up as a ‘movement’, in the way that Happenings
were?
GB I don’t know. Maybe Jill Johnston wrote now and then in the Village Voice but
not very much, and she had a dance column anyway, so it was in the performance
area. People from the art-as-objects world hardly ever came to the performances.
Whereas Happenings were done in galleries, so it was natural for the visual-art
people and critics to turn up. And the people who did Happenings were professional
artists whereas Dick [Higgins] was a printer, Alison [Knowles] was a housewife

333
‘Outside Fluxus, in the hands of a David Tudor (the first person I saw
perform Incidental Music in the Water Yam) or a John Tilbury, and in relation to such
period phenomena as James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (from which I cannot
disentangle the Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event) in the box), the Water Yam begins
to reveal its real function: a course of study, and following on that, a teaching
instrument’. (Cardew in ‘Volo Solo’ programme, note to Brecht concert at the Royal Court
Theatre, London, 22 November 1970.)
334
I was not referring, of course, to those pieces that were composed specifically for
audience, such as La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 No. 3: ‘Announce to the audience
when the piece will begin and end if there is a limit on duration. It may be of any duration.
Then announce that everyone may do whatever he wishes for the duration of the composition’.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 323

and silkscreen painter, I was a chemist, Maciunas did layouts and design, and Al
Hansen was a graphic artist and bum.
MN So you felt there was a great divide between you and the happeners?
GB Not that there was anything necessarily dividing us, but our way of going
about things was different. The Happenings seemed to fit the gallery/museum
system pretty quickly, whereas the Fluxus things never did.
MN Was there any relationship between Happenings and events? Michael Kirby
reckons that an event is like a single, independent compartment in a Happening.335
GB I don’t see it that way. There’s no relation between them except that I started
thinking in terms of events at the same time as Kaprow was starting to think in terms
of Happenings, and they both came from a dissatisfaction with the static quality of
so much of the work at the time. But beyond that the way they developed was quite
different. Thinking of the ‘classical’ Happenings of the late 1950s/early 1960s –
Kaprow’s, Dine’s, Whitman’s, Oldenburg’s – they all had a kind of unity and there
was really no tendency, at least from my experience, to divide a Happening into
smaller parts. They had a kind of total unity.
Of course you could artificially divide a Happening into events, but that seems
to me to be the post facto thing to do – I don’t see any real relationship. It seems to
me that events in general are either a viewpoint on life or, in their more objective
form, in the form of scores to be realised, notations, they’re more personal and
they don’t even have to be performed outwardly. Some of them can be realised
mentally too, so the whole emphasis seems quite different.336
MN How do you distinguish between a piece that you can realise privately, or
mentally, and conceptual art?
GB It depends on where you put the emphasis because conceptual art has to do, by
definition, with the conceptualising faculty of the mind, whereas to me the events

335
‘Compartmented structure is based on the arrangement and contiguity of theatrical
units that are completely self-contained and hermetic. No information is passed from one
discrete theatrical unit – or “compartment” – to another … Events are short, uncomplicated
theatre pieces with the same alogical qualities as details of Happenings. For example, George
Brecht places three glasses on the floor of his “playing area” and then fills them with water
from a pitcher: it is his Three Aqueous Events. An event is not compartmented. Formally, if
not expressively, it is equivalent to a single compartment of a Happening’ (Michael Kirby
(ed.) Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1966), pp. 13 and 21).
336
Interestingly enough some early Brecht performances were done in the context
of primarily Happening performances. E.g. ‘An Evening of Sound Theatre – Happenings’
at the Reuben Gallery on 11 June 1960 comprised Jim Dine’s Vaudeville Act (happening),
Allen Kaprow’s Intermission Piece (happening), Robert Whitman’s E.G. (an opera),
Brecht’s Gossoon (a chamber event) and electronic music by Richard Maxfield. And
the ‘Environments, Situations, Spaces’ at the Martha Jackson Gallery between 25 May–
23 June 1961 consisted of Brecht’s Iced Store (event), Dine’s Spring Cabinet (environment),
Kaprow’s Yard (environment), Oldenburg’s The Store (environment), Whitman’s Unrided
(environment) and W. Gaudnek’s Unlimited Dimensions (event). (The bracketed descriptions
are taken from the happening & fluxus catalogue and so are presumably authentic.)
324 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

are total experiences. There is no more emphasis on conceptualising than there

is on perception or memory or thinking in general of unconscious association.
There’s no special emphasis, it’s a global experience. I’ve seen conceptual art
pieces that look a lot like my scores in Water Yam, so it’s possible that these people
knew of my event scores and took them as concept pieces, but from my point of
view they’re not. Calling them conceptual pieces would be using a very narrow
view of them.
MN This total experience differs from the Romantic Gesamtkunstwerk. In her
Joseph Cornell book, Dore Ashton quotes this from Schumann: ‘The cultivated
musician may study a Madonna by Raphael, the painter, a symphony by Mozart,
with equal advantage. Yet more: in sculpture the actor’s art becomes fixed; the
actor in turn transforms the sculptor’s work into living forms; the painter turns a
poem into a painting; the musician sets a picture to music.’ That’s a far cry from
Intermedia …337
GB Yes it is. Like he always says change something into something. If you really
change something into something, it can only be done in a simpleminded way,
like painters from time to time try to interpret a Bach fugue: there’s a row of
blue dots, there’s a row of red dots, but that’s really so simpleminded. Whereas
Intermedia come from, I think, an awareness that the boundaries aren’t any longer
there, that you can move anywhere along a continuous line, in a continuous field –
a continuum. And what comes out can’t be analysed into its component parts: it’s
continuously variable within a field.
MN You’ve said that an ‘act of imagination of perception is itself an arrangement,
so there is no avoiding anyone’s making arrangements’. Cage avoids making
perceptual arrangements, leaving it open to the listener.
GB I guess Cage in some cases makes a process for making a process. He tells
you how to make the parts for a piece and lets you make the parts, whereas a score
like Two Durations is already a score, there’s nothing else you have to do. In some
pieces you do, it’s more like Cage – Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event) or the Card
Piece for Voice.
MN In Motor Vehicle, as in Cage, there’s no central focus as there is in the
monostructural events.
GB That was the first event score and it’s not typical.

337
‘Much of the best work being produced today seems to fall between media’ (Dick
Higgins, in the best survey of Intermedia in his essay of that title in Foew & ombwhnw. Since
he has recently taken up the academic study of English literature, Higgins has discovered that
the term intermedia was first used by Coleridge: ‘This term was first used by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge about 1812 and re-applied in 1965 by Dick Higgins to describe art works being
produced which lie conceptually between two or more established media or traditional art
disciplines’ (Higgins, Some Poetry Intermedia (New York: Poster Press, 1976).
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 325

MN Listening to Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis in France,338 I felt that I was almost forced
to structure, in order to ‘survive’ the disorientation of totally un-arranged music.
GB If your mind is in the state of Zen meditation or even if you just have a
blank mind, then you can experience without structuring, but that doesn’t happen
very often, that’s not a very common situation. Normally when we’re in any
kind of situation, even a global situation, like a performance of Atlas, we notice
relationships just naturally. Everyone has a natural way of experiencing and people
make connections unconsciously.
MN Would you say, therefore, that that was a good reason for creating an
uncontrollable, non-controlled global situation, as against La Monte’s almost total
control?
GB Yes, the aim is different. The focus is different, as Cage might say. The essential
point about a Cage global situation is that it’s an unfocused experience, whereas
La Monte’s emphasis is on control and the focus is on, for example, the overtone
interactions – what happens in the interaction between the 5th and 6th overtones,
for example. He really goes to great lengths to control as much as possible, and
to focus attention on what remains uncontrolled.339 Whereas in the event scores
the focus isn’t on a global situation but on something you’ve noticed already.
It can be pretty marginal. Bird-flight, for instance. Sometimes I’m looking out
of the window and a bird just goes by like that, and that’s the event. So I notice
what’s happening during the time the bird’s flying. It’s a matter of focus. There’s
no argument between what Cage does in his global situation and what I do in the
events, it’s just a difference in focus, since you can, in any movement of your
experiencing Atlas, perceive an ‘event’.
MN So your event scores are abstract in the true sense – they are abstractions from
the global situation in which we live and perceive?
GB That’s right. If you focus on anything it has a limit, just like the total performance
of Atlas Eclipticalis has a limit – it begins somehow and sooner or later it ends.
So you could consider a whole performance is one event if you wanted to. I took
care of this apparent distinction in the Two Exercises, where there’s an object or an
event that can become as large, you can keep adding to it as long as you want or
reducing it as much as you want. So it’s only a difference in focus as far as I can
see – it’s not a fundamental difference between Cage’s work and mine.
MN There are no performance directions in your scores – they don’t say ‘do
something’, they merely indicate or name. But there’s a kind of control, or a
directing as you’d call it …

338
For more on Atlas Eclipticalis, including the transcript of Cage’s address to the
orchestral players prior to the performance at La Rochelle, see ‘Music’, Studio International,
192 (September–October 1976), pp. 192–4, above.
339
Brecht found that this comment is less relevant to Young’s newer work, which
‘enters more into traditional Indian music’.
326 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

GB … but as soon as you say anything you’re already focusing. In principle

everybody could use the event-scores as paradigms and invent their own whatever
they wanted to. You could take them as examples.
MN The only situation in which you don’t control is when you don’t say anything.
Unless you put one overall directive that gave an example in the form of an event
score, and then say ‘go away and find your own’.
GB But even that would be more controlling than not doing it. You could say that
even if you did nothing you would still be controlling people’s not having anything
of yours (laughs).

‘Steve Reich: Interview’ (Studio International, 192, November/December

1976, pp. 300–07) 340

MN When you wrote Music as a Gradual Process, were you aware of Sol LeWitt’s
Paragraphs on Conceptual Art? Because it seems to me that there are some very
striking parallels.
SR I wrote Music as a Gradual Process in New Mexico in the summer of 1968 in
complete isolation from everybody except the composer/pianist James Tenney,341
who paid me a visit and looked over the manuscript and offered some good
comments. I discovered Sol LeWitt’s Paragraphs a couple of years later when he
gave me the catalogue of his exhibition at the Gemeente Museum in The Hague.
MN He says in the opening paragraph, for instance, that ‘When an artist uses a
conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made
beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.’
SR I don’t agree. Execution is hardly a perfunctory affair and never has been in my
music. Also, I’m not a conceptual artist, because the concept does not necessarily
precede the work but, rather, as I said in Music as a Gradual Process, not only may
the form precede the content but the content may precede the form. In my music,
the musical material has usually become clear before the form. In It’s Gonna Rain,
the material, the original loop, preceded the phasing idea. I knew I was going to
work with Brother Walter’s voice. I knew it was that material that was generating
my excitement. So it was a sound that was in my ear, and later I discovered the
process of phasing. For me, sound has been uppermost in my mind, and even in
It’s Gonna Rain the question of how long the execution of the phasing would be

340
This interview took place between Nyman and Reich at La Rochelle, France, on
26–27 June 1976. Originally published later that year in the November/December issue
of Studio International, and reprinted in Reich’s Writings on Music (ed. Hillier), this
slightly extended version is based on the original transcript of the interview found amongst
Nyman’s papers in 2011.
341
Composer James Tenney (1934–2006) studied with John Cage and performed
with Steve Reich during the late 1960s, including participating in a performance of Reich’s
Pendulum Music at the Whitney Museum of American Art in May 1969.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 327

(in other words, does it go round from unison to unison in two minutes or does it
take nine minutes or does it take seven minutes) – that decision was crucial. So
the execution is never perfunctory. As you know my ensemble will rehearse a
large new piece like Music for 18 Musicians for two years. So I would completely
disagree with what Sol says here – at least as far as my own music is concerned.
MN Do you think that LeWitt believes this himself? That the execution of his
works is a perfunctory business?
SR Perhaps in some of the works where what he does is to superimpose a grid on
top of itself, as seen in his book Arcs, Circles and Grids (1972). I admire LeWitt’s
work and I admire parts of Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, but I think for me right
now the works of his that I admire most are the ones that have been realized by
hand. There’s a huge wall drawing in the Museum of Modern Art. It’s done in
pencil, but the net effect is of seeing a very beautifully modulated surface with
slight areas of greater darkness or slight areas of greater lightness, which create the
effect almost of colour – of subtle greens, reds and purples.342 So I’d say that the
works of his that I admire the most are quite far from this particular description.
MN What struck me was the similarity between LeWitt’s ‘all the planning and
decisions are made beforehand’ and your ‘once the process is set up and loaded it
runs by itself.’
SR Well, my decisions weren’t all made beforehand. The only times that I
composed a phase piece that goes from unison to unison was the first section of
It’s Gonna Rain and the individual sections of Piano Phase. Every other piece
of mine has some aesthetic decision in it as to exactly how many beats out of
phase a pattern will shift against itself and when the two voices will become four
voices, and when the four voices become eight voices, and when the melodic
resulting patterns will be doubled. Even in It’s Gonna Rain where you have the
‘pure’ process, yes, there’s a pure process, but how long does it take? That’s an
aesthetic decision.
MN But surely you’d admit that the tone and purpose of Music as a Gradual
Process was very close to that of the Paragraphs?
SR Yes, but we’re talking now in 1976, and at the time I was writing, in 1968,
much of the stress in new music was on chance and free improvisation and I was
trying to separate myself from that and to show that one could work in a more
traditional way. What I wanted was a blend of controlled individual choice and
impersonality. You’re doing something that is working itself out and yet because
you’ve chosen the material and the process it is also expressive of yourself and
you don’t meddle with it any further for it to express your personality. But surely
what you say is true that the thrust of my essay, and the tersely worded style, was
to drive home an idea of impersonality, which I thought was important at the time.
And now it’s eight years later and I don’t feel like making that point any more
because it’s so well understood. In fact, I’ve changed musically quite a bit and I’d
like to bring my words up to date, too.

342
See, for example, LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #260 (1975).
328 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

We talked about this in 1970 when you interviewed me for the first time.343 You
asked ‘what do you call this music?’ and I said, ‘maybe “pulse music”’. But the
real, strict answer is ‘music’, because the labels enforce a kind of static quality
on one’s personality. In other words, you’re forced to crank out phase pieces for
the rest of your life if you start to call it ‘phase music’, and I’ll be damned if I’m
placed in that situation. That’s why I’ve shied away from giving labels to things.
I don’t know what the next piece will bring but I assume that it will bear some
similarity to what I have done in the past. But I hope that my music will move on
and change.
MN To return to the LeWitt Paragraphs, he says, ‘If the artist wishes to explore his
idea thoroughly, then arbitrary or chance decisions would be kept to a minimum,
while caprice, taste, and other whimsies would be eliminated from the making of
the art.’
SR Certainly there’s no place for chance in my music beyond the traditional
place for it; namely, after the rehearsals, one can never know exactly how a live
performance will go. The idea of composing through tossing coins, or oracles, or
other chance forms I would reject now, as I did in 1967, and as I did in 1958 when
I first heard John Cage’s retrospective concert.344 But there is a great difference
between chance and choice, and what I was trying to do in my earlier pieces was,
to some extent, eliminate personal choices as a composer. Now, especially in
Music for 18 Musicians, I have made a great deal more choices. There still isn’t
one iota of chance in my music and I don’t foresee that there will be.
MN LeWitt also says, ‘once out of his hand the artist has no control over the way
a viewer will perceive the work.’ That certainly applies to your earlier work, but
it’s surely true of traditional music too? 345
SR Yes, but it’s particularly true of music that works with short repeating patterns.
In the phase pieces you can’t possibly know all that people may hear. First, there
are two, three, or four identical repeating patterns playing canonically against
each other in different phase positions and, at times, on different groups of
identical instruments simultaneously – as at the end of Drumming. Second, there
are acoustic by-products of this repetition and phasing. For instance, in the first

