Robert Ashley

wrtng ths lecture I had the dea that I

would nterrupt t now and then for a muscal example. That was
a bad dea, as we all know. I dont know what made me forget.
Talk and musc dont mx. Derent parts o the bran or somethng. Except n two very specal condtons, whch we all have
experenced, the attenton to the detals o the vocewhether or
not anythng nterestng s beng sadmakes us mpatent wth
the musc, whch s the last thng the lecture needs. The two
condtons (ust to remnd you o what I mean) are: rst, the very
casual NPR-type ntroducton to a long pece o musc, whch
sort o eases you nto the Vvald or whatever; and second, the
full-speed ahead DJ on format-pop rado, who tres not to say
anythng except the ID, the tme and the advertsement.
I cant do ether o those, because the talk s too long and the
examples are too short. When I rehearsed ths wth the examples
for the rst tme, I could hardly bear the examples, whch are
actually very short and whch I love as musc. I was shocked.
Then I came to my senses.
So rst I wll talk, for about two hours, and then I wll play
about mnutes o nne examples, wth reference to what they
were supposed to llustrate n the lecture and wth dscographcal
nformaton, n case you should want to pursue them n full.
Mostly, the lecture s academc, n the realnot bad, I hope
sense o the term. That s, these deas have been sad many tmes
already by people more qualed than I. But, obvously, they are
only academc you have already heard them. For some people
some o the deas wll be new. So I wll say them anyway, ust n
case.
Most o the lecture, too, s not about the future, as such. It s
not about computers wll get faster, and we wll DNA-away all
dsease, and we wll eat food made out o chemcals and so nobody wll starve, and you can make any sound magnable wth
ths set o knobs and so forth. We all know that stu. Everythng
they told me n the rotogravure when I was a kd has come true.
And I am stll lookng at old moves and the same le footage but
wth derent words on TV. And I dont feel lke I have aged a

bt. Strange, huh?

So I am not gong to tell you that loudspeakers wll be mplanted n your bran and that you wll be able to lsten to any pece o
musc that was ever made anywhere, at any tme you want
though that s part o the problem. I would guess that those o
you who are too young to have known the Beatles wll have
grand-chldren lstenng to the Beatles, and you wll be as cranky
as I am about lstenng to Shes got a tcket to rde
Most o the lecture wll be about the present, and how we got
to t from the past. I thnk that we could understand the
present, the future would be obvous.

The future o musc s too bg for me to deal wth. Only a few
decades ago I thought I knew, or knew of, most o the composers
n Europe and Amerca. That s, I knew somethng o ther
musc, I knew what deas were beng attempted.
Today, o course, that s out o the queston. The world o
musc has come to nclude more and more o the composers n
the larger world. They lve n places I have never been and wll
never be. I have no dea what s gong on. I dont have a worldvew, and t would be mpossble for me to have a world-vew
unless I devoted every wakng mnute to lstenng to every
recordng I could get my hands on (or, on a more practcal level,
every recordng that I have now and that I have not lstened to).
And probably even then I wouldnt have a world vew. The world
s too bg for me.
Havng sad all o ths, to protect me from crtcsm, I wll
make a few remarks about musc as I know t, whch wll lead us
to thoughts about the future o musc.
Musc s a commodty, lke hamburgers, automobles, ol, gran,
currency and under-pad labor. []
Musc s a commodty, lke hamburgers, automobles, ol, gran,
currency and under-pad labor.
It can be bought and sold. Every muscan, now, wants hs or
her musc to be a valuable commodty, so that the muscan can
make some amount o money to, as we say, lve on. We have no
choce.
I cant see that anythng wll change n the next few years.

Then I wll not be around. And so, as far as I am concerned,

there s not much o a future, we are talkng about change or no
change. I thnk I have worked ths out, nally, for myself. I Im
not there, there s nothng. I realze that ths poston or atttude
o mne represents one sde o an enormous phlosophcal problem, whch I am unqualed to speak about, but I have come
down on the sde o I Im not there, there s nothng, because
t speaks to my belefs about my actvtes n musc for the past
fty years. I became a muscan as an alternatve to scentst, cvl
servant, busnessman, crmnalmy qualcatons for all o
whch I can documentbecause I wanted to make musc, because
musc meant, when I was a chld, an rratonal sensual pleasure
that I could not resst and, later, when I got nto musc as an
adult, an rratonal pleasure n makng musc wth other muscans. No one who s not a muscan can understand ths pleasure.
I can say wth honesty that, when I started, I dd not ntend to
be a composer. When I rst realzed I wanted to be a muscan, I
dd not know what a composer was. Im not sure now that the
term was n my vocabulary. Maybe ts no derent for lots o
you. Musc s a present-tense actvty that has an rresstble
attracton, lke, say, sex. Certan people are drawn to t.
There must have been a tme when musc was not a
commodty. Or there mght be a place even now where musc s
not a commodty. I cant magne what that dea about musc
could be. Maybe a knd o dharmc you wll pardon the
expressonassgnment. My father was a muscan and so I am a
muscan. I am provded for. I dont know how the world began
or how t wll end, but I am a muscan and I am provded for.
But thats gone. Now, anyone can be a muscan and a
composer, and that s why we are havng ths dscusson.
It s n the nature o a commodty to destroy the resources that
produced the commodty n the rst place. []
It s n the nature o a commodty to destroy the resources that
produced the commodty n the rst place.
Who would have magned that the humble hamburger, whch
was brought nto commercal exstence only a mere fty years
ago, would destroy the resources o the Great Plans o the
Unted States, whch some nutrtonsts only thrty years ago sad
could grow enough food o the rght sort to feed the whole