343
‘Steve Reich: an interview with Michael Nyman’, originally published in the
Musical Times, 112 (March 1971), pp. 229–31.
344
Hillier states that ‘[this] famous event, a 25-year retrospective concert, took place
in New York Town Hall on May 15, 1958. The recording of that event is now available on
CD, and the original LP box set with photographs by Robert Rauschenberg has become
something of a collector’s item’ (Reich, Writings on Music (ed. Hillier)).
345
LeWitt also writes (‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’, first published in Vito Acconci
and Bernadette Mayer (eds) 0–9 (New York, NY, January 1969)): ‘The words of one
artist to another may induce an idea chain, if they share the same concept … Perception
is subjective … The concept of a work of art may involve the matter of the piece or the
process in which it is made … The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with.
It should run its course.’
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 329

section of Drumming for tuned bongos, one may listen to the little ‘tkk’ of the
stick hitting the skin that bounces off the ceiling at the rear of the concert hall and
focusing in on that rhythmic pattern. That may be more present for one listener
than the fundamental pitch of the drums.
Similarly with the attack of the wooden mallets hitting the metal keys of
the glockenspiels later in the piece. These acoustic by-products are particularly
audible when there is rhythmic repetition and a constant key centre, as is often
found in Balinese and African music. As to the fundamental phase relationships,
these are basically a variation of canonic technique and resemble Western musical
techniques of the medieval and baroque periods. In listening to any canonic music,
one will naturally focus on one of the two or more simultaneous voices – and this
focus will shift depending on the listener.
MN You would obviously disagree with LeWitt’s statement that ‘It doesn’t really
matter if the viewer understands the concepts of the artist by seeing the art.’
SR Well, in 1968 through about 1972, I would have. What I said in 1968 was that
I wanted the process to be perceptible. It was very important to me that the listener
be able to perceive precisely what was going on in the music and I hope that
I succeeded.
MN But do you still hold to that position? Even with the program notes in front of
me I find it very difficult to follow the process of Music for 18 Musicians.
SR Let’s put it this way: in Music for 18 Musicians you can hear what’s going on
in the sense in which you can hear that the melodic pattern is getting longer. You
may not realize that the melodic pattern is being repeated over and over again and
is being reaccented, and that’s how it’s getting longer. So in a sense you’re right,
I’m not as concerned that one hears how the music is made. If some people hear
exactly what’s going on, I’m glad of it, and if other people don’t, but they still like
the piece, that’s fine with me.
What I was really concerned with in Music for 18 Musicians was making
beautiful music above everything else, and that the sound result would be to
my ears as beautiful as possible. I wasn’t as concerned with filling the structure.
You’ve got to remember that I started Music for 18 Musicians in 1974, which was
almost ten years after It’s Gonna Rain, and I completed so many pieces in the
meantime. You have Music for Pieces of Wood and Music for Mallet Instruments,
Voices and Organ, which can be analysed note for note. The latter piece is very
rich, but everything can be accounted for. It’s possible to hear it as clearly as Piano
Phase. The rules are still there. There happens to be two processes going on but
each one works like clockwork, and when you hear the piece I think it makes a
very rich impression. The first piece that isn’t analysable in this way is Music for
18 Musicians.
Music for 18 Musicians was consciously composed with a feeling for liberating
myself from strict structures. I had to have some strong formal organization because
I hear that way, but once I’d established those 11 chords at the beginning, each
section was in a sense an invention. Within some sections you’ll still find strict
build-ups working in strict canonic relationships, and then they’ll be harmonized,
330 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

absolutely as a question of taste with no other justification. Nevertheless, the

11 different sections do relate to each other as members of a family: Certain
characteristics will be shared, others will be unique.346
MN But one finds that as the texture of your music becomes richer and more
seductive, not only is there less possibility of following the process but also there
seems to be less necessity.
SR You’re right. There was a didactic quality to the early pieces, I think. When
you discover a new idea, it may be very important to present that idea in a very
forceful and pared-down way. My early pieces are very clear examples of a strict
working-out of certain musical ideas that were new, although they did have strong
relationships to canonic structure and augmentation. But once you’ve done that
for a while – you can’t write the same piece over and over again. The artists I
admire are the ones that move on. There’s no point in simply rehashing those same
principles in another orchestration.
MN So in fact variety of materials is important to you?
SR Yes, it’s been very important to me to work with different kinds of instruments
(or the lack of them in the case of Clapping Music). It’s very important for me to
work in successive different media because the formal necessities of dealing with
the voice, as opposed to the dealing of the clapping of the hands, as opposed to
working with marimbas, or pianos, or strings, or with bass clarinets, all produce
very different basic musical assumptions. Mallet percussion and bare hands
produce short tones, whereas voices, bass clarinets, and strings can produce
longer ones, and that leads to basic decisions about duration of notes, the human
breath, and so on. Plus, the sheer beauty of sound these instruments can produce,
especially in combination.
MN You’re not interested in genuinely minimal music?
SR No, I’m not. I’m interested in music in a more traditional sense of that word,
and I really always have been. By ‘traditional’, I mean several of the world’s
musical traditions including that of Europe from around 1200 to 1750, that of
Balinese gamelan music as it has survived, West African music as it is found now,
American jazz from about 1950 to 1965, the music of Stravinsky, Bartók, and
Webern, and the traditional cantillation of the Hebrew Scriptures.
MN You’ve often referred to the lead pieces of Richard Serra.
SR I would say that the relationship between Serra and me is lodged in Pendulum
Music. I gave him the original score of Pendulum Music as a gift; in exchange,
he gave me a piece called Candle Rack, which is simply a piece of wood with 10
holes drilled in it that holds candles and sits on the floor. Actually, my ensemble
rarely performs Pendulum Music any more.
MN Some of my students did it at Nottingham last year, unprompted by me.

346
Reich first encountered the concept of ‘a complicated network of similarities,
overlapping and criss-crossing’ in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (Oxford,
Blackwell: 1953), p. 66.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 331

SR Really, well, it’s very easy to do, one can say that for it. I prefer the low-fi
version. You can do it beautifully on small, inexpensive loudspeakers because then
you get a sort of series of birdcalls and I much prefer that to a hi-fi shriek.
MN Pendulum Music is the only piece of yours that one can talk of in terms of
a natural process, because the other pieces, as you’ve admitted, all have some
degree of personal intervention on your part.
SR And not only that, they’re musical in the sense that Pendulum Music is strictly
physical. A pendulum is not a musician. So of all my pieces, that was the most
impersonal, and was the most emblematic and the most didactic in terms of the
process idea, and also most sculptural. In many ways, you could describe Pendulum
Music as audible sculpture, with the objects being the swinging microphones and
the loudspeakers. I always set them up quite clearly as sculpture. It was very
important that the speakers be laid flat on the floor, which is obviously not usual
in concerts.
MN So if someone composed it now, it would be called performance art.
SR Exactly – but I’m more interested in music.
MN Do you find that your attitude toward the art world is changing?
SR It may be that after a period of much activity as there was in the 1960s, things
are naturally slowing down, starting about 1970.
MN Do you see the same thing happening in music?
SR Well, music has always moved slower – there aren’t the same expectations.
In the 1960s, everyone thought it was great that there was one art movement
following another in quick succession. For instance, there was a two- or three-year
period between the emergence of Pop Art as a dominant form and the emergence
of Minimal Art as a dominant form; and then after that you have the process art
that I was tied in with. Things moved very rapidly.
MN But the pace of music is slower?
SR It has accelerated from what it was in the Middle Ages, but it’s still considerably
slower than the three- or four-year generation period in the visual arts. For instance,
in America you had Ives, then you had the period starting with Copland in the
1920s and going well into the 1940s, or even the 1950s with imitators of Copland
and Stravinsky. And at the same time you had the Schoenberg imitators, and then
Cage emerging strongly in the 1940s and 1950s, then dominant in the 1960s: a
20-year period.
I composed It’s Gonna Rain in 1965, so this kind of music has been going on for
well over ten years and it’s only now gaining serious attention and consideration.
Frankly, I think this slower movement is healthier. It’s harder to get accepted in
serious music. There are a lot of people around playing Bach, so you’ve got to deal
with them. They’re not going to accept your music without careful and repeated
listenings. If you want to be taken seriously by musicians in general, and not just
a small coterie on the outside, it’s going to take a while.
MN But when your music becomes available for anyone to play, it ceases to have
the exclusivity that it has at the moment.
332 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

SR Well, that exclusivity is something I really don’t believe in. I want other
musicians to play my music. I can’t say for certain when this will happen. There
has to be a certain kind of investment that has to be measured emotionally and
financially. Clapping Music doesn’t demand that, for example, so I’m making an
effort to try and publish it with Universal Edition along with some of the more
straightforward pieces, because the music can be done. I’m trying to make some of
my music more accessible. It’s a kind of ‘wait and see’ attitude. Piano Phase gets
published, musicians start to play it, and if I know it was a success then I might
go a step further and publish Six Pianos or Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices
and Organ.
I think Stravinsky once said that there are two documents: the record and
the score. I’ve been lucky to have been recorded because this puts the sound in
people’s ears in a way a score doesn’t. There’s the cliché that when Varese wrote
Ionisations it took some 75 rehearsals to play it the first time. Now it takes three or
four rehearsals and almost every student ensemble plays it. Why? It’s a style that
is known. Everybody knows how it goes. They’ve heard it before. They’ve heard
the recordings. It’s a known quantity. And the same applies to any style of music.
After a while we get to know what’s expected and start assimilating that style. So
for the first few performances it’s very difficult – it’s a big deal. After that it’s not
so difficult.
MN You say that you’re primarily interested in younger musicians getting to know
your music.
SR Yes, I’m interested in other musicians playing my music. If a piece of music is
going to survive, who’s going to make that decision? It’s not going to be painters
or sculptors or music critics; it’s going to be other musicians. If musicians like a
piece of music they will continue to play it, and it will continue to live. Otherwise
it’s like pop music; it comes and it goes.
MN What about the question of scale and duration in your music? Taking a
particular phase relationship in Drumming, for instance, once you’ve made the
phasing shift, there’s no inner reason – nothing within the music – that dictates
how long you stay where you are and when to move on.
SR Yes, there is. What I mean by that is that if you take Piano Phase and you
make it last for three hours, you’re creating a scandal and you’re not playing the
piece seriously. Piano Phase could take, if you were really tearing along, about 16
minutes, and if you’re going incredibly slowly, 22 to 24 minutes. It’s a pretty wide
latitude. But, on the other hand, you can’t play it in seven minutes or play it in an
hour without hurting the music.
MN Why not?
SR Because we’re human beings and in many respects we’re very similar, and at
a certain point boredom sets in even if you’re an aficionado. At a certain point,
you’ve heard the relationship long enough to appraise it carefully, to appraise what
the upper resulting patterns are, what the lower resulting patterns are, what the
middle resulting patterns are, and it’s time for a change.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 333

MN Piano Phase is not the best example, because the texture’s pretty bare. What
about Drumming?
SR Drumming will vary in concert performance from about 70 to 80 minutes.
That’s the most latitude I’m aware of – 10 minutes in what is generally an
80-minute piece. On the other hand, if you played Drumming for two hours, that’s
a mistake, it’s just wrong – you’ve grossly elongated something that shouldn’t
take that long.
MN Have you tried it?
SR We’ve not tried it that long, but we’ve played the piece many, many times
without fixing it; so that, in other words, without consciously trying to do it, we’ve
simply allowed ourselves the human situation of having no rules. I’ve never told
anyone in my ensemble how long or how short to go on for. The singers have
x amount of patterns to sing and they pace themselves slightly differently each
night. The duration does vary, but never has it taken two hours and never has it
taken 30 minutes. If you did it in 30 minutes, you’d be moving along at such a clip
that no one really could get a grasp on what they heard – they wouldn’t be able
to hear those relationships clearly. And if you played it for two hours, it would be
just a bore.
Some musicians in my ensemble have perfect pitch, as you know, and other
musicians have what you could say is an absolute sense of tempo – given the piece
of music they know really what the right tempo is. And this relates to the number
of repetitions in my music. There is latitude, but there are limits to that latitude.

‘Music’ (Studio International, 193, January/February 1977, pp. 6–8)

[The music of Hobbs and White]

The Hobbs/White Duo’s Retrospective Concert (presented by Music Now on

24 November [1976] as part of the ICA’s valuable Contemporary Music Series
that ran every Sunday from 3 October to 19 December) clearly demonstrated
what on the surface appears to be an irreconcilable contradiction between their
systems music and what White calls their ‘intuitive’ music. For John White, at
least, there is no inconsistency (as a statement, quoted in my ‘Hearing/Seeing’
article in the November/December issue of Studio, showed).347 The difference
between the two mutually exclusive categories is clearly pinpointed by George
Brecht’s definition of what he termed ‘The Irrelevant Process’: ‘In general, bias in
the selection of elements for a chance-image can be avoided by using a method of
selection of those elements which is independent of the characteristics of interest
in the elements themselves. The method should preferably give an irregular and
unforeseen pattern of selection.’348

347
See ‘Hearing/Seeing’, Studio International, 192 (November/December 1976),
pp. 233–43.
348
In George Brecht, Chance-Imagery (New York: Something Else Press, 1966), p. 14.
334 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Brecht wrote that in 1957, and was referring to both musical and visual chance-
images, but it could just as easily stand as an epitaph to the English experimental
music of the 1960s and 1970s. Until, that is, Hobbs/White waved goodbye to the
irrelevant process of articulating often-historical fragments by means of repetition
and random number systems. Instead, the fingers now ripple up and down the
keyboard, historical keyboard layouts and textures are taken over complete, and
the ear rather than the process is the initial and final arbiter. The processing is now
highly ‘relevant’, as in the conventional models from which Hobbs/White work.
Gavin Bryars has said that he finds this piano music subversive, and so it may
be, in that style and personal taste are now proclaimed openly rather than hidden
behind ‘impersonal’ processes.
When they began writing percussion music around 1972 Hobbs/White found
the impersonality that systems offered was a necessary barrier between taste and
sound-source, a guarantee. White says, against their music sounding like Latin-
American percussion music – and, in effect, a refuge from the tactile and empirical.
The shift from percussion (and toy pianos/reed organs which were treated similarly)
to piano was not the simple reverse of what it was for Steve Reich, for instance
– from one percussion instrument to another, from drumming on the keyboard to
drumming on skins, wood and metal bars (in Drumming). Having successfully
avoided the associative quality of percussion instruments, Hobbs/White fell into
the trap of working with, indeed reproducing, only the conservative, ‘expressive’
character of traditional, mainly 19th-century, piano writing. Thus Hobbs:

I chose the piano duet medium (in late 1974) because I wanted to continue
writing duo music, while at the same time making use of the traditions which
to me are typified by the piano. Seeing the instrument primarily as a tonally
sonorous medium, I had no desire to write mathematically-based music for it,
feeling that its potential was better realised in music where harmony, melody
and so on were the governing factors. Also, I had become aware of the severe
limitations of the percussion music, and welcomed the chance of returning to the
richly expressive musical language in which I had been trained.349

A bold step, undeniably, but one that seems to me to be basically cowardly; it is

possible, after all, to realise this traditional potential, to make music more accessible
to wider audiences, without succumbing to mere recreation of a musical tradition
which is dead creatively if not culturally. (Cardew made the same error with his
political music.) Personally I prefer either to hear the original sources themselves
or to have them irrelevantly processed in some way; if you renounce the irrelevant,
mathematical, or some other re-focusing process, you are forced to structure your
music in the way that the Masters did – themes have to take their own time, phrases
have to be balanced, dramatic points have to be made, the material, generally, has
to be exploited and developed according to its own nature, and the nature of the

349
Personal correspondence with the composer.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 335

(tonal) language in which it is expressed. Process-orientated experimental music

had mercifully removed the heavily romantic, theatrical gestures that are all too
frequent in this music. An expressive style has been adopted: one wonders what is
being expressed, what there is to express.
In this sense of course this supposedly free music is not free, since it is locked
in a closed tradition and is thus compatible with systems music (and experimental
music in general), since both, in their opposing ways, absolve the composer from
[the] responsibility of establishing an autographic identity. Hiding behind a found
or given style is in concept no different from hiding behind a found or given
system. Yet the consequences are radically different, the piano music being as
aggressively ‘personal’ as the percussion music is gently self-effacing; the former
telling us little or nothing new about music and its materials, the latter far more.
(Indeed it is the very stability of the expressive modes of Romantic music that
particularly attracts Hobbs and which makes his music ultimately more suitable
for theatre or cinema than for concert Hall, especially the backstreet salons where
experimental music tends to get played.)
And I’m also ready to admit that by writing of Hobbs/White as an indissoluble
unit rather than a very close working association of two very different composers,
I’ve not only tended to overstate and oversimplify, but also, more importantly, to do
a disservice to John White. The two are, however, very close: they work together
almost exclusively, and their music has a close generic similarity. Otherwise the
differences are striking: White, in his early 40s, has been composing for exactly
20 years, Hobbs, in his mid-20s, has been active on the experimental scene for
about 10. And if one is to believe Hobbs’ statement about the music he had been
trained in, then both represent cases of arrested development – arrested, that is, by
involvement in experimental music. In his mid-teens, Hobbs, instead of working
traditional music out of his system (as a young painter would) by adapting its
principles (perhaps to avant-garde serialism), was plunged up to his neck into
Cage, Cardew, chance and indeterminacy, free improvisation – where ‘anything
goes’ was the watchword, anything, that is, other than what one finds depressing
in his recent music. Hobbs’ fascination with the workings of traditional technique –
how to effect a transition from one texture to another, thematic development, etc.
– suggests that he has at last found himself as a composer.
Certainly the seriousness with which he follows a rather good piece of student
Handel pastiche by some very jolly ‘boys and girls come out to play’ music
suggests that Hobbs is about to fall prey to the dead hand of English academic
pastoral whimsy.
This is a pity in many ways, not least because in the Duo context the strong,
but entirely negative features of Hobbs’ music tend to affect White’s more
original, detached and wry music adversely (as it has in this review, for instance).
White, too, became involved with experimental music in the later 1960s, when,
however, he was already established as an eccentrically independent composer
on the fringe of the mainline tradition. Having emerged from the dark tunnel
of experimental music, White’s piano music continues his involvement with
336 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

the gothic underbelly of nineteenth-century piano music. Unlike Hobbs, White

subtly short-circuits traditional techniques (just as Satie did) so that what sounds
familiar, or reminiscent, does so in an often fresh context. Even a piece as banal
as ‘interrupted Romance’ from White’s Concert Duos for piano and tuba, which
abruptly contrasts a ‘dreamy’ piano idea with ‘gruff’ staccato tuba passages, is
saved by the sense of irony that White, at least, possesses, even though he denies
that his purpose is ironic (unlike Satie’s). And his genuinely funny St Vitus Dance
Music Assembly Machine (1976), a gradual reconstruction of an angular big band
jazz bass line (on tuba and bassoon) shows that system and sentimentality are
not incompatible.
White sees his music as being cartoons (to Hobbs’ oils). Gavin Bryars recently
made another, tentative, visual analogy:

Stretching the point a little bit, I can see similarities between John’s work and
that of Tom Phillips in that both seem to involve research of one kind or another.
Both seem to feed off the past rather than quote it. There are things in Tom’s
work where he uses little elements from art history and from literary history but
which are compositionally his own. It’s not really that accurate a comparison but
there is a certain sympathy for past procedures without aping the past, and that
seems to me to be fairly close to John’s use of the past.350

‘Music’ (Studio International, 193, March/April 1977, pp. 134–5)

[Pop Music]

If popular music is to survive as anything more valuable than a source of revenue

for innumerable merchants, it will require steady and purposeful criticism.
Unlike literature or poetry or even classical music, popular music does not have
an agreed upon language by which its product can be understood. Partly this
arises because the music is not deemed worthy of proper analysis; partly because
the music and the image it perpetuates are often thought interchangeable. Either
way, the lack of reasoned evaluation, from whatever source, whether from
religious leader or renowned critic, committed or otherwise, is the music’s
biggest handicap. Truth is abandoned.351

So Tony Palmer ends his new book All You Need is Love (Weidenfeld & Nicholson
and Chappell, £6.50), confident that he’s blazed the trail with steady and purposeful
criticism of his own. That he hasn’t (and couldn’t) is not surprising: instead he has
little more than adequately retold the story of popular music from pre-ragtime

350
Personal correspondence with the composer.
351
Tony Palmer, All You Need is Love: The Story of Popular Music, ed. Paul Medlicott
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson and Chappell, 1976), p. 309.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 337

to the present, for, I would guess, a mainly popular, picture-book-as-Christmas-

present market.
The book, a spin-off from Palmer’s 17-part TV series, proves yet again that in
the ‘media’ world time, money and access are given to people who don’t really
know how to handle them responsibly. Palmer has clearly misused, or simply
underused (I can’t speak for the TV films which have not been shown) the power
and resources that he has uniquely and enviably had at his disposal. How could
any even mildly perceptive person who has ‘interviewed over three hundred key
protagonists, from performers to record producers, from critics to managers, from
publicists to promoters, throughout the United States, Europe and Africa … shot
almost a million feet of film and acquired as much again in archival material …
commissioned essays relating to each episode, hoping these would focus my
attention on what was considered important’ – how could such a person fail to
discover at least a little information that is fresh or to offer a new perspective on
known material?
Palmer considers that he has thrown new light on popular music since he speaks
of the book as containing an ‘argument’.352 This I did not manage to locate unless
it is the recurring leitmotif of commercialism, manipulation and exploitation, best
summarised by the rock journalist Lester Bangs:

The essential misapprehension about popular music is that it is anything other

than a totally capitalistic enterprise. In fact, it has absolutely nothing to do with
anything except making money and getting rich. Some popular musicians start
out with revolutionary rhetoric, but all they want is cars and girls and champagne.
It’s nonsense to think that popular music is about anything but conspicuous
consumption and the good life.353

That would make a fine theme for a responsible book on popular music, yet it is
quoted, like everything else, TV-documentary fashion, without further comment.
Palmer certainly has had the facilities to explore this area and he does show some
interest in it: whites exploiting blacks (minstrels, ragtime, blues, Presley, Johnny
Ray, etc.), whites exploiting whites (Manfred Mann):

Everyone was bothering you all the time, but you weren’t getting paid for being
bothered … Managers and record companies … despised us, on whom they
depended, and hardly paid us any money. Those who were successful, like the
Beatles, were really the exception. And even they had to pay in the end.354

This too allowed to pass without comment – was it true, and why and how?) and
blacks exploiting blacks for the whites (Berry Gordy’s Tamla Motown factory).

352
Ibid., p. ix.
353
Ibid., p. 287.
354
Ibid., pp. 260–63.
338 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

The chapter on rhythm and blues is one of the more successful in terms of
Palmer’s supposed critical ‘argument’ since its subject is particularly susceptible
to production-treatment, and has already been thoroughly researched by Charlie
Gillett in his meticulous The Sound of the City.355 Any single page of Gillett’s
book reveals more about the actual processes employed by the music industry
and teen culture than the whole of Palmer’s book does, apart perhaps from his
account of the old-style commerce of Tin Pan Alley, a chapter which relies
heavily on Ian Whitcomb’s patchy After the Ball,356 even to the extent of quoting
Whitcomb’s account of the communal manufacture of the 1920s hit ‘Yes, We
Have No Bananas’.357 Here, at least Palmer generously acknowledges his source
and perhaps the real value of this book, fascinating illustrations apart, is to turn the
frustrated reader to the authorities that Palmer heavily relies on.
One can’t blame Palmer perhaps for being dependent on other people’s
research in areas where he has had no personal experience, but when we come to
pop music of the 1960s, a subject on which Palmer once set himself up as some
sort of expert, the results are pathetic. After the vast acreage of print that has
been filled about the Beatles, for instance, it is lazy and irresponsible to have a
simple uncritical narrative account of the Beatles ‘story’, without benefit either
of hindsight, or of other people’s critical work (such as, to take an extreme case,
Wilfrid Mellers’ thorough but idiosyncratic musical evaluation of the Beatles
songs in Twilight of the Gods (Faber)).358 But then Palmer, certainly no social,
cultural or media historian, is no musical historian either. For instance, he writes
about Roxy Music solely from the point of view of physical appearance, realises
that it is unfair to ‘dump’ Bryan Ferry with the Osmonds or Gary Glitter, and gives
him his due by adding that his songs ‘are superior in every way: better constructed,
more challenging lyrically, more rewarding harmonically’.359 Real musical insight
apart, a good example of Palmer’s ‘reasoned evaluation’. Where he attempts in the
opening chapter to set the record straight on the African heritage of black music,
he gets into a hopeless muddle. He obviously did not read Gunther Schuller’s
masterly analysis of the European and African sources of the blues, ragtime and
jazz in his Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (OUP).360
It’s also rather a major flaw in a book on popular music that Palmer seems to
have no clear conception of what he means by ‘popular’. He despises obviously
manufactured pop by the Osmonds and the Monkees (yet they, if their record sales

355
Charlie Gillet, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll (New York:
Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1970).
356
Ian Whitcomb, After the Ball: Pop Music from Rag to Rock (London: Penguin, 1974).
357
Palmer, All You Need is Love, p. 98.
358
Wilfrid Mellers, Twilight of the Gods: The Beatles in Retrospect (London: Faber,
1976).
359
Palmer, All You Need is Love, p. 282.
360
Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1968).
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 339

and following are anything to go by, are immensely popular) and admires those
groups who manage to ‘express themselves’ without selling out to commercialism.
Yet he finds it difficult to get his targets in focus. He implies that the BBC has
confined Radio 1 to rock/pop rubbish (which is true) and that, therefore, The
Pink Floyd (hardly the most complex rock group) are confined to Radio 3 along
with Bach, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, yet he makes no attempt to explore this
paradox. There’s no further mention of the Floyd in fact, no mention of Zappa,
Velvet Underground, Beefheart, Weather Report (though he does nod in the
direction of jazz/rock with a rather unhelpful quote from Chick Corea), Tangerine
Dream, Can, Eno, etc., etc.
Palmer could justify the omission of musicians and groups like these because of
their only limited amount of commercial success (although it would be interesting
to know how much Zappa earns/owns), yet he does show himself to be on the side
of the elitist underdog – but only if he is black, it seems: ‘it was surely no accident
that Armstrong’s greatest hit – it became almost his theme-song – was a second-
rate melody from a second-rate music comedy, Hello, Dolly! By comparison, his
stunning records of the late twenties and early thirties have been more or less
forgotten except by aficionados’.361
The clue to Palmer’s confusion is found in the closing chapter, where two
English rock musicians give some hope for the future of a popular music which
‘carries on down its baubled sewer’ now that ‘[white] music, which has emasculated
black music for decades, rendering it culturally painless, has now achieved the
same result with itself’. 362 Who are these two English rock musicians? None other
than Jimmy Page (lead guitar of Led Zeppelin) and (of course) Mike Oldfield.
And in selecting these two lucky youngsters Palmer has fallen into the trap that
he loftily accuses others of falling into – confusing the music with the image it
perpetuates. For it’s not Page’s or Oldfield’s music that he seems to admire; in fact
his description of Oldfield’s Tubular Bells is, given the limitations of his critical
language, surprisingly accurate: ‘Much of the music was immediately attractive,
although some of it seemed the familiar self-indulgent mumblings beloved of rock
stars …’363 (an opinion confirmed by recent enforced listening to Mike Oldfield
Boxed, Virgin VBOX1, containing Tubular Bells, Hergest Ridge, Ommadawn and
collaborative work). What then, does Palmer find admirable about Page/Oldfield?

Neither Page nor Oldfield has eschewed the financial rewards that popular music
can bring. Both enjoy its more harmless pleasures though both have found ways
of avoiding its more insidious effects. Each composes or performs for his own
satisfaction, although each has chosen to work in a medium whose language is
reckoned the common property of all. Between them, Page and Oldfield stand
against the triviality of glitter rock, the destructiveness of such as Jagger, the

361
Palmer, All You Need Is Love, p. 304.
362
Ibid., p. 300, p. 282.
363
Ibid., p. 288.
340 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

banality of the Osmonds. Both have prospered within the system, demonstrating
that the transition from obscure talent to million-dollar acclaim is not in itself
damaging.364

Pure image-building, but of a more subtle and sophisticated – more respectable –

kind in Oldfield’s case, than in, say, Presley’s: monasticism (genuine rather than
assumed – money now buys privacy – the rock musician’s life no longer needs to
be public property), facile use of 24-track technology, and the basic gimmicks –
multi-instrumentalism, swoony choirs and ‘symphonic’ extended melodic gambits
(there are one or two real tunes in Tubular Bells, but thereafter it sounds as though
Oldfield really has to manufacture his melodies) and modish, weedy, tinselled nods in
the direction of Terry Riley. Final exasperation with Palmer’s book (and disinclination
to evaluate Oldfield’s music seriously) comes with the following statement:

[Oldfield and Page] both have embraced old music to create fresh musical
experiences. Oldfield admits to using African melodies; Page uses Moroccan
chants to spice his compositions. Both rely heavily on the tradition of Afro-
American blues and jazz to provide instrumental and rhythmic flavor. But all
composers, from Bach to Ives, have thrived on the absorption of popular dances
and songs. It is not the use of such material that matters, but the manner of its
recomposition.365

Will pop music survive such ‘steady and purposeful criticism’? Stay glued to your
TV sets, rock papers, and record catalogues.

‘Against Intellectual Complexity in Music’ (October, 13, Summer 1980,

pp. 81–9)366

Stockhausen’s notoriously arrogant aside to Morton Feldman – ‘[I] once told

Feldman that one of his pieces could be a moment in my music, but never the
other way around’367 – is indicative of an attitude that cannot comprehend true
simplicity in music. A simple ‘moment’ can be recognized as such only when
posited against another, more complex moment. In Stockhausen’s music simplified
moments are either set against other moments of greater complexity, or they fulfil

364
Ibid., p. 299.
365
Ibid., p. 299.
366
This article was also reprinted in Thomas Docherty (ed.) Postmodernism, a Reader
(London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 206–13. [Apart from some minor editorial
changes and additions, all the footnotes in this article belong to the original text.]
367
Jonathan Cott, ‘Talking (whew!) to Karlheinz Stockhausen’, Rolling Stone
(8 July 1971); see also Stockhausen, in Jonathan Cott, Stockhausen: Conversations with the
Composer (London: Robson Books, 1974), p. 121.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 341

a complex role in the total structure of the work; whereas Feldman’s simple work
is a complete field in which moments of greater and/or lesser simplicity, if they
occur at all, have no intended relational significance in the traditional sense.
In what we call experimental music – loosely speaking, the music of the Cage
‘tradition’ – simplicity is something approaching a constant, an absolute, although
there are obviously degrees of simplicity, just as there are degrees of complexity.
Still, simplicity is not one alternative to be selected from the vast reservoir of
means of expression or techniques upon which the avant-garde composer can
draw as occasion, instrumentation, or compositional situation demands. The
straightforwardness of most experimental music, which usually finds the most
direct route to the effective presentation of the chosen sound material, might
be interpreted by an outsider a reaction to traditional and modernist intellectual
complexity. But it has not simplified the complex technical paraphernalia
which makes European art music respectable; it has quite bluntly ignored that
paraphernalia, since the aesthetic, structural, and expressive requirements of
the so-called New Simplicity demand the development of a totally different,
independent (some might say naive, innocent, and simple-minded) compositional
methodology.
Reaction against complexity is, in fact, a characteristic of intellectually
complex music itself, as Stockhausen himself noted when he observed that in the
early days of total serialism in the fifties:

all elements had equal rights in the forming process and constantly renewed
all their characteristics from one sound to the next … If from one sound to
the next, pitch, duration, timbre, and intensity change, then the music finally
becomes static: it changes extremely quickly, one is constantly traversing the
entire realm of experience in a very short time and thus one finds oneself in
a state of suspended animation, the music ‘stands still’. If one wanted to
articulate larger time-phases, the only way of doing this was to let one sound-
characteristic predominate over all others for some time. However, under the
circumstances then prevalent, this would have radically contradicted the sound-
characteristics. And a solution was found to distribute in space among different
groups of loudspeakers, or instruments, variously long time-phases of this kind
of homogeneous sound-structure.368

In the revolving brass chords in Gruppen, for instance, this simplification, a

demonstrable reaction against a complex statistical rather than musical process,
bears absolutely no relation to the simplicity described by John Cage in 1961 when
discussing the music of La Monte Young:

368
Karlheinz Stockhausen, ‘Music in space’, ‘Two Lectures’, in Die Reihe, 5 (Bryn
Mawr: Theodore Presser, 1961), p. 69.
342 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Young is doing something quite different from what I am doing, and it strikes me
as being very important. Through the few pieces of his I’ve heard [presumably
such minimal classics as X for Henry Flint and Composition 1960 No. 7], I’ve
had, actually, utterly different experiences of listening than I’ve had with any
other music. He is able either through the repetition of a single sound or through
the continued performance of a single sound for a period like 20 minutes, to
bring it about that after, say, five minutes, I discover that what I have all along
been thinking was the same thing is not the same thing after all, but full of
variety. I find his work remarkable almost in the same sense that the change of
experience of seeing is when you look through a microscope. You see that there
is something other than what you thought was there.

On the other hand, La Monte Young’s music can be heard by Europeans as being
European. For example, take the repetition of a tone cluster or a single sound
at a seemingly constant amplitude over, say, a ten-minute period. The European
listener is able to think, ‘Well, that is what we’ve always had, minus all the
elements of variation.’ So they imagine, you see, that something is being done
to them, namely a simplification or what they’re familiar with. My response is
not that he is doing something to me, but that I am able to hear differently than
I ever heard.369

Consider Young’s chord of B and F-sharp in Composition 1960 No. 7, or the

dominant eleventh extended from one beat to over 200 beats by Steve Reich in
his Four Organs. If we take these ‘primitive’ musical materials as reductions
or concentrations of traditional tonal occurrences, then we are indeed talking of
simplification. It is possible, of course, to analyse (rather than to hear) them in
this way, especially if yours is a symbolic or metaphoric view of music. Reich,
for instance, employs the dominant eleventh in such a way that it ‘contains’ both
tonic and dominant chords, and could therefore be said to ‘represent’, in digest
form, the tensions of the tonal system. As the dominant eleventh extends itself, we
may perceive the tonic/dominant pull; that is, the dominant in the chord appears
to ‘resolve’ onto its tonic element. It would, however, be incorrect to believe that
when Reich sat down to compose Four Organs he had anything more in mind
than the material itself (a ‘preferred fragment’ taken not from traditional music but
more likely from Dizzy Gillespie) and the most suitable process for articulating
this fragment over a comparatively long period of time.370

369
Roger Reynolds, ‘Interview with John Cage’, in John Cage (New York: Henmar
Press, 1962), p. 52.
370
Two points of clarification are necessary: first, twenty or so minutes may not be a
long duration for a piece of ‘new music’, yet it may (or may not) be a long period for the
gradual augmentation of a single chord; second, ‘sitting down to compose’ is a metaphor
taken from traditional composition. It usually has little to do with the process of producing
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 343

In the instance of the dominant eleventh, it should be remembered that one of

the most fundamental lessons of Cage’s aesthetic is the principle of not reducing
the whole of music – or culture – to a single set, but the opposite: beginning from
nothing, building from zero or, as 4’33” shows, from silence. This is perhaps
the fundamental difference between, on the one hand, an avant-garde whose
intellectually complex music builds on, grows from, develops, and extends
traditional compositional techniques and concepts and, on the other, experimental
music, in which apparent straightforwardness and lack of notated complexity
derives from principles alien to European music, at least since 1600.371
While the material of a work – the open fifth or the dominant eleventh – appears
to arise from zero, this new compositional attitude actually arose out of serialism. In
Reich and Young, specific, if unconventional, musical attitudes revealed themselves
to be at work within serialism, rather than as a blanket reaction against serialism.
Writing serial music for Berio at Mills College, Reich avoided transposing his rows
in order to retain some sort of tonal feeling. And he approached the row itself as a
repeating constant to be regrouped each time it recurred.
A totally new attitude towards duration arose out of Young’s serial writing in
the fifties; individual pitches began to extend themselves from within the serial
context, so that in his Octet for Brass (1957) long notes would often be held for
three or four minutes. Nothing else would happen, apart from the overlapping of
other occasional long notes, and rests which lasted for a minute or more. From the
viewpoint of traditional composition, we may justifiably speak of simplification,
since there has been a significant reduction in pitch information and rhythmic
complexity. This is emphasized even more in Young’s subsequent Trio for Strings
(1958), where according to the composer there is a greater emphasis on harmony
than in any other music, ‘to the exclusion of almost any semblance of what had
been generally known as melody’.372 But once this new emphasis on extended
duration as the subject of the composition emerged out of the old serial organism –
leading naturally to the exclusive use of sustained notes, the melodyless harmony
which Young continued to explore in his temporally all-embracing The Tortoise,
His Journeys and Dreams (1964–) – we can no longer speak of reduction, reaction,
or even rejection, but of entirely new musical concerns and materials demanding
entirely new methods of structuring and articulation.
In sketching this background to the so-called New Simplicity, it is also useful
to distinguish two different reactions to one of the main exponents of intellectually

experimental music, which effectively bypasses the traditional idea of the ‘craft of musical
composition’ and all that it involves.
371
My own music, which I consider to fall into the experimental category as defined
in my book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (New York: Schirmer Books, 1974),
is, however, related to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century variation forms, while systems
music in general is related, however distantly, to serialism.
372
Richard Kostelanetz, ‘Conversation with La Monte Young’, in La Monte Young
and Marian Zazeela, Selected Writings (Munich: Heiner Friedrich, 1969), p. 26.
344 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

complex music – Anton Webern. Both Reich and Young (as well as Christian
Wolff in the ‘first generation’ of experimental composers in the early fifties) heard
the results of Webern’s serial manipulations in an entirely selective way. Reich
has spoken of the ‘intervallic consistency’ of the Orchestral Variations which
‘give[s] a kind of harmonic sound to his music’.373 And Young, noting Webern’s
practice of repeating the same pitches in the same octave positions whatever their
position in the different forms and transpositions of the row, remarked that while
on the surface this represented ‘constant variation’, it could also be heard as stasis,
‘because it uses the same form throughout the [length of the] piece. … We have the
same information repeated over and over and over again’.374 This kind of selective
hearing, which depends, of course, on the hearer’s individual musical interests
and perceptions, is the obverse of the situation outlined by Cage. In Webern one
perceives sameness out of (apparent) variety, while in Young’s, Glass’s, or Reich’s
music one perceives variety out of (apparent) sameness – a variety of a different
order, demanding a different mode of listening and of experiencing musical time.
At times the question of variety-in-sameness poses problems for the performer
as well, as Cornelius Cardew indicated in his analysis of Young’s seminal X for
Henry Flint (1960). Young’s work exists only in oral form and concerns a single,
dense, heavy, decaying sound repeated as uniformly and regularly as possible.
Cardew asks:

What is the model for this uniformity? The first sound? Or does each sound
become the model for the one succeeding it? If the former, the first sound has
to be fixed in the mind as a mental ideal which all the remaining sounds are to
approach as closely as possible. (In practice the first sound too is an attempt
to approach a mental image that exists before the piece began.) If the latter
method is chosen, constant care has to be taken to assimilate the various
accidental variations as they occur. David Tudor has approached the piece in
this way and tells how, on noticing that certain keys in the centre of the keyboard
were not being depressed, it became his task to make sure that these particular
keys continued to be silent. The task of assimilating and maintaining accidental
variations, if logically pursued, requires superhuman powers of concentration and
technique. … It must be remembered that although uniformity is demanded (‘as
far as possible’), what is desired is variation. It is simply this: that the variation
that is desired is that which results from the human (not the superhuman) attempt
at uniformity.375

Written in 1963, such minutely detailed analytical sophistry may be somewhat

outdated in terms of contemporary musical practice; yet it does show that there
are forms of complexity other than the intellectual at work in experimental music,

373
Personal communication to the author.
374
Kostelanetz, ‘Conversation with La Monte Young’, in Selected Writings, p. 24.
375
Cardew, Treatise Handbook (London: Edition Peters, 1971), p. xv.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 345

which, generally speaking, reveal creative and perceptual areas neglected in

traditional and avant-garde music, and which have changed the accepted emphases
in the conception-composition-performance-perception chain.
To return to the experimental composers’ response to Webern: How are we to
judge the reaction to Webern’s intellectual complexity as it manifests itself in the
work of Morton Feldman, for example? It was through Webern that Feldman first
met Cage – after a performance of the Symphony, which both found ‘beautiful’.
Feldman’s interest in the early fifties was, he claims, in sound rather than structure.
Abstract-expressionist painting suggested a sound-world ‘more direct, more
immediate, more physical than anything that had existed before’. Varèse, he felt,
had searched after this ideal, ‘but he was too “Varèse”’; Webern also glimpsed it,
‘but his work was too involved with the disciplines of the 12-tone system’.376 It is
well-known that Feldman’s first ‘experimental’ pieces had certain improvisational
or free elements, since ‘the new structure required a concentration more demanding
than if the technique were that of still photography’, which is what precise notation
had become for him. In a piece like Projection No. 2 for flute, trumpet, and cello,
he said that his desire was not to ‘compose’ but to ‘project sounds into time, free
from a compositional rhetoric that had no place here. In order not to involve the
performer [Feldman himself] in memory [relationships], and because sounds no
longer had an inherent shape’,377 he allowed for certain indeterminacies in pitch.
This was certainly a heretical idea in the face of a serial system which was then,
as it is now, more or less exclusively pitch oriented. In a later statement, Feldman
made his attitude towards serialism startlingly clear:

It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always
been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don’t happen. They must
be constructed. To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or
stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling
metaphor of the composition …378 Only by ‘unfixing’ the elements traditionally
used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves – not as
symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.379

The radical concept is, of course, that of unfixing relationships, since all post-
Renaissance music has been concerned with fixing with increasing exactitude the
relationships between sounds. Cage’s attitude towards unfixing relationships was
– and unfortunately remains – as rigorous and strict as the serialist’s towards fixing
relationships. It might be useful to recall Cage’s approach, even though it might

376
Quoted in Nyman, Experimental Music, p. 44.
377
Ibid.
378
Feldman, ‘Between Categories’ (1969), in B.H. Friedman (ed.) Give My Regards
to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman (Cambridge MA: Exact Change,
2000), p. 83.
379
Feldman, ‘Predeterminate/Indeterminate’ (1965), in ibid., p. 35.
346 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

appear to be only indirectly related to the so-called New Simplicity. In 1970 he

remarked that he would assume:

[That] relations would exist between sounds as they would exist between people
and that those relationships are more complex than any I would be able to
prescribe. So by simply dropping that responsibility of making relationships I
don’t lose the relationship. I keep the situation in what you might call a natural
complexity that can be observed in one way or another. Now it used to be thought
that the function of the artist was to express himself and therefore he had to set
up particular relationships. I think that this whole question of art is a question of
changing our minds and that the function of the artist is not self-expression but
rather self-alteration, and the thing being altered is clearly not his hands or his
eyes but rather his mind …

Given a particular situation, one person will observe certain relationships, another
will observe others. If we have the view we used to have, that there was only one
right way of observing the relationships of things, then we have a situation that
really doesn’t appeal to me. We have, in other words, one thing that’s right and all
the rest are wrong. I would like to have a multiplicity of rights.380

Compared with the music of La Monte Young, Cage’s music appears, at its most
characteristic (and he would say its best), to be ‘complex’; but this non- or even
anti-intellectual complexity is only apparent, since any relationships that emerge
are only skin deep, like the relationships between strangers who happen to pass
on the street. This, then, is just one extreme of the New Simplicity, where all
musical events, devoid of intentional relationships, are of equal importance (or,
in Cage, of equal unimportance). The opposite extreme, represented in America
by the music of Terry Riley, Reich, Glass, Young, and Jon Gibson, and in
England by Gavin Bryars, John White, Christopher Hobbs, and myself, is closely
related conceptually, methodologically, and structurally to Cage, even when its
purposes and methods appear to contradict this relation. Cage himself perceived
the similarity; his own music may be anti-structure, yet if one of these younger
composers ‘maintains in his work aspects of structure, they are symmetrical in
character, canonic or enjoying an equal importance of parts, either those that are
present at one instant, or those that succeed one another in time’.381 Once Cage had
attempted – and succeeded – in removing the glue from musical relationships by
resorting to chance methods of articulating a multiplicity of sounds in combination
and sequence, younger composers found themselves free to explore and to realize

380
Frank Kermode, ‘Is an elite necessary?’ (interview with Cage), The Listener
(5 November 1970), p. 619.
381
John Cage, A Year From Monday (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1967),
p. 31.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 347

the potential of extending single sounds or limited sets of sounds and to create
relationships between different aspects of these restricted sets.
The equality of vertical and horizontal compositional aspects is fundamental
to experimental music. Simplicity is an absolute, a constant, not part of a scale
of values, textures, techniques, dramatic structure, or whatever, spanning the
entire gamut from absolute simplicity to frightening (and usually self-defeating)
complexity. Nor are there moments of greater or lesser simplicity during a work,
unless they result naturally from the chosen process, as for example in Reich’s
Pendulum Music, at the conclusion of which all the microphones come to rest –
reach unison, so to speak – after the more ‘complex’ interaction of independent
and gradually elongated feedback pulses. Similarly, simplicity is not a dualistic
or multiple quality (in the end, the apparent complexity of Cage’s multiplicity
is simple, since no structural relations are established between successive parts);
only in rare cases, such as Gavin Bryars’s Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, are
melody/harmony polarizations aimed for or achieved. When they are – in my own
music, for instance – repetition guarantees that such overt background/foreground
focus is destroyed, negated, or reassessed in some way. Similarly, the parts of a
sectional work, such as Reich’s Drumming, relate to each other in a 1:1, or 1:1+1
… relationship.
In this new, simple experimental music the given material of a piece is its
only material and relates only to itself; there are no contrasting, complementary,
or secondary ideas. The single, unitary musical idea, usually of immense and
deliberate simplicity, is extended through the composition by means of repetition,
augmentation, phrase shifting, imitation, accumulation, rotation, number
permutation, vertical stacking, addition, layering, etc. These basic techniques are
not used, as they are in ‘complex’ music, to transform, disguise, transubstantiate,
or intermodulate either themselves or the initial musical idea; where change
is an important part of a work (in the old terminology, when the work is more
‘developed’), the systems, procedures, and processes guarantee that the identity of
the material is always audibly retained.
Perhaps the reaction of experimental composers to the so-called intellectual
complexity of avant-garde music is a reaction not against intellectual complexity
itself, but against what brings about the need for such complexity, as well as its
audible result. We should perhaps speak of the qualities that serial music denied and
which have resurfaced in experimental music: symmetrical rhythms (i.e. regular
beat); euphony; consonant, diatonic, or modal materials; absence of theatricality
and grandiloquence, of drama, of sound used as symbol.
In discussing experimental music as a whole, we should perhaps read ‘New
Objectivity’ for ‘New Simplicity’, since composer–publisher–publicist Dick
Higgins found Cage’s emphasis on chance procedures significant as a means of
distancing oneself from one’s materials; the composer no longer feels the necessity
of consciously influencing the creative process at every moment. According to
Higgins, ‘What Cage did was to place the material at one remove from the composer,
by allowing it to be determined by a system which he determined. And the real
348 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

innovation lies in the emphasis on the creation of a system.’382 This ‘emphasis on

the creation of a system’ applies both to the mechanical acceptance of a system (in
the percussion music of Hobbs and White, for example) and to the music of Steve
Reich, who has increasingly sought to make personal ‘aesthetic’ interventions
which seem to contradict the principles laid down in the 1968 statement Music as
a Gradual Process. Despite the intervention of personal decisions which to some
extent override the abstract mechanics of the system, Reich’s music still retains
the basic non-traditional characteristics shared by all experimental music: that
of stasis and a non-directional, non-dramatic, non-dynamic approach to musical
structure; there are no hierarchies, no transitions, no tension, no relaxation, and
change is quantitative rather than qualitative.
In 1948 Cage wrote: ‘We may recognize what may be called perhaps a new
contemporary awareness of form: it is static, rather than progressive in character.’383
This was unconsciously echoed some 20 years later by La Monte Young where
he distinguished his music from that of the Western tradition: ‘Climax and
directionality have been among the most important guiding factors [in music since
the thirteenth century], whereas music before that time, from the chants through
organum and Machaut, used stasis as a point of structure a little bit more the way
certain Eastern musical systems have.’384 And just as pre-thirteenth-century and
non-Western music often present surprisingly complex perceptual problems for
the listener reared on European classical music, so too does this ‘simple’ music
that I have chosen to call experimental.

‘Nam June Paik, Composer’ (in John G. Hanhardt (ed.) Nam June Paik
(Whitney Museum of Art, 1982), pp. 79–90)

In his 1968 paper ‘Expanded Education for the Paper-less Society’, Paik made
a categorical state­ment about the availability and transmission of a composer’s
work, a statement which takes on a very special relevance when one attempts even
a cursory overview of his ‘purely’ musical output. He wrote that

97% of all music written is not printed, or printed early enough for contemporary
evaluation, performance and study … A vastly un­ favorable gap exists for
the composer, compared to the booming pop-op-Kinetic [and one might add
today-video] art boom. Even experienced concert managers and performers

382
Dick Higgins, Foew & ombwhnw, p. 57.
383
Richard Kostelanetz (ed.), John Cage (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 81.
384
Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings,
Kinetic Environments, and other Mixed-means Performances (New York: Dial Press,
1968), p. 188.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 349

have difficulties getting materials from composers, who are often unreach­able,
whereas composers on their part complain of the too rare performing chances.385

Paik was a composer/performer before he be­came a video artist and though he

has not pro­duced many exclusively musical works in recent years, he remains
a composer, even while he is a video artist. His musical work falls conveniently
into three phases. The first takes in his con­ventionally notated works and began
in 1947 with the Korean folk-flavored music of his youth; it continued by way of
the strictly serial solo violin variations of 1953 and the non-serial String Quartet
of 1955–57. The second phase began in 1959 with Hommage à John Cage; the
third in 1964, when he started his long collaboration with the cellist Charlotte
Moorman (with Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saëns). Paik’s works with
Charlotte Moorman have been more than adequately documented at source by
various recording means: video (many of these pieces are video), photography,
and the printed word (either as reviews or, in the case of the Opéra Sextronique
arrest in 1967, as court reports). These works are part of American culture (Paik
moved to New York in 1964), whereas the earlier works (well documented in
their way, but less publicly so) were very much part of a European musical/art
culture – his relationship with Cage (like La Monte Young’s) began in Europe after
Cage was seen by the European avant‑garde to be an important and respected (if
ridiculed and misunderstood) cultural export, and many of the Amer­ican artists he
worked with under the Fluxus umbrella were expatriates too.
Paik’s pre‑Moorman (pre‑1964) scores are spread untidily through a labyrinth
of scattered sources: occasional Fluxus publications, exhibition cata­ logues,
obscure art magazines; they are casually mentioned in his own equally uncollected
writings, or have never been committed to paper, or are perhaps lying among piles
of TV junk in his loft on Mercer Street in New York. But many of the compositions
that are available – almost ex­clusively verbally notated – can do little more than
transmit basic information, and that for contempo­rary evaluation and study only:
they are not scores to be performed by others, rarely even the memo­ries of now
long‑distant (but not forgotten) past performances. They fail to notate (how could
they?) the most crucial and the most characteristic dimen­sion of Paik’s early
pieces – namely, Paik himself as performer.
Further on in the ‘Expanded Education’ docu­ment (a farsighted blueprint for an
educational program through video, every paragraph of which demonstrates Paik’s
knowledge of music history and his preoccupations as a musician), Paik admits
the poverty of notation not only in regard to his own action music/antimusic (he
used both terms) but to the events of other Fluxus composers, such as George
Brecht, Young, and Henning Chris­tiansen: ‘Often there is no way to make the

385
Nam June Paik, ‘Expanded Education for the Paper‑less Society’, in Nam June
Paik: Videa ’n’ Videology 1959‑1973, exhibition catalogue (Syracuse, NY: Everson
Museum of Art, 1974), p. 31. (Since this book lacks numerical pagination, for the reader’s
convenience page numbers have been assigned, p. 1 being the Foreword.)
350 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

nota­tion of music except by recording the whole performance … video tape

will be a useful supple­ment for their sketchy instructions.’386 Significantly, Paik
exempted himself from this recording-as-nota­tion process: Karlheinz Stockhausen
and György Ligeti had suggested making a film of Paik in action which would be
used as a score for other perform­ers to use, but Paik rejected this proposal ‘for a
philosophical reason’.387
Whatever that precise rea­son was, it is obvious from eyewitness accounts (and
unfortunately I didn’t see or experience any of these extraordinary performances)
that Paik’s per­ forming aura could not be mechanically reproduced and that
performance-as-imitation was clearly unwelcome. Paik himself had a horror of
repeating the same sequence of actions in the same way: by analogy he pointed out
that the pianist Wilhelm Backhaus played a cadenza well only once; it deteriorated
on repetition. So that in 1961, when Paik had to perform his own work (Simple, Zen
for Head and Étude Platonique No. 3) 12 times in the first run of Stockhausen’s
Originale (a large-scale theater piece for, or rather by, a bunch of ‘originals’ of
whom Paik was one), he found it acutely boring just to repeat the same set of
ac­tions: occasionally something or other put him into an ‘absolute state of mind
which I found mar­velous’.388 In his published account of Paik’s contri­bution
to his piece, Stockhausen noted admiringly that Paik changed his performance
every day so that any description of what he did could only ‘sketch the actions of
one evening without trying to concretize in words the important and individual
elements of these moments’.389 According to Stock­hausen, Paik would come ‘onto
the stage silently, usually shocking the public through a series of rapid actions’:390
throwing beans at the ceiling and into the audience, hiding his face behind a roll
of paper which he unrolled endlessly slowly in a breathless silence – sniffing,
pushing the paper into his eyes over and over again until it became wet with his
tears; and so on.
Paik’s performance ideal was ‘variability as a necessary consequence of
intensity’391 – an intensity that he shared with La Monte Young, who however,
was totally unconcerned with variability since he seemed to spend the whole
of 1961 trying to perfect the art of drawing straight lines. George Maciunas
responded unenthusiastically to this activity in his Homage to La Monte Young,
part of the instructions for which run: ‘Erase, scrape or wash away as well as