planet. (Frances Moore Lapp, n her book, Det for a Small

Planet, mantaned that the bualo, whch had adapted to the
ndgenous grasses o the Great Plans, could provde more meat
over an ndente perod o tme than could cattle even n the
present. But the bualo-burger s apparently out o the
queston.) The hamburger needed cattle. The cattle needed corn
(n the nal force-feedng stage), because the ndgenous grasses
o the Great Plans dd not produce cattle wth enough meat fat
to make a good hamburger. (And t dd not produce enough
cattle.) The corn needed water. And so the wells got deeper and
deeper. And now, accordng to Ian Frazer, author o a presumably well-researched book, The Great Plans (Ferrar, Strauss,
Groux, ), the enormous aqufer that les beneath the Great
Plans from northern Texas up nto Canada and from the Msssspp to the Rockes s only one-fth full and wll take a long tme
to ll up agan, even we stop eatng hamburgers tomorrow. So
the hamburger has moved on, n ts powerful drve to exst as a
commodty, to the ran forests o the Amazon, whch are beng
cut down to make a place for cattle and corn n the presence o
new water.
There s some queston about whether cuttng down the ran
forests, apart from ethcal consderatons, s gong to help us n
our mmedate goal o contnung to exst and to enoy musc.
And so, as o now, the hamburger as a commodty, s almost as
dangerous as the possblty o a nuclear accdent. Not on the
same tme scale, o course. But there s no nuclear accdent n
the next fty years, hamburgers wll probably do t for us.
Who would have magned that the nternal combuston engne
and ts toy, the automoble, a way to go from one place to another faster than one could walk, would dstort the economes o hal
the world and apparently destroy the protectve layer o the
planet.
Who would have magned that Coca Cola, a smple mxture o
water, sugar, a couple o frut avors and cocane would destroy
the trbal natons o Central Amerca, where prevously people
lved on yams, medtaton and a few leaves o somethng that
made them feel good n an atmosphere almost wthout oxygen?
Footnote: For a brllant artcle on the queston o why we kll each other
I refer you to Always Tme to Kll by Jason Epsten n The New York
Revew o Books, Vol XLVI, Number , Nov , . Mr. Epstens artcle


s about the why o mass warfare, but ts observatons could, I thnk, be
appled as well to the why o large numbers o humans actng wth total
dsregard for consequences n matters such as ecology. There s obvously
somethng wrong wth us. We are practcally unque among speces.

I wll skp a dscusson o petroleum, gran, currency, underpad labor and other commodtes, whch would only use up
valuable tme.
Musc has become a commodty. Every composer and muscan
I know wants hs musc or her musc to be a saleable commodty
n the whole world. Maybe there are some exceptons, but soon
they wll be converted.
It s n the nature o a commodty, too, to be chosen for ts
success by persons who are mpartal to the qualty o the
commodty as understood by the consumer. []
It s n the nature o a commodty, too, to be chosen for ts
success by persons who are mpartal to the qualty o the
commodty as understood by the consumer.
No one, for a moment, beleves that the well-pad hamburger
executve eatng a hamburger on TV would eat a hamburger, now
that he s well-pad, except on TV. But somebody, not a
muscan, wll determne the commodty value o a certan knd
o musc. And we wll be stuck wth that decson untl another
comes along.
It s n the nature o a commodty, too, to try to elmnate all
competton. []
It s n the nature o a commodty, too, to try to elmnate all
competton.
It s not a concdence that the commodty as the domnant
element n our lves has rsen exactly n parallel wth the rse o
fundamentalsm, n all relgons, n our bele about the nature o
God you wll pardon the expresson. Fundamentalsm wants
to exclude all other deas. The commodty wants to exclude all
thngs lke t.
The ultmate goal o the commodty n the eyes o the commodty producer s to have only one o every knd o thng.
[]
The ultmate goal o the commodty n the eyes o the commodty producer s to have only one o every knd o thng.
I we are to beleve the holy books, whch s questonable, and
we are to beleve scence, whch s, at tmes, equally questonable,