386
Ibid., p. 33.
387
Ibid.
388
Nam June Paik, interview by Gottfried Michael Koenig, in ‘Die Fluxus Leute’,
Magnum, 47 (April 1963); reprinted in Nam June Paik: Werke 1946–1976, Musik–Fluxus–
Video, ed. Wulf Herzogenrath, exhibition catalogue (Co­logne: Kölnischer Kunstverein,
1976), p. 51.
389
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Texte, Vol. 2 (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1964). p. 128.
390
Ibid.
391
Nam June Paik, interview by Gottfried Michael Koenig, in Nam June Paik: Werke,
p. 51.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 351

possible the previously drawn line or lines of La Monte Young or any other lines
encountered.’392 Maciunas’ 12 Piano Compositions for Nam June Paik, however,
is a more positive and accurate response to Paik’s activities, instructing Paik to
(among other things) ‘with a straight stick the length of a keyboard sound all keys
together’, ‘place a dog or cat (or both) inside the piano and play Chopin’, ‘stretch
3 highest strings with tuning key till they burst’.393
Paik’s demand for variety, variability and constant change led him to inquire in
the mid-1970s why new American music was so boring: ‘Americans need not be
entertained every second, because they are so rich. America has in a way this very
rich attitude that makes boring, long music possible. But I’m not writing boring
music that much. The reason is that I come from a very poor country and I am
poor. I have to entertain people every second.’394
But Paik’s talent for extravagant, violent, and unexpected actions in these
‘entertainments’ often drew the spectator’s attention away from what Paik claimed
were the more important features of a piece. This is hardly surprising when one is
dealing with events of the order of the notorious 1960 performance of Étude for
Pianoforte, when Paik jumped off the stage and proceeded to cut Cage’s shirttail
and tie and then smother him and David Tudor with shampoo (scrupulously
avoiding Stock­hausen in the process!). But Paik, in all innocence, claimed to be
disappointed when, amidst all the bean throwing, shaving cream and water dousing
during his Simple, a 15-second tape collage passed unnoticed. This collage was an
essential part of the work since his ‘quality of performance was dependent on
the quality of tape playback’.395 And in the 1959 Hommage à John Cage, beyond
(or prior to) the overt actions involving screaming, toys, tin boxes full of stones,
eggs, smashed glass, a live hen and a motorcycle, there were serious philosophical
and musical purposes: the first movement was proof for Paik that the ‘elevated
and the ugly are inseparable therefore every listener has to behave as though he
had just heard the St. Matthew Passion for the first time’.396 The per­formance as
a whole was backed with a tape collage of a type then being pioneered by Paik,
built out of a mixed bag of classical and non-musical sound sources: Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony, a German song, Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, a
lottery announcement given over the phone, a news announcement of a foreign
ministers’ conference held in Geneva about the reunification of Germany, and a
recording of con­crete sounds – such as a Japanese toy car, a pre­pared piano, sine
waves, noise, and so on. Paik remarked sadly that although he spent 80 per­cent of

392
George Maciunas, ‘Homage to La Monte Young’, in hap­pening & fluxus, ed.
H. Sohm, exhibition catalogue (Cologne: Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1970), unpaginated.
393
George Maciunas, ‘12 Piano Compositions for Nam June Paik’, in happening &
fluxus catalogue.
394
Nam June Paik, letter to Hugh Davies, 6 May 1967, collection of Hugh Davies.
395
Calvin Tomkins, ‘Profiles: Video Visionary’, The New Yorker (5 May 1975), p. 48.
396
Nam June Paik, letter to Wolfgang Steinecke, 2 May 1959, Nam June Paik: Werke,
p. 39.
352 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

his working time on the tape and sound components of the performance, ‘several
“actions” became famous instead of my tape toil and tear. I was half happy and half
sad. I thought my action is the accompaniment to my tape, but people took it [the]
opposite way.’397
Though Paik’s overall intention at this time was to find a way out ‘of the
suffocation of the musical theater as it is today’,398 it was a little naive of him to
expect that his meticulously crafted collages would have more impact than his
obviously mesmeric actions (the eye is more easily and immediately impressed
than the ear in certain environments). Paik, who would have liked to ‘complement
Dada with music’,399 particularly admired those Dada artists for whom ‘humor
was not an aim but a result’.400 Many of his (presumably) serious but (possibly)
mischievous events had humorous effects – like those of Cage, who acted at that
time as a release mechanism for Paik, as he did for many other artists, however
much he may have disap­proved of the effects of this ‘release’. Still, one might
wonder how much fun it must have been for the audience in Mary Bauermeister’s
studio in Cologne in 1960, confronted with an onstage motorcycle with its engine
left revving, and an absent Paik. After some minutes it became appar­ent that the
perception of time passing and the expectation that something was to happen were
rapidly being replaced by the perception of carbon monoxide filling the space
and the expectation of asphyxiation. The engine was turned off and Paik returned
some time later saying that he’d been in a bar and forgotten about the bike: not for
nothing did Cage say of Paik’s performances that ‘you get the feeling very clearly
that anything can happen, even physically dangerous things’.401
And this from someone who just a few years earlier was a studious
musicologist who had given up writing music when his String Quartet failed to
win the important Mainichi competition in Tokyo, and who sat day after day in
the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich studying old German and Austrian
music, sometimes pondering on ‘some affinities between Webern and a short piece
of Emmanuel Bach’. He also went to the new-­music concerts at the Lembach
Gallery and sat through ‘mediocre piece after mediocre piece’ by contemporary
European composers, a mediocrity which proved to him that as a student from an
underdeveloped country, he too could become a composer:

In Tokyo University, with strict aca­demicism soaked with admiration of Western

cul­ture, our job was not to judge but to learn the Western music. Therefore if we
would encounter a piece which would not impress us, both teacher and students
would rather say ‘I don’t understand this one’, than to say ‘This is a bad piece …’

397
Nam June Paik, letter to Hugh Davies, 6 May 1967.
398
Nam June Paik, letter to Wolfgang Steinecke, 2 May 1959, Nam June Paik: Werke,
p. 40.
399
Ibid.
400
Ibid.
401
Tomkins, ‘Profiles: Video Visionary’, p. 48.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 353

Therefore the accumulation of mediocrity at the Lembach Gallery finally killed

my heavy minority complex of Asian composers, and it led me to think that
‘I can compose at least as bad as they do’.402

So he became a composer again, realizing through his study of German musical

aesthetics that there was no fundamental answer to the question ‘What is music?’
except that music is (most openly) merely a sequence of events in time. He
realized too that the artist’s role was to oppose accepted social norms and do
‘abnormal things’, and set about destroying hidebound social/musical values: he
saw pianos as taboo objects which had to be destroyed, mistreated, disfigured, or
just plain abused. He later remarked that he ‘changed the superficial forms of the
piano and the neck-tie of John Cage with various carpenter tools in 1959 & 60’,403
though it’s possible to regard this formal and functional change as both destruction
and con­struction: how far is it, for instance, from the pianos he ‘prepared’ in his
extraordinary, gargan­tuan Exposition of Music – Electronic Television held in
Wuppertal in 1963 (covering them with a vast range of optical, acoustical, and
other objects, attaching devices to their keys which operated lights, shoes, hot-air
ventilators, etc.), how far from this to the cello as recycled by means of video in
his Moorman collaborations such as TV Bra for Living Sculpture, TV Bed, and
TV Cello, which Moorman described as ‘the first real innovation in cello design
since 1600’? 404 (One can’t push the comparison too far, however, since the cello
has never been destroyed or damaged in these pieces as pianos were damaged in
Hommage à John Cage and the violin destroyed in One for Violin Solo in 1962.)
Like many of the other Fluxus composers, but in a more deliberate, evolved way,
Paik introduced another series of classical music artifacts into his performances,
namely, the music itself, either ex­tracted on tape or played live. Beethoven’s Moon­
light Sonata was a particular favorite of Paik’s: it formed the basis of Sonata quasi
una fantasia (in which he alternately played and stripped) and was used again as
the soundtrack for his TV Electronic Opera No. 1 in 1969. Similarly Saint-Saëns’
The Swan was an obvious choice for his cello-based pieces, the sexual obsessions
of which were pres­ent in his works of the early sixties: one of the very first Paik-
Moorman works, Cello Sonata No. 1 for Adults Only (1965), is none other than the
Sonata quasi una fantasia with a more formal structure, Bach replacing Beethoven
and Moorman replacing Paik; while Serenade for Alison (Knowles) was described
by her husband, Dick Higgins, as a ‘melodramatic striptease for amateurs only’405
and the Symphony No. 5 contains the following in­structions: in the 10003rd year
of the performance the (obviously male) player is to

402
Nam June Paik, ‘Erinnerung an Muenchen’ (typescript), 15 July 1972, collection
of Hugh Davies.
403
Nam June Paik, untitled typescript, 14 November 1967, collection of the artist.
404
Tomkins, ‘Profiles: Video Visionary’, p. 75.
405
Dick Higgins, Postface, in Jefferson’s Birthday/Postface (New York: Something
Else Press, 1964), p. 71.
354 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

[Pick] up your old impotent penis with your finger and play the first piece of
Czerny – etude (30) with this penis, on keyboard (alone, or in a public concert …
To a very beautiful girl,/please, hold the bow/of the violincello/in your beautiful
vagina,/and play an attractive music/on the violincello/with this beauti­ful bow
in a public concert/(preferable Saint-Saëns’ death of swan).

Paik’s collaboration with Alison Knowles was more limited and less
technologically evolved than that with Moorman. Yet Serenade for Alison is not
only an early example of the striptease theme, but also one of a number of scores-
as-lists (minimal/repetitive music) that Paik composed around 1962. Serenade
has the performer taking off a number of different colored pairs of panties and
performing actions with them. (As a former music critic with no great fondness
for the profession or its current practitioners, I could not but fail to be attracted
to the eighth operation: ‘Take off a pair of blood­stained panties, and stuff them in
the mouth of the worst music critic’.406) Other ‘list scores’ have ten young men
successively poking their penises through a hole in a large white sheet of paper
(Young Penis Symphony with its ‘expected world première about 1984 A.D.’407
– a work immor­talized in George Brecht’s own Symphony No. 1 with its sole
instruction: ‘Through a hole’).408 In Gala Music for John Cage’s 50th Birthday,
Cage (one assumes) is instructed to sleep with different (female) film stars and
members of international royalty on successive nights, while in the Wupper­tal
‘Exposition’ Alison Knowles realized Paik’s ‘in January, stain the American flag
with your own monthly blood. In February, stain the Burmese flag with your own
monthly blood’, etc., etc.409
But Paik warned against too much emphasis being placed on the ‘What’ of
music: he was tired of ‘renewing the form of music, whether serial or aleatoric,
graphic or five lines, instrumental or bel canto, screaming or action, tape or live’.
(This is not quite accurate since he expressed his pride in a letter to Cage in
never having composed any graphically notated scores.) Becoming preoc­cupied
with the Where/For Whom/How, he started exploring the question of moving
sounds around, or allowing the audience to move around static or mobile sounds,
or allowing them to produce sounds with specially designed installations. Paik
characterized the ‘Exposition’ as a situation wherein ‘the sounds sit, the audience
plays or attacks them’, and his own action music as the ‘the sounds, etc., move, the
audience is attacked by me’.

406
Nam June Paik, ‘Serenade for Alison’, dé‑coll/age, 3 (1962); reprinted in Nam
June Paik: Werke, p. 50.
407
Nam June Paik, ‘Young Penis Symphony’, dé‑coll/age, 3 (1962); reprinted in Nam
June Paik: Werke, p. 47.
408
George Brecht, Water Yam (78 cards in slide‑out cardboard box) (New York:
Fluxus, 1963), unpaginated.
409
Tomas Schmit, ‘Exposition of Music’, Nam June Paik: Werke, p. 70.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 355

The Sinfonie for 20 Rooms (‘the sounds, etc., move, the audience move
also’),410 first sketched in the spring of 1961 in Cologne, was perhaps a model
for the ‘Exposition’ (the enormous, ambitious scale of which set Paik apart not
only from other Fluxus composers but from all composers at that time). But it
can also be viewed as a genuine symphony in its all-inclusiveness and formal/
spatial organization. It is also a symphony in the ety­mological sense of ‘many
things sounding to­gether’, though this could not be the reason why Paik generally
adopted the term symphony, since his First and Fifth deal with individual sounds
or sound events heard in succession – or, most proba­bly, not heard at all, apart from
the possible rustling of the paper sheet in the Young Penis Symphony. The Fifth
belongs to that category that Paik elsewhere referred to as ‘Music – /for the mind/
by the mind/of the mind’.411 The Sixth (completed and actually performed in 1980)
also presents individ­ual sounds in sequence, as each string player plays a single
note (occasionally two), and then passes the only bow used in the work to the next
player, who plays his note (or notes), and then passes the bow to the next player,
who … etc. The published score of the Sinfonie for 20 Rooms 412 shows each of the
16 (!) rooms as having its own music/visual/dynamic lighting and occasionally
heat/smell character (apart from one room which appears to be empty). Eight of
the rooms have one or more tape-replay machines and five invite direct audience
participation: one room has a prepared piano to be played; another has natural
objects (stones, lumps of wood, etc.) to be kicked around and generally explored
and enjoyed for their sound and feel; and one of the three ‘fortissimo cellars’
contains a heavily amplified metal plate on and by means of which the spectators
may make sounds. Of the other two fortissimo cellars one seems to be particularly
Paikesque: it is lit as brightly as possi­ble, with a ‘sine-wave torture’ tuned to as
high a pitch and volume as possible, a stink bomb (vin­egar flavor), a very strong
wind, and a very hot stove. The fifth audience-participation room is for a ‘free
orchestra made up of bad players’ who have 100 whistles, 100 toys, and a number
of orchestral instruments at their disposal. Other rooms are filled with live sounds
(such as a series of parallel readings of texts by pairs of authors – Montaigne/Pascal,
Thoreau/detective stories, etc.); uncut tape recordings (a ‘playground at a joyful
school at Paris Montmartre which Mary Bauermeister men­tioned’); and simple or
more elaborate tape col­lages with or without live sounds. The first (pianissimo)
room, for example, features running water and a loud clock, while the tape (mezzo­
-piano) plays, every three minutes, three seconds of 15 different sounds from
mainly non-musical sources – French, Italian, and German TV announ­cers (among
Paik’s favorite sounds at the time), voices from TV commercials and quiz shows.

410
Nam June Paik, ‘New Ontology of Music’, Postmusic: The Monthly Review of the
University for Avant‑Garde Hinduism, ed. N.J. Paik; reprinted in Videa ’n’ Videology, p. 3.
411
Nam June Paik, ‘Read Music – “Do It Yourself” – Answers to La Monte Young’;
reprinted in Nam June Paik: Werke, p. 104.
412
Nam June Paik, ‘My Symphonies’, Source: Music of the Avant‑Garde, 2 (1972),
p. 75.
356 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

By contrast, the ‘Andante sostenuto espressivo (Träumerei)’ room has three

sound sources: in the top left corner three radios (pianissimo) are ‘tuned to delicate
noises’ and there are two tape ma­chines, one with the ‘main voice’ playing senti­
mental French, American, Korean, Japanese songs and some Tchaikovsky, and
the other replays 25 sounds running from a ‘lonely train station sound (noise and
announcement)’, through Chopin, Mendelssohn, an early Korean folksong-­style
composition of Paik’s, to distorted radio noise, a heartbeat and the ticking of a watch.
In his 1963 essay ‘To the “Symphony for 20 Rooms”’, Paik acknowledged that
it was Cage and Stockhausen who pioneered the idea of allowing an audience to
perambulate, but he added lacon­ically that ‘with respect and appreciation I note
Cage’s and Stockhausen’s priority in this respect, although art is often a bastard
the parents of which we do not know’.413 Not the least fascinating aspect of Paik’s
Sinfonie for 20 Rooms is the game of who or what is the father to which bastard.
If that’s your game then one could start with the ‘forte scher­zando’ room which
presents tape recordings of national anthems, a Nazi song, ‘American Patrol’ and
American and Russian marches. (The Beatles’ use of a similar collage in ‘All You
Need Is Love’ springs to mind, though Stockhausen’s 1968 na­tional anthem-based
tape collage Hymnen is a more significant heir. The ‘free orchestra made up of bad
players’ recalls the British Portsmouth Sin­fonia, formed by art students in 1970
and famed for its dedicated but somewhat inadequate perform­ances of the classics
and, more recently, rock classics; while the overall concept and layout of many
events taking place simultaneously and inde­pendently in a large space obviously
foreshadows many of the performances of the Scratch Orchestra in England during
the early seventies and Stock­hausen’s multi-roomed Wandelkonzerte.)
From such audience-access work Paik moved on to a work such as Moving
Theater No. 1 (1962), where an unsuspecting audience comes across moving
sounds unexpectedly in the street. ‘The beauty of moving theater lies in this
“surprise a priori” because almost all of the audience is uninvited, not knowing
what it is, why it is, who is the composer, the player, organizer – or better speaking
– organizer, composer, player’, Paik has remarked.414 From there to his ‘platonic’
works was but a short, logical step – to pieces that have no audience, only a printed
program; and ultimately to The music for high tower and without audience, in
which Alison Knowles climbed the Eiffel Tower ‘and cut her beautiful long hair in
the winter wind. No one noticed, no program was printed, no journalist was there.
Sorry, Dick Higgins saw it. It is just the unavoidable evil. He is her husband.’415
Such almost conceptual music contrasts strongly with the ‘physical music’ Paik
was also promoting at the same time, such as the Fluxus Champion Contest he
held in Düsseldorf in February 1963. Here the ‘longest-pissing-time-recordholder’
(F. Trowbridge of the USA with a 59.7 second record) was honored with his

413
Nam June Paik, ‘To the “Symphony for 20 Rooms”’, in La Monte Young (ed.) An
Anthology, unpaginated.
414
Nam June Paik, ‘New Ontology of Music’, Videa ’n’ Videology, p. 3.
415
Ibid.
 Articles, Essays, Interviews and Longer Prose Pieces 357

national anthem.416 Paik noted that not only was music deficient in the sexual
dimension (unlike literature and the visual arts – though these were deficient in
the use of indeterminacy, which was an important feature of the music of the
time), but music was also deficient in record breaking, at least where the temporal
dimension was concerned. The Ring was still the longest work ever written – after
87 years no musical work lasting longer than four days had been composed, even
though other records are broken with great frequency. Paik set out to break this
feeble record. He analyzed the basic time units used by five significant composers
and arranged them according to their respective boxing classifications: ‘Flyweight
composer (Higgins) works with seconds. Featherweight composer (Webern)
works with minutes. Lightweight composer (Beethoven) works with ten minutes.
Middleweight composer (Bach) works with hours. Light heavyweight composer
(Wagner) works with days. Heavyweight composer (N.J. Paik) works with days,
weeks, YEARS, CENTURIES, Mega – Years. …’417 Hence the Symphony No.
5 with its two ‘mottos’ at the head of the score: ‘The eternity-cult is the longest
disease of mankind’ and ‘WHEN to be played is equally important as WHAT to be
played’. Perhaps also a fitting motto for a retrospective!