ths would mean the end o the world. Accordng to the holy
books and to scence there has to be at least two o anythng n
order for anythng to be around for very long.
It s beleved by some that ths s not true. There are longstandng belefs that a woman can produce another human beng
wthout the cooperaton o a man and that ths happens today
more often than we thnk. I made a note o research on ths
possblty n the Character Reference anecdote for the
Wllard secton o the opera, . The
note says smply that two, Brtsh, Doctors o Medcne have
done reputable research on the subect o vrgn brth and have
come to beleve that t s more common than we thnk.
(Incdentally, scence, t seems, often comes around to conrmng long-standng belefs. So, n spte o what you are thnkng at
ths moment, I would urge you not to wrte o ths possblty. I
mean, the possblty o vrgn brth.)
The problemfor the commodty producer: o there beng only
one musc; the stuaton where everybody n the world, lstenng
to the rado or watchng televson or whatever, s lstenng to the
same recordng o the same pece o musc at the same tme; the
ultmate goal o the commodty producers not that ths s
necessarly badwho s to udge what that would mean?but
(the problem s) that we are not capable as human bengs at ths
tme o beng o one mnd. There are too many dstractons
from our memores, our magnatons and our mmedate physcal
desres and needsfor us to be o one mnd. We are dvded
among ourselves and wthn ourselves, and that dvson produces
dstractons that mpede the domnance o the commodty. In
fact, the commodty mpedes tself.
The structural paradox for the commodty producer n musc, at
the moment, s that the performance o the musc n every medumall day, everyday, everywheres supposed to sell more
recordngs, but o course recordngs sold wll probably be lstened
to and that lstenng tme, at the moment, wll nterfere wth the
on-gong busness o propagatng commodtes. We are havng
ths problem today. We all know people who have record collectons they have never lstened to or have lstened to ust once.
Thats ok. Buy t, but dont lsten to t. Especally, dont get
attached to t.

O course, the soluton s smple. It s beng dscussed even as I

speak. Sell lstenng-for-the-rst-tme-onlyall day, everyday,
everywhere. Dont gve them anythng they can keep around and
play repeatedly. You thnk ths s crazy? I ust read that Rupert
Murdock suggested that snce Amercans are wllng to spend
fty dollars (wth accessores) to go to a baseball game, they
should be wllng to spend three or four dollars to see t at home
on TV. The people from Det Coke and Its a Rock must have
taken hm n the back for a lttle chat. The Det Coke and the
Chevy are supposed to go home, Rupert, and the people have to
keep beng remnded to buy them and take them home, and
they have to pay to watch the game, they wll resent beng remnded. They are perfectly happy, they thnk the game belongs to Det Coke and Chevy and they get to watch for free.
They wont be perfectly happy they buy the game and the
game belongs to them and Det Coke and Chevy keep nterruptng t. Payng for cable s bad enough.
Ths s not to say that the commodty wll not become more
powerful and ecent. I could predct, at the expense o seemng
crazy, that n the near futureprobably not n my lfetme, but
maybethere wll be one ht record everyday, for one day only,
and that t wll be played n every medum for all o that sngle
day. Propretary technology mght prevent us from copyng
that record n any way. But who would want to copy t anyway?
Tomorrow s another day.
O course, the ht record wll not change n any percevable
way from day to day. It s n the nature o a commodty to resemble tsel as much as possble from use to use. []
It s n the nature o a commodty to resemble tsel as much as
possble from use to use.
For nstance, a tank o gas may take you to derent places
whle t s beng used, but the tank o gas should resemble the
pror tank o gas as much as possble. And the hamburger may
have derent eects on your body chemstry from day to day,
but the hamburger should resemble the pror hamburger as much
as possble.
In the meantmethat s, concdentallyevery person n the
world (who s not restng for the moment n the external world
o the compound o commodtes) wll be tryng to make a pece

o musc that s as derent from the commodty-musc as hs or

her magnaton wll allow. Just for a lttle varety. No other
reason s needed. The spce o lfe, etcetera.
It s n the nature o a commodty to create resstance to tself.
[]
It s n the nature o a commodty to create resstance to tself.
(As opposed to the stuaton o creatng a tradton, as n some
knds o musc we know o and admre, but dont understand the
practce of, n spte o what we say about t among ourselves.)
And so there wll be a musc o resstance. Every person nvolved
n musc wll be tryng to create a derent musc, created
through ndvdual exertons. (That s, wthout help.)
There wll be lttle common language among these ndvdual
exertons. There wll be, perhaps, a common recognton that we
all do t Im not sure o ths. There may be rumors o ths or
that extraordnary accomplshment. There may be actual examples o ndvdual exertons beng heard by persons other than the
composer. But there s no reason to beleve that these rumors or
these exemplary exertons wll be scotched by the commodtes
polce, because there wll be no need for them to be scotched
Everythng wll be movng too fast.
It s pontless to try to magne what the day-to-day ht records
wll sound lke. The super-hghways take us to where the superhghways want us to go. They wll sound lke what the commodtes producers want them to sound lke. They wll sound, as much
as possble lke the ht record o the day before.
But what wll the ndvdual, secretly magned, non-commodty compostons sound lke? I have sad that there wll be lttle
common language. But that s wrong. There wll be the common
language o the nstruments, the syntheszers and the computer
software and whatever s avalable. But there has to be somethng
that s more profound than that technologcal commonness,
whch would amount to nothng more than mere tnkerng.
So n ths dscusson we are bascally concerned wth what s
the future o musc o the knd that weprobably almost everyone n ths hallare devoted to and compose. We are not concerned wth the future o Afrcan musc or Chnese musc or the
musc o the people who lve , feet above sea level n the
Andes, or even, curously, Icelandc musc. Unless we take care o

them, to use a phrase, they wll take care o themselves. We are a

small group and we are concerned wth ourselves. What s the
future o the sort o musc that I compose or that Roger Reynolds
composes or that the rest o you compose?
The strongest force n the musc o today n Amerca s nostalga. It s the bass o musc as we know t.
Amerca s approxmately one-hundred years old. Approxmately one hundred years ago the European mmgrants and ther
Amercan Indan employees were kllng bualo, beaver, sea otter
and every other thng that moved, as fast as they could. Ths
enterprse was a great success. There are no more bualo, beaver
or sea otteror almost anythng else, for that matter.

Footnote: When Europeans rst arrved on the North Amercan contnent, one o the most numerous o the new anmal speces n evdence was
the Green Parrot, eght to ten nches long, three to four pounds, a non-stop
talker. They were everywhere from the Atlantc to the Msssspp. They
were consdered to be worse than a nusance. They were consdered to be a
blght, lke the Bblcal locusts. You thnk pgeons are bad. Imagne a world
o Green Parrots. Imagne the nose. Now there are a few Green Parrots n
parrot stores.

The European mmgrants were also kllng the remanng

Amercan Indans and the Amercan Indans were stll kllng
each other. All o us, European mmgrants, Afrcan-Amercans,
Asan-Amercan and Amercan Indans pretty much took t back
to bascs. A contnent wthout forests, wthout anmals and
wthout anythng resemblng communcaton between the varously located dreams o rches and the varous pockets o resstance and resentment that gathered n clumps around the rver
forks, the swamps, the desert hdeaways and downtown and
uptown n the ctes to the ocean.
But we had brought n musc from the old country, whch
perssts today. For nstance, Beethoven n the orchestras, polkas
n the taverns and a pano n every lvng room.
I am too old and tred to attack the way thngs are. The Metropoltan Opera can keep on playng Italan opera untl, when
they are ht by a car, they bleed spaghett sauce. Orchestras n
strange places where the palaces are the trangular Hyatt Hotel
wth external elevators can keep on playng Beethoven untl they
go broke. Thats okay wth me.
All o ths s nostalga on a ggantc, psychopathc scale.


Footnote: For a strange and dsquetng artcle on nostalga n Amerca I
refer you to Death o the Cowboy by Larry McMurtry n The New York
Revew o Books, Vol XLVI, Number , Nov , . Mr. McMurtry
ponts out that the cowboy, as we know hm from the moves, novels,
rodeos on televson, Marlboro advertsements and on and on, never really
exsted. Where dd the cowboy come from? The cowboy s a mythcal
gure, rooted n nostalga. Maybe n the case o the cowboy the nostalga
was for the dreams o freedom that the mmgrants brought wth them. A
nostalga for a dream o a better lfe.

A good number o the muscans at the Metropoltan Opera

mght be Jews, a few o whom may have gone to Italy on ther
Fulbrght. But why would they play Italan opera? God, why
would they play Wagner? The commonplace answer s that musc
has no poltcal meanng. That s, the musc s not meant to evoke
the tme, place or poltcal clmate o when t was composed. But
ths s obvously crazy, when even the relatvely unnformed
lstener lke mysel can dentfy by the rhythms n the Italan
operas that there must have beenand I have read thsderent knds o Italan popular bands, from whch the musc o the
popular Italan operas was derved: Italan standng bands,
Italan runnng bands, Italan horse bands.
To say nothng o the words. It s mportant that all o us, I
beleve, are thrlled to lsten to a foregn language when we have
no oblgaton to respond. Foregn language overheard s heard as
musc, n a way that we can never hear the language we speak.
So, t s not muscally crucal that we understand the words n
operas n foregn languages. Words are mportant, you understand them (and especally they are good), but they are not
crucal to a muscal experence. Mostly, though, we understand
whats gong on, wthout understandng every word.
I go to the opera as a Jew or as a descendant o Appalachan
hll-blles (who resent the term) or as a Mexcan-Amercan from
New Mexco or as any one o the numberless combnatons that
make up Amerca, and I am transported to some Italy, say, o the
past.
There s nothng remotely Italan about the Metropoltan
Opera. But there t s. Planted n the mddle o New York Cty,
once caterng to the left-over nostalga o a huge number o
Italan mmgrants who then controlled the cty, and caterng
now to the unfocused nostalga o ts current audence. It contn