416
Nam June Paik, ‘Afterlude to the Exposition of Experimen­tal Television 1963,
March, Galerie Parnass’, V TRE, 5 (1964); reprinted in Videa ’n’ Videology, p. 6.
417
Nam June Paik, ‘New Ontology of Music’, Videa ’n’ Videology, p. 3.
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Appendix
Michael Nyman’s Collected Writings in
Chronological Order (1968–1982)

1. ‘Blocks of Granite’, The Spectator, 12 July 1968, p. 63

2. ‘Commission Airs’, The Spectator, 26 July 1968, pp. 135–6
3. ‘The Sound of Music’, The Spectator, 9 August 1968, pp. 201–2
4. ‘Britons at Sea’, The Spectator, 23 August 1968, p. 269
5. ‘Enter Birtwistle’, The Spectator, 30 August 1968, p. 299
6. ‘New Favourites’, The Spectator, 13 September 1968, pp. 367–8
7. ‘Shawms and Rackets’, The Spectator, 27 September 1968, pp. 440–41
8. ‘Alexander Goehr’s Naboth’s Vineyard’, Tempo, 86, Autumn 1968, pp. 14–15
9. ‘Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy’, The Listener, 10 October 1968, p. 481
10. ‘Minimal Music’, The Spectator, 11 October 1968, pp. 518–19
11. ‘Old for New’, The Spectator, 1 November 1968, p. 634
12. ‘Chaconnes’, The Listener, 7 November 1968, p. 620
13. ‘We Never Close’, The Spectator, 22 November 1968, pp. 741–2
14. ‘About Time Too’, The Spectator, 6 December 1968, pp. 809–10
15. ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’, The Spectator, 13 December 1968,
pp. 850–51
16. ‘Peace on Earth and Good Will Towards Music’, The Listener, 19 December
1968, p. 834
17. ‘Is This a Record?’, The Spectator, 3 January 1969, pp. 19–20
18. ‘Play Group’, The Spectator, 17 January 1969, pp. 84–5
19. ‘Work Projects’, The Spectator, 7 February 1969, pp. 181–2
20. ‘Demolition Squad’, The Spectator, 14 February 1969, pp. 217–18
21. ‘Strange Interludes’, The Spectator, 21 February 1969, pp. 247–8
22. ‘French Polish’, The Spectator, 14 March 1969, p. 346
23. ‘Sons of Art’, The Listener, 27 March 1969, p. 434
24. ‘Iron Hand’, The Spectator, 28 March 1969, pp. 417–18
25. ‘Two New Works by Birtwistle’, Tempo, 88, Spring 1969, pp. 47–50
26. ‘Off and On’, The Spectator, 4 April 1969, p. 450
27. ‘Not Being Done’, The Spectator, 25 April 1969, p. 553
28. ‘This Way Madness’, The Spectator, 9 May 1969, pp. 626–7
29. ‘Boulez in the Labyrinth’, The Spectator, 16 May 1969, pp. 658–9
30 . ‘Echo Answers’, The Spectator, 14 June 1969, p. 793
31. ‘Skip and Run’, The Spectator, 28 June 1969, p. 860
32. ‘Hands Off’, The Spectator, 12 July 1969, pp. 50–51
33. ‘Patchwork’, The Spectator, 26 July 1969, pp. 116–17
360 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

34. ‘Saucer-shaped’, The Spectator, 2 August 1969, pp. 150–51

35. ‘Plain Clothes Don’, The Spectator, 16 August 1969, pp. 215–16
36. ‘Giant Strides’, The Spectator, 23 August 1969, p. 247
37. ‘Mr Birtwistle is Out’, Music and Musicians, 18, September 1969, pp. 27
and 78
38. ‘Good Mixer’, The Spectator, 6 September 1969, pp. 311–12
39. ‘Frozen Form’, The Spectator, 13 September 1969, p. 342
40. ‘Purcell in his Cups’, Music and Musicians, 18, October 1969, p. 30
41. ‘Odd Todd’, The Spectator, 11 October 1969, pp. 487–8
42. ‘Brass Tacks’, The Spectator, 1 November 1969, p. 613
43. ‘With Reference to Birtwistle’s Medusa’, The Listener, 13 November 1969,
p. 676
44. ‘Scratch & Co’, The Spectator, 13 December 1969, p. 845
45. ‘Drums & Symbols’, The Spectator, 20 December 1969, p. 877
46. ‘Old Master’, The Spectator, 3 January 1970, pp. 23–4
47. ‘Food of Love’, The Spectator, 10 January 1970, p. 53
48. ‘Six to One’, The Spectator, 17 January 1970, pp. 85–6
49. ‘Ancient Monument’, The Spectator, 7 February 1970, p. 186
50. ‘Flowerpot Men’, The Spectator, 14 March 1970, p. 346
51. ‘Stockhausen and David Bedford’, The Listener, 30 April 1970, p. 593
52 . ‘Birtwistle’s Rituals’, The Listener, 27 August 1970, p. 285
53. ‘Tim Souster’s Night Out at the Proms’, Tempo, 94, Autumn 1970, pp. 20–24
54. ‘Satiety’, New Statesman, 2 October 1970, p. 429
55. ‘Anachronisms’, New Statesman, 30 October 1970, pp. 574–5
56. ‘John Cage in Paris’, New Statesman, 6 November 1970, p. 617
57. ‘Kettle of Sounds’, New Statesman, 18 December 1970, p. 848
58. ‘Papa’s Stock’, New Statesman, 8 January 1971, p. 59
59. ‘Big Screen Opera’, New Statesman, 19 February 1971, p. 249
60. ‘The Music of Steve Reich’, Time Out, 21 February–7 March 1971, p. 85
61. ‘Sign Language’, New Statesman, 26 February 1971, p. 282
62. ‘Steve Reich: an interview with Michael Nyman’, Musical Times, 112,
March 1971, pp. 229–31
63. ‘Lovely and Useless’, Music and Musicians, 19, April 1971, p. 48
64. ‘Boulez’s Law’, New Statesman, 2 April 1971, pp. 466–7
65. ‘Stockhausen – The Musician, The Machine’, Vogue Magazine, 15 April
1971, pp. 82–3
66. ‘Interconnections’, New Statesman, 16 April 1971, pp. 539–40
67. ‘Stockhausen Kommt’, Time Out, 18 April–2 May 1971 p. 23
68. ‘Panethnic’, New Statesman, 30 April 1971, p. 607
69. ‘Stockhausen’, New Statesman, 7 May 1971, p. 646
70. ‘Towards Interpretation’, New Statesman, 25 June 1971, pp. 889–90
71. ‘Starvarese’, New Statesman, 9 July 1971, p. 60
72. ‘Uncommercial’, New Statesman, 20 August 1971, p. 248
73. ‘Heavy Duty’, New Statesman, 10 September 1971, p. 343
 Appendix 361

74. ‘Melody Rides Again’, Music and Musicians, 20, October 1971, pp. 26–8
75. ‘Harrison Birtwistle’, London Magazine, 11, October/November 1971,
pp. 118–22
76. ‘Death Throes’, New Statesman, 1 October 1971, p. 453
77. ‘Disciplinarians’, New Statesman, 29 October 1971, p. 599
78. ‘Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning’, London Magazine, 11, December
1971/January 1972, pp. 130–35
79. ‘Dart’s Epitaph’, New Statesman, 17 December 1971, p. 872
80. ‘Learning from Scratch’, New Statesman, 28 January 1972, pp. 122–3
81 . ‘SR – Mysteries of the Phase’, Music and Musicians, 20, February 1972,
pp. 20–21
82. ‘Causerie’, New Statesman, 10 March 1972, p. 324
83. ‘Circle Complete’, New Statesman, 31 March 1972, p. 434
84. ‘Christian Wolf’, Music and Musicians, 20, April 1972, p. 8
85. ‘The Experimental Tradition’, Art and Artists, October 1972
86. ‘As the Titanic Went Down’, Music and Musicians, 21, December 1972,
pp. 10–14
87. ‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’, The Listener, 22 February 1973, pp. 252–3
88. ‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’, The Listener, 19 April 1973, pp. 521–2
89. ‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’, The Listener, 3 May 1973, pp. 593–4
90 . ‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’, The Listener, 24 May 1973, p. 698
91. ‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’, The Listener, 5 July 1973, pp. 26–7
92. ‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’, The Listener, 23 August 1973, p. 258
93. ‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’, The Listener, 13 September 1973, p. 354
94. ‘Cage and Satie’, Musical Times, 114, December 1973, pp. 1227–9
95. ‘Cage/Cardew’, Tempo, 107, December 1973, pp. 32–8
96. ‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’, The Listener, 27 December 1973, p. 893
97. ‘The Experimental Scene’, Music and Musicians, 22, January 1974, pp. 14–16
98. ‘“Song of an Average City” – Tim Souster’s Answer to Delius’, The Listener,
7 March 1974, p. 312
99. ‘Tavener’s Last Rites’, Music and Musicians, 22, June 1974, pp. 14–16
100. ‘Americana’, The Listener, 31 October 1974, pp. 578–9
101. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (First Edition, Studio Vista, 1974;
Second Edition, CUP 1999)
102. ‘Experimental Music and the American Vernacular Tradition’, in First
American Music Conference (Keele University, 1975), pp. 149–52
103. ‘Tippett at 70’, The Listener, 16 January 1975, pp. 84–5
104. ‘Gavin Bryars 1971 Michael Nyman 1975’, Soundings, 9, June 1975
105. ‘Peak District’, The Listener, 9 October 1975, p. 480
106. ‘Music’, Studio International, 191, January/February 1976, pp. 64–5
107. ‘Music’, Studio International, 191, March/April 1976, pp. 186–8
108. ‘Music’, Studio International, 191, May/June 1976, pp. 282–4
109. ‘Music’, Studio International, 192, July/August 1976, pp. 71–2
110. ‘Music’, Studio International, 192, September/October 1976, pp. 192–4
362 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

111. ‘Havergal Brian’, The Listener, 30 September 1976, p. 421

112. ‘Hearing/Seeing’, Studio International, 192, November/December 1976,
pp. 233–43
113. ‘George Brecht: Interview by Michael Nyman’, Studio International, 192,
November/December 1976, pp. 256–66
114. ‘Steve Reich: Interview by Michael Nyman’, Studio International, 192,
November/December 1976, pp. 300–307
115. ‘Bare Essentials’, The Listener, 9 December 1976, p. 763
116. ‘Music’, Studio International, 193, January/February 1977, pp. 6–8
117. ‘Back of the Queue’, The Listener, 10 February 1977, pp. 183–4
118. ‘Music’, Studio International, 193, March/April 1977, pp. 134–5
119. ‘Mexican Discovery’, The Listener, 21 April 1977, pp. 520–21
120. ‘Lindbergh’s Flight’, The Listener, 2 June 1977, pp. 722–3
121. ‘Images’, The Listener, 21 July 1977, pp. 87–8
122. ‘John Buller’s Proença’, The Listener, 28 July 1977, pp. 118–19
123. ‘Training Session’, The Listener, 15 September 1977, pp. 343–4
124. ‘Against Intellectual Complexity in Music’ (October, 13, Summer 1980,
pp. 81–9) (also in Postmodernism, a Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty (London,
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) pp. 206–13)
125. ‘Nam June Paik, Composer’, in John G. Hanhardt (ed.) Nam June Paik
(Whitney Museum of Art, 1982), pp. 79–90)
 Index

Michael Nyman is referred to as MN throughout the index, except for his own
main entry where he is entered as Nyman, Michael.

References to music examples are in bold.

Abravanel, Maurice 100 monotony of 198–9
Abstract Expressionism 282, 299, 318 musical consequences 198–203
Brecht, painter of 318–19
Adams, John, American Standard 259, Babbitt, Milton, Ensembles for Synthesiser
260, 261 72, 155
African drumming, Reich’s interest in 213 Bach, C.P.E. 18
Albert Hall, sound 29 Bach, J.S., Chaconne 45–6
Alloway, Lawrence 279 Backhaus, Wilhelm 350
American culture, and orientalisation Bangladesh, concert for (1971) 136–7
244–5, 268 Bangs, Lester 337
Amy, Gilbert 68 Bantock, Granville, Vanity of Vanities xiv
Relais 79 Barenboim, Daniel 92
Anthology of Criticism 264 Bax, Arnold 164
ap Siôn, Pwyll, The Music of Michael Bayle, Francis 60
Nyman xvii BBC Symphony Orchestra 208
Aprahamian, Felix 63 Beatles xii, 33, 338
Armstrong, Louis 339 MN on 34, 35
Arnold, Malcolm 80 works
art ‘Hey Jude’ 35
and experimental music 277, 283 Sergeant Pepper 34
and music, parallels 17, 131 ‘Yellow Submarine’ 34
Art and Artists 17 Bedford, David
art galleries, as concert halls 304 Albion Moonlight 97
art schools, experimental music 262–4 Gastrula 97
Arts Lab Ensemble 48 Pentomino 97
Ashley, Robert 185, 266, 267 Piece for Mo 97
The Wolfman 194 Sword of Orion 94
Aston, Hugh, ‘My Lady Carey’s Dumpe’ 44 Tentacles of the Dark Nebula 97
Atherton, David 54, 70 Two Poems 53
authenticity, MN on 7 Beethoven, Ludwig van
Avant-Garde, collections 52, 90 legacy 92
avant-garde, and experimental music 14, works
15, 15–16 32 Variations in C Minor, bass line
differences 178, 182–3, 200–201, 242, 46
255 Hammerklavier 92
364 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Moonlight Sonata 353 Boulez, Pierre 56, 89, 166

Behrman, David 190 on music 179
Runthrough 182 works
Berberian, Cathy 65, 70, 95, 210 Boulez on Music Today 8, 107–9
Berio, Luciano Domaines 56
Chemins II 79 Le Marteau sans Maître 34, 69
Sequenza V 52 Livre pour cordes 51
Sequenza VI 79 Livre pour quatuor 51
Berlioz, Hector, Requiem 21–2 Pli selon Pli 51, 67–9
Berners, Lord 18 Structures I 68
Bhattacharya, Deben 137 Bowles, Paul 169, 170
Birtwistle, Harrison 1, 265, 301 Brahms, Johannes, Piano Sonata 293
Cage, comparison 13, 215 Braun, Victor 105
works Brecht, Bertold 39
Cantata 72, 76, 82, 217 Brecht, George 3, 180, 197, 297, 333–4
Chorales 31 Abstract Expressionism, painter of
Down by the Greenwood Side xii, 318–19
10, 75, 76, 216 Cage
Four Interludes from a Tragedy 61, comparison 143–4
76, 82, 94 influence of 318, 319
An Imaginary Landscape 214, 215, interview with MN 305–26
217 on time 307
La Plage 157–8 works
Linoi II 75 The Book of the Tumbler on Fire
Medusa 81–2, 93, 94, 215 308–9
Meridian 217 Candle Piece for Radios 142, 147,
Monodrama 61 305, 320
Monody for Corpus Christi 41, 75, Card Piece for Voices 142, 324
216, 217 Chance-Imagery 319
Nomos xii, 10, 31, 32, 76, 215, Comb Music 142, 147, 297
216–17 Concerto for Orchestra 144
Orpheus 76 Drip Event 142
Punch and Judy 22, 31, 32–3, Flute Solo 314
38–41, 75, 76, 93, 216 Incidental Music 147, 305
‘Spring Song’ 93 Journey of the Isle of Wight 83
Tragoedia xiii, 1, 10, 31, 41, 81, The Motor Vehicle Sundown
216, 217 (Event) 142, 310, 314, 324
Triumph of Time 157 Piano Piece 1962 306
Verses for Ensembles (Signals) Piece for Voice 305
61–4, 76, 98–9, 214, 216 Play Incident 307
as re-composition 63–4 Solo for Violin 306
Blacher, Boris, Cello Concerto 33 Solo for Wind Instruments 144
Bochner, Mel 287 String Quartet 144, 165, 314
definition of serialism 285 Symphony No. 1 148, 354
Boje, Harald 122 Ten Rules: No Rules 144
boredom Three Aqueous Events 147, 306
Cage on 230 Three Telephone Events 145, 147,
Satie on 230 313
 Index 365