ues n ts reenactment o Italy becomng a naton, armng tself,

drawng borders, tryng pathetcally to conquer Ethopa, collapsng nto economc chaos and black and whte moves. The Metropoltan Opera, were t an ndvdual, would be hosptalzed.
Such s the power o nostalga.
At the opera I am transported to a place and tme where there
s no dsorder. There s dsorder on stage, and t s called melodrama. We dont beleve t. Ths s mportant: that we dont
beleve t. We do beleve, when we are young (or even momentarly sometmes when we are older), what happens n the
moves. It s mportant to remember: we do not beleve what
happens n opera. Therefore, opera can have no plot. It s foolsh
to argue that operaany operacan have a plot; that s, that the
characters and ther apparent actons and the apparent consequences are related n any way. Opera can be storytellng
only. That the story-tellng happens on stage and that muscans
are makng musc n the pt (to renforce the story told) s entrely concdental. The story mght as well be told at the ktchen
table wth a crazy aunt and uncle as the soprano and tenor. Opera
has become performance art, because t has lost ts meanng.
Most people n Amerca dont known the matter o ther
genealogymuch beyond where ther grand-parents came from,
they know that. So we nvent where we came from n our
musc. Only musc, among the sensual pleasuresfor some
strange reason that I have not heard dscussed n scence or
phlosophyhas the ablty to stop the present, to stop tme and
to move us mentally to another tme and place. Real or unreal, t
doesnt matter.
(Maybe the reason s smply that musc uses tme and so t
dsplaces the tme o the present for a few mnutes o rele from
the tme o the present. I dont know.)
(Maybe, too, vsual artsts would protest that a pantng can do
that for them. It doesnt do t for me. And vsual artsts spend far
more tme lstenng to musc than they spend n museums. The
queston o the why o musc, when taunted by Joyces muchquoted observaton about the neluctable modalty o the
vsble, s answered n the smple fact that musc does t. The
modalty o the vsble s suspended, up-staged as t were, by the
powerful nostalga o the passage o sound. We can st n a

concert hall, more or less untroubled by the bzarre regmentaton

o the archtecture and the theater o the performancethe
orchestra dressed as for a funeraland be releved o the
present for a few mnutes.)
Except n rare nstances, we have not magned musc movng
us nto the future. Ths s understandable, because we cannot
magne what the orderng o everyday lfe n the future wll be
lke. And n fact we dont much care. Our experence wth everyday lfe suggests that thngs are not lkely to mprove.
But gong backward n tme has the advantage that the dsorder
o everyday lfe s removed. And so gong backward s the ballgame. Whle the stores o the past, as n hstory and anecdote,
are smpler than the past was, we stll have to keep rehearsng
them (the stores) to make them smpler and smpler. But wth
musc ths eort o smplfyng s not requred. Musc smples
the past for us. That we were not there, n place, when the musc
was nvented doesnt matter. The place and the beautful, unreal
order surroundng the place comes wth the musc.
So, we can go back to Europe or Afrca or Asa or wherever
thngs were easy when the musc was conceved, and for a few
mnutes be releved o the present.
Most o us go back to Europe, because that s where most o us
came from. So our musc s mostly European n ts nostalga.
The predomnance o European musc s a gven, so even people
who presumably came from someplace else are caught up n
gong back to Europe. Why not? Why ght t? We are not gong
back to a poltcal possblty. We are not gong back to reshape
the present. That s scence-cton. We are gong back to rest
n the past, to be releved o the present for a few mnutes.
Sorry. I was dstracted by the myth o the cowboy, the nostalga for Wagner and for the trumphs o Italan natonalsm and
by a denton o performance art as melodrama. I used the
more common denton o nostalga. I was dstracted from what
I proposed was the future o musc: a contnuous, barely changng commodty always n the ar and another knd o musc caused
by ths commodty and made by ndvduals n refuge from ths
commodty.
The mportant queston n ths dscusson s what the musc o
ndvduals solated for a moment-of-varety from the

commodty-musc wll sound lke. Among the solated ndvduals

n retreat from the commodty-musc that wll be played n every
medum for one day and for one day only there wll be, n ther
musc, strangeness. What are the orgns o ths strangeness?
The orgns today are, agan, nostalga, but a derent knd o
nostalga. Ths s a nostalga for a past when musc had a powerful poltcal meanng and when muscal change meant a poltcal
change o some sort, hopefully for the better. I have changed the
meanng or use o the term nostalga
Except that the term, regret, has an actve sense, whch I
thnk s not the case now, I could use regret We have regret for
the tme when musc had a powerful poltcal meanng and when
muscal change meant a poltcal change o some sort, hopefully
for the better. I would have to say, regret the loss of. So, I wll
stay wth nostalga.
Let us, for the sake o argument, set the begnnng o European
modern musc wth Beethoven. That would make t two-hundred
years old. By modern I mean that Beethoven, sensng the power
o musc n hs tme, thought that he could change thngs through
hs musc. He thought that by nuencng the atttudes o the
rulng classes, who controlled the machnery o everyday lfe, he
could allevate the suerng o everyday lfe n some degree n
everybody. Whether he thought that lstenng to hs musc could
for a moment allevate the actual suerng o everyday lfe n
some degree n some lsteners I dont know. Probably. But I
dont know.
I thnk he succeeded. Or maybe t s ust concdence. Maybe t
would have changed anyway. (Ths s the artst-as-dot-savant
pont o vew.) Who cares? Thngs started changng and some
suerng was allevated. Not all, but some.
Beethovens dea about the poltcal power o hs musc to
change thngs has contnued to today n Amerca and n Europe.
It s, apparently, orgnally European and now Amercan, too. I
would thnk that t s spreadng to other contnents, but that s
probably only a guess or a wsh. As lttle as I know, I have not
heard o the dea beng an mportant part o any other musc. (I
was once o the bele that bg deasfor nstance, the poltcal
power o muschappened to everybody on the planet at more
or less the same tme, the result, maybe, o a sun spot, or some

vrus, but I have left that dea behnd, because the more I learn,
the less t seems to work.)
I wll not pck on other cultures, because I am too gnorant to
wthstand the attacks. But I know that the dea o musc to eect
a socal change s at least European, datng (arbtrarly) from the
tme o Beethoven, and that we (n Amerca) have nherted that
dea.
It must have grown wth the growng power o musc for twohundred years, because by the tme I got n touch, around, say,
, t was very strong. It was stll strong after the warwhch
was n some ways a muscal war: that s, () the bad guys apparently lked some knds o musc and ddnt lke other knds o
musc and they enforced ther belefs; () I thnk t s far to
guess that our leaders couldnt have cared less; and () note that
after the war, when we re-bult European culture, at our taxpayers expense, we re-bult what was there before the war. After
the war the dea that musc was embedded n the poltcs o
change contnued unquestoned, especally n Europe, where
every composer was a poltcan. And t was true n Amerca,
where every composer was dsenfranchsed, but stll beleved. I
beleved. Every one o my frends beleved.
Thngs have changed somewhat snce. Now nobody beleves.
But that doesnt mean that the dea has gone away. Maybe we are
ust stunned, as after a bg meal the carbo-shock leaves you
speechless. The next decade or so wll tell.
Back to the queston o Roger Reynolds and me. We are gettng old. After forty you cant play thrd base n the maor
leagues. Merle Haggard says that after sxty you lose your voce.
(I thnk hes rght.) We have lost our power. And even you are
under forty, so have you.
The most serous crtcsm one can make o my musc (or the
musc o Roger Reynolds), whch crtcsm I hear n varous
forms more and more s: what you are dong s not gong to
change anythng; ths pece s self-ndulgent, the term meanng
t doesnt mean anythng poltcally. The crtc, n my magnaton a younger composer, maybe doesnt know where the root o
ths complant les, but t s on hs or her lps, because the dea
that musc can change thngs s stll n force. But unacknowledged. Muted.

Actually, what I have ust sad s not true. I am rarely any

longer crtczed by younger composers. Now ust newspaper
crtcs complan. Tmes have changed. Twce, about thrty
years ago, I had the experence o havng a young man come up
to me after a concert (these were derent young men) to tell me
that he hated my musc. In one case the young man had to make
a specal trp to a party gven n my honor. I was attered, o
course, and asked hm why he had wasted hs tme to make the
trpwhen he could be home composng musc. He sad t was
mportant to hm that I know. Those were the days. Now I am
ust gnored n the trac or treated very poltely as an old guy
that dd t. I wll speak more about the current absence o mutual
crtcsm among composers later. For the moment I must stay
wth the subect o nostalga.
The problem for the three o us, Reynolds, you and meand
for all o our contemporaress that we are n nostalga for the
tme, only four decades ago, when musc had a poltcal meanng.
I can remember the tme (wow, nostalga) when almost every
pece was more or less earth-shakng. Now, I must admtths s
lke some knd o medcal confessonthat few peces seem
earth-shakng to me. They sound lke strange sounds never to be
heard agan. They sound solated. Not as manc and monomanacal as early Stockhausen and Boulez. (These are poltcal, not
muscal, evaluatons.) Not as poltcally confrontatonal as Cage.
Not as eerly unlkely as Feldman or Nono. Just peces o strange,
solated deas. That I may never hear agan. And I dont mean
ust among the young composers. I mean everybody.
I would lke to nsert here a somewhat ndefensble theory o
mne n order to ntroduce a long and complcated complant
about a pecular characterstc o Amercan musc. It goes lke
ths. The Europeans who rst arrved on the Amercan contnent
were not, we thnk, bg-tme ntellectuals or artsts or muscans.
They were escapng from oppresson, real and magned. They
were what we could call, euphemstcally, the workng class.
Ther ob, mmedately, was to cut down trees, buld huts, plant
crops and n general make what they found as much as possble
lke what they had left. They ddnt brng court musc or Gregoran Chant or the begnnngs o Bel Canto or anythng o the
sort. (Probably thats the stu they wanted to leave behnd.)

They dd brng a knd o unrealzed devotonal musc, whch

became realzed here. But, most mportant, they brought dance
musc; that s, musc organzed around a smple beat, whch was
expressed n the body. Because everybody has to dance.
Then they brought entrepreneurs, who n turn brought ndentured servants (a wonderful term) and slaves, to cut down the
trees, clear the swamps, ght the Indans, plant cotton and tobacco and, hopefully, make money. The devotonal musc became
more and more solated n the churches. But the dance musc
the Afrcan drum beats, the Celtc bar dances, the polka and
every other knd o dance rhythmwas thrvng.
Then every successve wave, the Germans, the Irsh, the Italans, the Slavs, the Greeks, the Russan Jews brought more. We
are nundatedno, thats not the wordwe are branwashed wth
the noton o musc as an expresson o rhythm to dance to,
because thats what the mostly very poor people, who had only
that, brought wth them. It s so deep n us that we cant nd t to
cure t.
I am sorry to seem bellgerent. I lke dance musc. I lke Amerca. I lke our nnocent people. I am one o them. But I have come
to lke, as well, another knd o musc, whch s n conct, I
dscover, wth the dea o musc as somethng to dance to. I have
come to lke a new knd o devotonal musc, whch has moved
out o the churches nto some unlocated, secular place. I say
devotonal, because I dont know a better word, but t s musc
to be lstened to, not danced to. In the lstenng t takes you to
someplace you have never been. It s mental. It doesnt requre
head-noddng. You ust st there and t ows through you and
changes you.
I have brought up ths pont o the derence between dance
musc (musc to be danced to) and devotonal musc (for want
o a better word), because Amercans keep tryng to arrve at
some sort o compromse Check out the term, accessble It
almost nvarably means the musc has a beat I dont thnk
there s any reason musc as to have a beat, unless you are gong
to dance to t. It can have a beat. That s a pleasant aspect o
some musc. I do t myself. But unfamlar musc that doesnt
have a beat s dscrmnated aganst. The composer knows ths.
And so the composer s always tryng to compromse. Ths s