Two Definitions 310 I-Ching, use of 226, 232, 234, 283, 293
Two Durations 147, 324 mentors 238
Water Yam 145, 146–7, 148, 305, on music 234–5
308, 309, 313, 315, 322 New School classes 282
Brighton Festival 10, 29 on performance 271–6
British Society for Electronic Music 72 repetition 230–31
Britten, Benjamin 31 Satie
Chaconne 46 commonalities with 228–9
War Requiem 33–4 promotion of 226–8
Brome, Alexander 78 on sound 200, 201
Brook, Peter 39 Stockhausen
Brown, Norman O. 232–3 comparison 113
Bruce, Neely 165 conversation 95
Bruck, Charles 28 structures 228
Bruckner, Anton, Symphony No. 8 7, 158–9 systems, use of 293
Bryars, Gavin 3, 17, 20, 131, 262, 334, 336 works
1, 2, 1-2-3-4 132, 252, 261 4’33’’ 55, 178, 343
Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet 152, identity 184–5
250, 255, 256, 260, 261, 287–8, 347 non-intentional sound 197
White on 288 notation 179, 193
Mr Sunshine 65 time, attitude to 185
A Place in the Country 253 34’46.776” 65
Private Music 191, 252 45’ for a Speaker 210
The Sinking of the Titanic 148–51, 255, 62 Mesostics re Merce
260, 261, 291 Cunningham 232
‘Autumn’ 250 Aria 65, 210
Bryars on 301–2 Atlas Eclipticalis 271, 298, 325
Budd, Harold 268 Cartridge Music 116, 209
Coeur d’Orr 269 Cheap Imitation 226, 229, 231, 283
Madrigals of the Rose Angel 270 Concert for Piano and Orchestra
The Candy-Apple Revision 269 209, 219, 233, 301
The Oak of the Golden Dreams 269, 270 Concert for Prepared Piano and
Bush, Alan 1 Orchestra 233
Diaries 238, 239
Cage, John 49, 64, 84, 113, 165, 243–4 Dream 64
assemblage music 296 Imaginary Landscape No.4 195
on Bach’s Art of Fugue 122 Indeterminacy 196
Birtwistle, comparison 13, 215 and Lejaren Hiller, HPSCHD 167,
on boredom 230 233–4, 237, 283
Brecht M 231, 232, 234, 235, 238, 244
comparison 143–4 Mureau 232
influence of 318, 319 Mushroom Book 232, 239
Buddhist studies 271–2 Music for Amplified Toy Pianos 65
Cardew, comparison 16 Music for Carillon 210
composition classes 303 Music for Wind Instruments 65
on Duo II for Pianists 288 Musicircus 13, 208, 283
duration, use of 145, 147 Notations 204
on ‘experimental’ 177 Poem 145
366 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Radio Music 65 Britten 46

Rozart Mix 209, 210 development 44–5
Solo 30 232 Gerhard 46
Song Books 209, 210, 232 MN on 43–6
Variations III 191 origin 44
Variations IV 117 Chant, Michael 17, 42
Variations VI 65 Chaudhuri, Debabrata 54
Variations VII 209 Chavez, Carlos, Toccata 168, 170
Water Music 299 Cheltenham Festival 42
The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen ‘Aleatoric Adventure’ 73
Springs 65, 192 Chiari, Giuseppe, Lavoro 191
A Year from Monday 239, 245 chord, single, Lucier on 291 fn261
Young Christiansen, Henning xiii, 204
comparison 282, 325 Springen 43
influence on 283 Ciccolini, Aldo 101
Cale, John, and Terry Riley, Church of City of London Ensemble 83
Anthrax 114, 115 Clapton, Eric 136
Campiello Band 6, 11, 19 classical system
Cardew, Cornelius xv, 13, 64, 138, 144–5, dichotomies 199
280 functions 200
Cage, comparison 16 Clifford, Hugh 246
on Scratch Music 236–7 Cobbing, Bob 83
works Cockburn, Claud, Bestseller 165
1001 Activities 236 Coltrane, John 269
The Great Learning xii, 16, 42, composition
67, 83, 135–6, 181, 182, 194, Tippett on 163
217–21, 235, 237, 301 Varèse on 166–7, 168
Confucian book 218, 238 concert halls, art galleries as 304
notation 221 Connolly, Justin, and Peter Zinovieff,
Memories of You 192–3 Obbligati III 72–3
Octet 61 219, 235 Cooke, Derek 7, 158–9
Piano Sonata No 35 126 Cooper, Joseph 152
Schooltime Compositions 235, 263 Cork, Richard xi
Scratch Music 235–6, 238 Cotrubas, Ileana 105
The Tiger’s Mind 220 Cottesloe Theatre 265
Treatise 183, 219, 235, 262, 263, Cowell, Henry 195–6, 228, 244
304 Cowie, Ed 154, 155
on Young’s X for Henry Flint 344 Cox, John 37
Caskel, Christoph 115 Crabtree, Crawshaw 246
Catch Clubs 77 Crossman, Richard xi
Cavalli, Francesco, Ombra mai fù 158 Cunningham, David 17
Cecconi, Monic, Imaginaires 71 Cunningham, Merce 64, 201–2
Cerha, Friedrich 124 Idyllic Song 226
chaconne Second Hand 226
Bach 45–6 Curzon, Clifford 33
basic version 45
bass line 45 Dalhaus, Carl 8
Beethoven’s debt to 46 dance, repetition 296–7
 Index 367

Dart, Thurston xiii, 1–2, 117 Obscure label 255, 258–60

influence on MN 6, 133–4 Ensemble Musica Negativa 90
recordings Eritrean music xii
Bull’s Goodnight 133 Ernst, Max 276
Masters of Early English Keyboard Eschenbach, Christoph 51
Music 133 Everett, Yayoi 11
Upon la mi re 133 experimental, Cage on use of word 177
Davies, Hugh 48, 73 experimental music
Davies, Peter Maxwell xii, 1, 31, 36, 57–8 American 266–70
Antechrist 55 and art 277, 283
Eight Songs for a Mad King xiii, 11, in art schools 262–4
66, 85, 86 audience, function of 195
Leopardi Fragments 86 and the avant-garde 14, 15, 15–16
L’Homme Armé 10, 55, 58–9, 66, 74 differences 178, 182–3, 200–201,
Revelation and Fall 58 242, 255
St Thomas Wake 73–4 monotony 198–9
Seven in Nomine 54 musical consequences 198–203
Versalii Icones 11, 84–6 creeping conservatism 303–4
Davies, Walford 157 definitions 14
Davis, Colin 32, 171 focus 196–7
Dean, Elton 115, 208 game element 189–90
Debussy, Claude, La Mer 89 Glass on 256
Dennis, Brian 126, 128, 136 groups 17, 139
Frame 30:30 132 identity 183–5
Déroubaix, Jeanne 34 instrument as total configuration 191–3
Dickinson, Peter 160, 227 listening 194–6
Domaine Musical 78–9 MN on 13–19, 177–203, 239–49,
The Doors, Absolutely Live 103 255–8
Drew, David xi, xii, 2, 10, 171, 172 in the National Theatre 265
drinking songs 77–8 notation 14, 179
Druce, Duncan 88 as observation 193
Duchamp, Marcel, Large Glass 148 performance 187, 188–9
Dufay, Guillaume, Magnam me gentes 36 performers 193–4
Dury, Ian 17 Pop Art, parallels 297–302
Dylan, Bob 137 pop music, use of 300
processes
early music, revival 6–7 chance determination 180–81
Early Music Consort 6 contextual 181–2
Ecco la Primavera 123 electronic 182
Eastley, Max 255, 260 non-hierarchy 201–2
Eisler, Hans 164 people 181
Ellington, Duke repetition 182
Mood Indigo 154 rules and interpretation 190–91
Sophisticated Lady 261 as silence 193
English Bach Festival 27, 70, 122 simplicity in, MN on 340–41, 347
English Opera Group 33 sound sources 297
English systemic music, Parsons on 285–6 tasks 187–8
Eno, Brian 15, 21, 258–9 time frames 185–7
368 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

the unique moment 182–3 Gillett, Charlie, The Sound of the City 338
Wolff on 202–3, 256 Ginsberg, Allen 111
Experimental Music Catalogue 3, 259–60 Glass, Philip xiii, 19
on experimental music 256
The Family group 57 works
Feldman, Morton xiii, 15, 133, 137, 138, Music with Changing Parts 120,
152, 153, 217 270
music Music in Contrary Motion 270
performance of 153–4 Music in Fifths 270
Stockhausen’s comment on 340 Music in Similar Motion 120, 270
on time 187 Music in Twelve Parts 255, 256–7,
works 270
Four Instruments 55 criticism of 257–8
King of Denmark 31 Solo music 268
Piano Three Hands 190 Two Pages 270
Piece for Four Pianos 181 Glazer, Frank 101
The Viola in My Life 138, 154 Globokar, Vinko 48
Ferry, Brian 338 Discours II 53
film, MN on 22 Godard, Jean-Luc 41
film music 1-100 4 Goehr, Alexander xii, 1, 31
The Draughtsman’s Contract xv, 1, 4 The Deluge 38
Il Campiello 4, 6, 10 Naboth’s Vineyard 10, 36–8, 55
Keep it up Downstairs 4 Brechtianism 37
Man on Wire xv Gottschalk, Louis
The Piano xv Union, Grande Paraphrase de Concert
Fluxus artists 5, 141, 144, 145, 148, 236, 246–7
283, 297, 306, 321–2 Yankee Doodle 247
anti-modernism 142 Grateful Dead 102
Fluxus Champion Contest 356 Live/Dead 103
Flying Lizards 17 Workingman’s Dead 103
Foldes, Peter 60 Greenaway, Peter 17
Foster, Stephen 19, 263 Groupe de Recherches Musicales 59–60
Foster’s Social Orchestra 19, 263, 264 Gruppe Nuova Consonanza 91
Franklin, Benjamin 18, 165 Guarneri Quartet 92
Fugs xii, 41, 42, 43 Guillen, Nicolas 169
Fuller, Buckminster 227, 239
Futurists, Varèse on 302–3 Hacker, Alan 56, 94
Hague Residence Orchestra 3
Garland, Peter 170, 268 Hall, Michael 160, 162
Geesin, Ron 262 Hall, Peter 76, 105
Gentle Fire 139 Handel, G.F.
Gerhard, Roberto Concerti Grossi, op.6 2
Chaconne 46 Israel in Egypt 136
Fourth Symphony (New York) 50 Serse 158
Leo 99–100 The Choice of Hercules xi, 12
Third Symphony 50 Hanhardt, John G., Nam June Paik 348
Gilbert, Anthony, Brighton Piece 79 Happenings 282, 322, 323
Gill, Dominic xi, xii Harmony Band 17
 Index 369

Harrison, George 136 Ives, Charles 160–61, 242, 298–9

Hart, Roy 66 on Thoreau 246
Hastings, Thomas 243 works
Haydn, Franz Joseph 18 Decoration Day 161
Symphony No. 76 156 Memos 243
Heinrich, Anthony Philip 18, 161, 242 Orchestral Set 162
The Columbiad 247 St Gaudens 161
The Dawning of Music in Kentucky Second String Quartet 314
247–8, 248 Universe Symphony 245
Divertimento for 4 hands on the Grand
Piano Forte 247, 249 Jackman, Dave and Diane 17
The Four-Pawed Kitten Dance 249 Jenkins, Jean 119
Sylviad 247, 248 Joplin, Scott 162
The Minstrel’s Entertainment 247 Juke Box Jury 28, 30
The Wildwood Troubador 247 Jullien, Louis Antoine, British Army
The Yankee Doodleiad 247 Quadrilles 166
Helffer, Claude 51 Jung, Carl, on the I-Ching 182
Henze, Hans Werner
Neapolitan Songs 54 Kagel, Mauricio
Second Piano Concerto 51 Hallelujah 91
Heyworth, Peter xii Match 52, 53
Higgins, Dick 181, 186, 190, 194, 203, Musik für Renaissance-Instrumente
230, 322, 347–8 6, 53
Hill, Alec 127, 128–9 Kagon philosophy 272
Annable’s London Surprise 132 Kahn, David, The Codebreakers 34
Hiller, Lejaren see under Cage, John Kaprow, Allan 282
Hindemith, Karl, Lehrstück 37 Keller, Hans 29, 31, 164
Hobbs, Christopher 65, 240, 255, 286, 299, Ketèlby, Albert 131, 142, 165
333–6 Bells Across the Meadow 301
Aran 260 Kirby, Michael 323
First Doomsday Piece 130 Klee, Paul 76
Piobaireachd Exercise 132 Koenig, Gottfried Michael 90
Remorseless Lamb 130 Koltai, Ralph 103
Two Compositions 191 Kontarsky Brothers 115
Hobbs-White percussion duo 240 Kosugi, Takehisa
Hopper, Hugh 115, 207, 208 Anima 2 146
Hume-Carter, Ivan 263 Anima 7 146, 188, 193, 194
Hunter, Rita 104 Chironomy 1 146
Distance 146, 192
I-Ching Music for a Revolution 145–6
Jung on 182 Theatre Music 146
use by Cage 226, 232, 234, 283, 293 Theatre Piece 142
Ichiyanagi, Toshi Kustow, Michael 265
Distance 152, 263
Sapporo 194 La Rue, Danny 38
Institute of Contemporary Arts 19 Laird, Michael 8
International Society for Contemporary Lalandi, Linda 122
Music 214 Lampard, James 152, 262, 263
370 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Lanigan, John 105 Martin, George 34

Lawson, Nigel xi Mason, Frances 88
Leary, Timothy 111 Masson, Gerard 68
leitmotifs, Wagner 104 Mayuzumi, Toshiro
Les Percussions de Strasbourg 70 Metamusic 55
LeWitt, Sol 285, 287 Prelude for String Quartet 53
Arcs, Circles and Grids 327 Mellers, Wilfrid, Twilight of the Gods 338
Paragraphs on Conceptual Art 326, Menuhin, Hephzibah 152
327, 328 Merten, Wim, American Minimal Music,
Liberace 70 MN’s preface 21
Ligeti, György Messiaen, Olivier 27–8, 35
Atmospheres 91 Chronochromie 34
Aventures 91 Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum
Cello Concerto 91 27, 28, 98
Lux Aeterna 53 L’Ascension 27, 28
Volumina 53 Turangalîla-Symphonie 27, 28
The Listener, reviews for 2, 3 Michael Nyman Band xiii, 4, 6
Liszt, Franz, Requiem 164 Middle Earth organisation 41
London Contemporary Chamber Players Miller, Karl xi
83 Minimal Art 17, 131, 282
London Magazine, contributions 2, 16 minimalism xiii, xv, 19–22, 41–3
London Sinfonietta 54, 70 Minton, Yvonne 54
Louther, William 86 Monteverdi, Claudio, Il Combattimento 36
Lowens, Irving 248 Moorman, Charlotte xiii, 43, 349, 353
Lucier, Alvin Morrison, Jim 103
on Cage’s use of systems 293 Morrow, Michael 122–3
Chambers 206 Mortimore, Robin 263
music Mouth of Hermes group 55
as research 293–4 Mozart, W.A.
spatial aspects 294–5 ‘Coronation’ Concerto 33
on the single chord 291 fn261 Dice Game 234
Vespers 67, 182, 187, 188, 304 Mumma, Gordon, Hornpipe 67
music
McCartney, Paul 34 architectural 98
Machaut, Guillaume de, Plange, regni and art, parallels 17, 131
respublica 36 Boulez on 179
Maciunas, George 308, 310, 311 Cage on 234–5
12 Piano Compositions for Nam June ethnic
Paik 351 degrees in 117
Concerto for Clarinet 144 The Living Tradition 118
Homage to La Monte Young 350–51 Music from the Middle East 118
Mcnaghten Concerts 42, 47, 56, 135 Traditional Music of Ethiopia 118
Majorca Orchestra 246, 263, 264 mediaeval 35–6
Manchester School 1, 31 and movements 282–6
Mann, William xii as observation 193
Manning, Jane 58 pace of 331
Marais, Marin 60 post-experimental 17
Marshall, Stuart 293 repetition 296, 297
 Index 371

as research 293–4 ‘George Brecht: Interview by Michael

salon 300–301 Nyman’ 305–26
as silence 193 ‘Hands Off’ 72–3
spatial aspects 294–6 ‘Harrison Birtwistle’ 214–17
see also early music; experimental ‘Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Jusy’
music; minimalism 38–41
Music and Musicians, contributions 2 ‘Hearing/Seeing’ 276–304
music theatre, examples 66 ‘Interconnections’ 114–15
Music Theatre Ensemble 216 ‘Is This a Record?’ 52–4
music writings ‘John Cage in Paris’ 208–10
‘About Time Too’ 47–9 ‘Last Week’s Broadcast Music’ 152–9
‘Against Intellectual Complexity in ‘Learning from Scratch’ 135–6
Music’ 340–48 ‘Lindbergh’s Flight’ 170–73
‘Alexander Goehr’s Naboth’s Vineyard’ ‘Melody Rides Again’ 126–31
36–8 ‘Mexican Discovery’ 168–70
‘Americana’ 160–62 ‘Minimal Music’ 41–3
‘Anachronisms’ 102–3 ‘Mr Birtwistle is Out’ 75–6
‘Ancient Monument’ 92–3 ‘Music’ 255–76, 333–40
‘As the Titanic Went Down’ 148–52 ‘Nam June Paik, Composer’ 348–57
‘Bare Essentials’ 166–8 ‘New Favourites’ 33–5
‘Big Screen Opera’ 103–5 ‘Not Being Done’ 64–6
‘Birtwistle’s Rituals’ 98–100 ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’
‘Blocks of Granite’ 27–8 49–51
‘Boulez in the Labyrinth’ 67–9 ‘Old Master’ 87–8
‘Boulez’s Law’ 107–9 ‘Panethnic’ 117–19
‘Brass Tacks’ 78–9 ‘Patchwork’ 73–4
‘Cage and Satie’ 225–31 ‘Peak District’ 164–6
‘Cage/Cardew’ 231–9 ‘Play Group’ 54–5
‘Causerie’ 136–7 ‘Purcell in his Cups’ 77–8
‘Chaconnes’ 43–6 ‘Satiety’ 100–101
‘Christian Wolff’ 139–41 ‘Scratch & Co’ 82–4
‘Circle Complete’ 137–9 ‘Shawms and Rackets’ 35–6
‘Cornelius Cardew’s The Great ‘Sign Language’ 105–7
Learning’ 217–21 ‘Six to One’ 90–91
‘Dart’s Epitaph’ 133–4 ‘Skip and Run’ 70–72
‘Demolition Squad’ 57–9 ‘The Sound of Music’ 28–31
‘Disciplinarians’ 131–2 ‘SR - Mysteries of the Phase’ 222–5
‘Drums & Symbols’ 84–6 ‘Steve Reich: an interview with
‘Enter Birtwistle’ 31–3 Michael Nyman’ 211–14
‘Experimental Music and the American ‘Steve Reich: Interview’ 326–33
Vernacular Tradition’ 242–9 ‘Steve Reich, Phil Glass’ 119–20
‘The Experimental Scene’ 239–42 ‘Stockhausen’ 120–22
‘The Experimental Tradition’ 141–8 ‘Stockhausen – The Musician, The
‘Flowerpot Men’ 93–4 Machine’ 109–14
‘Food of Love’ 89–90 ‘Stockhausen and David Bedford’ 95–7
‘French Polish’ 59–60 ‘Stockhausen kommt’ 115–17
‘Gavin Bryars 1971 Michael Nyman ‘Stravarese’ 124–5
1975’ 250–54 ‘This Way Madness’ 66–7
372 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