expressed as gve em what they want Ths s the muscal

verson o I cant thnk, unless I am beng nterrogated Whch
s, n the case o thnkng, why we dont have very many freestandng thoughts. We have answers. I catch mysel dong ths. I
wake up n the mddle o the nght n the mddle o a complcated argument, and I realze that I am answerng to somethng that
hasnt even been asked. Its as though I am nterrogatng myself.
There s no kddng mysel that ths s a medtaton. I am on
tral. Or argung for somethng. And so I have begun to notce
ths n a lot o wrtng. We dont have medtatons, thoughts. We
have answers.
We have, n the same way, few examples o musc that s a
medtaton, free o external consequences. I dont mean medtatonal musc. I mean musc free o external consequences; that
s, the consequences o who and whether anyone wll lke t. I
thnk ths compromse has damaged us. It s pecularly Amercan,
because, as I sad earler, when our ancestors (all o our ancestors)
came to Amerca, they brought only what the common people
had, because they came under adverse crcumstancesalmost all
o them. They brought what they could carry. And so we dont
have the tradton o European thnkng musc, we dont have
the tradton o Afrcan or Asan thnkng musc. We have a
lop-sded culture that we have been tryng to x for a few hundred years.
There were a bre few decades, early n the century, when the
better-o went to Europe (Germany, n partcular) to catch up
wth non-dance musc. Charles Ives ddnt go. But everybody else
went. They brought back mtaton German musc. It was good
n Germany, but here t was mtaton.
Then, n ths serous musc there was a bre rtaton wth
azz, whch mostly came to nothng, because the black people
were better at azz. And black people could not make serous
musc, because they were oppressed.
Then (ths s a chronology) there came Amercan-SerousMusc. It was taught n the conservatores. Every musc school
had a Resdent Strng Quartet (the cheapest form o ensemble), a
Graduate Student Strng Quartet, and numberless Undergraduate Strng Quartets. They played Amercan-Serous-Musc. The
strng quartet was the unversty computer-musc-studo o the

s and s. The strng quartet was the sampler that ate

hamburgers.
It s a characterstc o the strng quartet to emphasze movng
the bow back and forth. The more the better.
: Mr. Ardtt, o strng quartet fame, complaned to
Alvn Lucer, n the presence o a large number o people, that he
ddnt lke to play Alvns Strng Quartet, because there was
very lttle bow movement, whch lack o bow movement made
hs arm tred. To whch Alvn repled, Why dont you play t
wth the other arm?
Amercan-Serous-Musc became a matter o movng the bow
back and forth as much as possble, wth accents here and there.
You mght call t sawng. One o ts foremost practtoners called
the style, motor-rhythmc It s characterzed by a contnuous
sawng o sxteenth-notes or eghth-notes (dependng on the tme
sgnature and the tempo) Up-bow, down-bow, Up-bow, downbow, endlessly. You know what I mean.
Ths s where I came n. I went to musc school. I hated motor
rhythms Gradually I came to hate strng quartets, when they got
nto that sawng, because that relentless sawng was smply a
senseless update o the crcle-dances that those nnocent people
had brought wth them to Amerca. Lawrence Welk get back. I
am senstve to poverty. Everythng about motor rhythms was
ust another verson o the polka, the hora and whatever else the
dances were called wherever they came from. A crcle o mostly
poor people holdng hands and umpng up and down.
A long way from Morton Feldman. And I ddnt even know
Morton Feldman exsted.
Then there was a perod, very bref, no more than two decades,
when the motor rhythms went away. I thnk they were replaced
n the musc schools by somethng else, but Im not sure what
that was. Whatever t was, t wasnt very mportant, because t
couldnt hold up to the changes happenng n Europe and Amerca. The European composers became rratonal (and contagous)
wth Seralsm. A lot o Amercan composers got nto you
wll pardon the expressonsound (The peoratve term was
drone) Both sdes were fascnated. What could be more derent and more beautful: seralsm and the drone?

Thngs were lookng up.