‘Tim Souster’s Night Out at the Proms’ In Re Don Giovanni 1

203–8 Michael Nyman Songbook 18
‘Tippett at 70’ 162–4 on early music revival 6–7
‘Towards (a definition) of experimental on experimental music 13–19,
music’ 177–203 177–203, 239–49, 255–8
‘Towards Interpretation’ 122–3 Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond
‘Two New Works by Birtwistle’ 61–4 xii, 2, 3, 13–14, 15, 18, 255
‘Uncommercial’ 125–6 folk music, interest in 6
‘With Reference to Birtwistle’s influences on, Dart 6
Medusa’ 79–82 librettist, Down by the Greenwood Side
‘Work Projects’ 55–7 xii, 10
Musica Elettronica Viva 117 music critic years xi–xiv, xv–xvi, 2, 22–3
Friday 91 music studies 1–2, 6
Musica Reservata 6, 35, 36, 54, 87, 88, 122 music writings
A Florentine Festival 123 alphabetical list see music writings
Music from the Time of Boccaccio’s chronological list 359–62
Decameron 123 scope 4–5
Music from the Time of Christopher on musical impermanence 7
Columbus 123 on musical modernism 7–8
musical modernism 7–8 on pop music 336–40
musique concrète 59 on programme notes 49–51
Reich, interviews with 3–4, 211–14,
National Theatre, experimental music in 326–36
265 on simplicity in experimental music
Neuhaus, Max 31 340–41, 347
New Simplicity 346, 347 on Stockhausen’s music 8–9
New Statesman, reviews for 2, 3 see also film music; Michael Nyman
Nico Band; music writings
Desertshore 115
Marble Index 115 O’Doherty, Brian 202
Noble, Jeremy xii Oldfield, Mike, Tubular Bells 339, 340
Nono, Luigi, La Fabbrica Illuminata 155 Oman, Julia Trevelyan 105
Noorman, Jantina 35–6 opera 22
notation ‘death of’ 41
in Cage’s 4’33’’ 179 uses of word 39
in Cardew’s The Great Learning 221 see also Wagner, Richard
experimental music 14 orientalisation, and American culture
Paik on 349–50 244–5, 268
traditional, limitations of 179 Orquesta Sinfonica de Mexico 169
Nyman, Michael Ortiz, Diego 44
on authenticity 7 Orton, Richard
on Boulez’s Boulez on Music Today 8 Cycle 73
Brecht, interview with 305–26 Sampling Afield 73
Brighton Festival, association with 10 Ottaway, Hugh 162
on Cage’s music 208–10 Otten, Kees 88
compositions
Bell Set No. 1 4, 287fn257 Page, Jimmy 339
Decay Music 4 Paik, Nam June xiii, 4, 43, 348–57
 Index 373

on notation 349–50 Pierrot Players 11, 59, 61, 72, 94, 153, 214,
performances 350–52 215
works Scratch Orchestra, comparison 13
Cello Sonata No. 1 for Adults Only Pink Floyd 339
353 Plaistow, Stephen xiii
Electronic Opera No. 1 353 Pollock, Jackson 283
Étude for Pianoforte 351 Pop Art, experimental music, parallels
Exposition of Music – Electronic 297–302
Television 353 pop music 22, 34
Gala Music for John Cage’s 50th live audiences 102–3
Birthday 354 MN on 336–40
Hommage à John Cage 349, 351, use of, by experimental music 300
353 Porter, Andrew xii, 104
Moving Theater No. 1 356 Portsmouth Sinfonia 17, 131, 262–3, 298,
The music for high tower and 300, 356
without audience 356 Praetorius, Michael 18
One for Violin Solo 353 Ach mein Herr 88
Opéra Sextronique 349 Ein Kind geborn 88
Serenade for Alison (Knowles) 353, In dulci jubilo 87–8
354 Syntagma Musicum 87
Simple 351 Terpsichore 87
Sinfonie for 20 Rooms 355–6 Wachet auf 88
Sonata quasi una fantasia 353 Presley, Elvis, Blue Suede Shoes 300
String Quartet 349, 352 Preston, Billy 137
Symphony No. 5 353–4, 355, 357 Previn, André 102
Variations on a Theme by Saint- Private Company 17
Saëns 349 Promenade Theatre Orchestra 17, 129, 240
Young Penis Symphony 354, 355 Pruslin, Stephen 92, 94
Palm, Siegfried 33, 91 librettist, Punch and Judy 32, 33, 39, 40
Palmer, Tony, All You Need is Love 336–7 Purcell, Henry
MN’s critique of 337–40 catches 2, 77–8
Park Lane Group 160 chaconne, example 45
Parmegiani, Bernard, Capture éphémère 60
Parsons, Michael xi, 16, 126, 129, 142–3, quotation 11–13
181, 240, 262, 284–5, 286
on English systemic music 285–6 radio
Orchestra Piece 132 as performing instrument 106
Rhythmic Studies 2 241 possibilities of, Weill on 172–3
Rhythmic Studies 4 241 as sound source 106–7
Pasolini, Pier Paolo 103 Randall, J.K., Mudgett 72
passacaglia 45 Ratledge, Mike 115, 207, 208
Peckham, Morse 190, 198 Ravenscroft, Thomas 2
Penassou, Pierre 71 Read, Ezra 246
performance, Cage on 271–6 record labels 125–6
Phillips, Tom, Ornamentik 73 Reich, Steve 3, 303
piano African drumming, interest in 213
as percussion instrument 192 MN’s interviews with 3–4, 211–14,
prepared 192 326–36
374 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

MN’s promotion of 19 Rist, Simone 210

works Robertson, Morgan, Futility 151
Clapping Music 330, 332 Rolling Stones, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out 103
Come Out xiii, 211–12, 213, 223 Rose, Barbara 282
Drumming xiii, 119, 222–5, 328–9, Rosenthal, Maurice 101
332, 333, 334, 347 Ross and Cromarty Orchestra 263
Four Organs 119, 125, 213, 222, Rossini, Gioachino, William Tell Overture
342 263, 298
It’s Gonna Rain 211, 223, 326, 327, Rowland, David, Degrees 42
329, 331 Roxy Music 338
Music for 18 Musicians 327, 328, Russell, Ken 17
329–30 Russell, Leon 136
Music as a Gradual Process 326, Ryan, Barry, Eloise 300
327, 348 Rzewski, Frederic 141
Music for Mallet Instruments, Les Moutons de Panurge 181
Voices and Organ 329, 332 Selfportrait 191
Music for Pieces of Wood 329 Spacecraft 181
Pendulum Music 119, 304, 330–31,
347 Sachs, Curt 44
Phase Patterns 119, 120, 192, 213, Sadie, George xii
222, 223 Saint-Saëns, Camille, The Swan 353
Piano Phase 119, 222, 223, 327, Salzman, Eric 117, 160
329, 332–3 Satie, Eric
The Plastic Haircut, film music 212 on boredom 230
Pulse Music 211 Cage, commonalities with 228–9
Six Pianos 332 Cage’s promotion of 226–8
Violin Phase 211 phonometrics 100
Writings on Music 4 piano music, recordings 101
Reid, Charles xi Shattuck on 130
Remedies, Alberto 104 works
Rennie Mackintosh, Charles 31 Croquis 101
repetition Embryons desséchés 101
Cage 230–31 Gymnopédies 82, 100–101
dance 296–7 Le piège de Méduse 226–7
music 296, 297 Menus propos Enfantins 101
Revueltas, Silvestre 18, 169–70 Parade 101, 125
Sensemaya 168, 169, 170 Passacaille 101
Richardson-Jones, Keith 262 Quatres Preludes 101
Riehn, Rainer, Chants de Maldoror 90 Socrate 101
Riley, Terry 19 Cage’s arrangement 226, 229,
Dorian Reeds 204 283
In C 84, 126, 204, 205 Sports et Divertissements 94, 227
Keyboard Studies 20–21, 203, 204–5 Vexations 227, 230, 231
Olsen III 204 Vieux sequins et vieilles cuirasses
Poppy Nogood’s Phantom Band 204 230
A Rainbow in Curved Air 21, 114, 126, Saunders, David 262
204 Schaeffer, Pierre 59
see also Cale, John Schnebel, Dieter, Glossolalie 91
 Index 375

Schoenberg, Arnold Soft Machine 20, 203, 208

Pierrot Lunaire 58 Fourth 115
Verklärte Nacht 35 Third 207
Wood-dove Songs 54 Sonic Arts Union xii, 66, 67, 193, 266, 267
Schonfield, Victor 14, 15 sound 29
Schuller, Gunther, Early Jazz: Its Roots in Albert Hall 29
and Musical Development 338 Cage on 200, 201
Schwarz, K. Robert 3, 15 sources, experimental music 297
Scratch Music, Cardew on 236–7 Stockhausen on 201
Scratch Orchestra xv, 17, 126–7, 136, Varèse’s use of 29, 125
141–2, 214, 217, 284, 300 Soundings magazine 170, 267
concerts 83–4, 131–2, 303 Source magazine 267
decline 239–40 Souster, Tim xi, 20, 64
formation 16–17, 135, 219, 235 Triple Music II 203, 206–7
Pierrot Players, comparison 13 The Spectator, reviews for 2, 3
Stockhausen on 319 Spector, Phil 137
Scriabin, Alexander, Poem of Ecstasy 130 Spooky Tooth 42
serialism 1, 154 Spurling, Hilary xi, xii, 2
Bochner’s definition 285 Stadlen, Peter xii
Stockhausen on 198–9 Steele, Jeffrey 262
Serocki, Kazimierz, Continuum 70, 71 Stella, Frank 279
Serra, Richard 330 Stockhausen, Karlheinz xii, 8–9, 47–9, 56–7
Sessions, Roger 69 Cage
Shankar, Ravi 43, 136, 137 comparison 113
Shattuck, Roger 229 conversation 95
on Satie 130 on Feldman’s music 340
Shaw, Glen Byam 103 London concert (1968) 109–10
Shawe-Taylor, Desmond xii mysticism 112
shozyg 81 on the Scratch Orchestra 319
Shrapnel, Hugh 127, 129–30 on serialism 198–9
Bells 129 on sound 201
Elegy 132 and tradition 113
Simpson, Christopher, Division Viol 44 works
Simpson, Robert Adieu 95–6
Fourth Symphony 155–7 Aus den sieben Tagen 9, 47, 48, 98,
Beethoven, debt to 156 109, 110, 111, 116, 120, 206
Skempton, Howard 16, 20, 126, 128, 240, Carré 50–51, 52, 53
241 Electronic Study No. 12 96
Waltz 281, 289, 290–91 Expo 112
Smalley, Roger 63 Gesang der Jünglinge 47, 96, 112,
Movement for Orchestra 132 116, 154–5
Pulses for 5x4 Players 70 Gruppen 30, 52, 53, 116, 341
The Song of the Highest Tower 70 Hymnen 48, 98, 112, 115, 117, 120,
Transformation I 70–71 122, 356
Smithers, Don 88 Klavierstück X 35
Snow, Michael, Wavelength xiii Kontakte 47, 48, 49, 96, 112, 116
Society for the Promotion of New Music Kurzwellen 92, 95, 105–6, 107,
72, 259 109, 112
376 Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Mantra 9, 115, 120–21 Plus-Minus 58

Mikrophonie I 95, 112–13, 117 time
Mikrophonie II 9, 48, 56–7, 95, 112 Brecht on 307
Momente 112 in Cage’s 4’33’’ 185
Op. 1970 113 in experimental music 185–7
Originale 350 Feldman on 187
Plus-Minus 48, 81, 131 Tippett, Michael 63
Poles 112 on composition 163
Prozession 95, 112, 122 seventieth birthday celebrations 162–4
Solo 48, 95, 96, 117 works
Spiral 97, 106, 112, 113, 199, 209 Concerto for Double String
Stimmung xiii, 96, 115, 117, 120, Orchestra 163
121, 244 First Piano Sonata 163
Studies 116 Second Piano Sonata 163
Telemusik 47, 48, 96, 112 String Quartets 163
Theatre Piece 97 Third Piano Sonata 164
Stravinsky, Igor tonality 156
The King of the Stars 30 Toop, David 255, 260
Pulcinella 124 Tudor, David 184–5, 351
Renard 54, 55
Requiem Canticles 30 Ussachevsky, Vladimir, Of Wood and
Rite of Spring 22, 29, 30, 89–90, 124 Brass 72
Symphonies of Wind Instruments 124, Utah Symphony Orchestra 100
125
Symphony in C 124 Varèse, Edgard
Symphony of Psalms 124, 125 on composition 166–7, 168
Studio International xi, 17 on Futurists 302–3
contributions 2, 4 music, lack of tradition in 124
Syntagma Musicum, Music of the Middle on notation 179
Ages and the Renaissance 88 sound, use of 29, 125
works
Tavener, John Arcana 29–30
Celtic Requiem 73, 74 Hyperprism 167
In Alium 74 Intégrales 79, 167
Requiem 13 Ionisation 30, 71, 332
The Whale 54 Octandre 167
Tchaikovsky, Peter 70 Poème Electronique 29, 71
Eugene Onegin 105 Velvet Underground 339
Teitelbaum, Richard 117, 268 Loaded 115
Tempo, contributions to 2, 10 ‘Sister Ray’ 21
Tenney, James 300, 326 White Light 115
Thomas, Allan 159 Vesuvius Ensemble 58
Thomas, Mary 58, 72, 94, 164 Villa-Lobos, Heitor, Bachianas Brasileiras
Thoreau, Henry 314
Ives on 246
Journal 232 Wagner, Richard
Tilbury, John xiii, 57, 64, 73, 137–8, 139, leitmotifs 104
146, 188, 262, 308 updating 103–4
 Index 377

works Wooldridge, David 160, 246

Götterdämmerung 103, 105 World Band project 117, 268
The Ring 104 Wyatt, Robert 203, 207
Walker, Sarah 65
Walton, William 31 Xenakis
Ward Clarke, Jennifer 86 Achorripsis 71
Wardour Castle Summer School xii, 7 Nomos Alpha 71
Watts, Alan 178–9 Stratégy: Game for two orchestras 71
Webern, Anton, Orchestral Variations 344 Syrmos 71
Weill, Kurt
on possibilities of radio 172–3 Young, La Monte xiii, 19, 142, 143, 204,
works 209–10
Berlin Requiem 173 Cage
Der Jasager 171 comparison 282, 325
Der Ozeanflug 170–71 influence of 283
Mahagonny 10, 37 Cage on 342
performance of 171–2 Theatre of Eternal Music 114
The Threepenny Opera 171 works
Whitcomb, Ian, After the Ball 338 2 Sounds 282
White, John 17, 128, 130, 240, 241–2, 255, Chemistry of Music 316, 317
280, 286, 291–3, 301, 303, 333–6 Composition 1960 No. 5 145
on Jesus’ Blood Never Never Failed Composition 1960 No. 7 142, 249,
Me Yet 288 280, 342
works Composition 1960 No. 9 279
Autumn Countdown Machine 132 Composition 1960 No. 10 281
Concert Duos 336 Drift Study 280, 281
St Vitus Dance Music Assembly ‘Hold a Fifth’ see Composition
Machine 336 1960 No. 7
Tube and Cello Machine 281 Octet for Brass 343
The Who 102 Poem for Chairs, Tables and
Live at Leeds 103 Benches 144, 195, 283, 315
Williams, Margaret and Hugh 39 Sunday Morning Blues 269
Wilmers, Mary-Kay xi The Tortoise, His Dreams and
Wilson, Catherine 104 Journeys 244, 343
Wits Interpreter 77 Trio for Strings 343
Wolff, Christian 154, 199 Vision 283
on experimental music 202–3, 256 X for Henry Flint, Cardew on 344
indeterminacy 139–40 Youngblood, Gene 218
works
Burdocks 139, 140 Zacher, Gerd 53
performance of 140–41, 181 Zappa, Frank 339
Duo II for Pianists 185 Zimmermann, Bernd Alois 91
Cage on 288 Zinovieff, Peter 61, 215
For 1, 2 or 3 People 189–90 see also Connolly, Justin