Then somethng poltcal happened. I I were nto conspracy
theory, I would blame t on the government, because t happened
exactly when the NEA happened. But thats mpossble. Maybe.
Motor rhythms came back n a bltz o ournalstc attacks on
the drone, n composers attackng one another, n strng quartets sawng away, n ve-nger exercses at the syntheszer and
elsewhere. Ths tme t was called somethng else. Another label.
Same deal. Derent name. Personally, I thnk the reason for the
reacton was that the drone had ust got too far out. It wasnt
satsfyng our need to nod our heads n memory o the polka and
the g and the hora.
Also, for some wonderful reason durng the two decades o
rele from motor-rhythms, many composers got nto usng
words. The words were largely poltcal, the Vetnam War and
varous other complants, but the mportant pont s that musc
stopped beng resolutely structural and started beng
narratve, as though there was some knd o prmtve opera
beng born n Amerca. (Note that at the same tme the European
composers were advocatng burn down the opera houses)
Ths turnng to narratve was maybe as mportant as the
evoluton o the drone And t was, apparently, n the mnds o
composers, audence and mddle-management, as dangerous as
the drone. So, somethng poltcal happened.
We went backwards.
Thrty years and I was back to where I came n: head noddng
whle the strng quartet played. I stopped composng for a whle.
My dream had come to an end.
Curously, at the same tme many Europeans went nuts. Im
tellng you: sun spots or a vrus. Free mprovsaton Wow. I
dont want to vlfy free mprovsaton, because so many muscans lke t now and practce t. Obvously, I dont. Maybe I am
too old, or maybe there s another reason. I have notced only, n
my own defense, that much o free mprovsaton does not seem
so free. It s a powerful method for ndng new sounds wthout
havng to wat for the neghborhood orchestra to nvte you to
make new sounds, but t does seem to me to lack, n some way, a
freedom o varety. I mean a varety among styles.
A few months ago I heard a glorous concert by the Art Ensem

ble o Chcago. I cant remember that they descrbed ther musc

as free mprovsaton, though mprovsaton was certanly there
n force.
Just last nght, (March, ) I heard a concert o free mprovsaton by nne professonal muscans, some o whom accordng
to the program notes have reputatons based n part on free
mprovsaton. One characterstc o the musc was ndsputable:
t came from azz mprovsaton. In fact, t remnded me durng
many moments o a concert I heard n played by Anthony
Braxton, Chck Corea, Dave Holland and Barry Altschul (the era
when many Europeans went nuts). It also remnded me o many
concerts I heard n played by the Bob James Tro. It remnded me o concerts Ive lost track o played n the s. In
other words, t seems not to have changed much and so t seems
unlkely to lead us out o ths stuaton o poltcal powerlessness.
It seems unlkely to change thngs for the better, nobody s
payng attenton. The concert wasnt a statement. I dont know
why I should have wanted t to be, but I dd.
One aspect o free mprovsaton that seems mportant to
someone from the outsde s that so much o t sounds lke t s
a form o azz.
I dont see why free mprovsaton has to sound lke azz. There
are so many other thngs to be free o muscally. But, I have
heard few concerts o free mprovsaton that remnded me o
anythng except azz, except from Brtsh muscans. Maybe only
the Brtsh, after , survved free mprovsaton free o azz
nuences. Why? Because they had a rgd caste system, a Royal
Famly that spoke German at home, and, thus, a sense o humor.
I have enoyed Brtsh free mprovsaton, because t was lke
Monty Python does modern musc.
That was a mstake. I heard a concert n Berkeley n about
by George Lews, Douglas Ewert, Rae Imamura and Jacques
Bekaert that I thnk was totally mprovsed and that dd not
remnd me o azz. A spectacular concert.
Anyway, I have spoken so much about free mprovsaton,
because t seems so mportant now. Almost as there s a
contest, n teachng musc, between free mprovsaton and some
other form that I havent heard much about but that I take to be a
knd o retrenchment to the ncorporaton o known deas

rhythmcally, melodcally, harmoncally and orchestrally known

deas. I know I am gulty o ths, I mean the retrenchment. It s
one o those deas that spread. A sun spot or a vrus. But I dont
do motor-rhythms.
And I have spoken so much about free mprovsaton, because I
am not much mpressed. There s so lttle varety o style. I wsh
those muscans who mprovse freely would come up wth a
new dea, a new form o behavor to sgnal the world that we
are not satsed wth the way thngs are.
I wsh free mprovsaton would make the audence say, Those
people are crazy Lke audences sad about Ornette Coleman
and John Cage and Juan Hdalgo and a few o my frends. I wsh
free mprovsaton would dvde the audence nto the cares and
the care-nots. I thnk dvsveness s necessary to accomplsh
certan thngs.
The good thng about free mprovsaton s that t s generally
free o motor-rhythmsnot always, but enough. In that respect
t s mportantly free. The retrenchment has certanly gven us
motor-rhythms o a sort. They seem new, but they are not. I
am watng for another change.
I thnk, to put my ntuton n the smplest possble statement,
the future o muscI mean both nstrumental and vocal musc
(about whch I wll say more n a mnute)wll nclude the
mportant change that musc wll get much faster andmuch
slower. We wll move dramatcally away from what we thnk o
now as the lmtatons o what the body can do. I thnk that,
wthn reason, lmtatons are self-mposed by habt. Ths s
llustrated n the radcal changes we have seen n the last thrty
years n sports. The slam-dunk, never magned, s now a
wthout-whch. The trple Lutz, never magned, s now a wthout-whch (and they are gong for four.) The four-mnute mle.
The sxty home runs. The seventy-yard pass. Etcetera.
There wll be more notes played n a shorter perod o tme,
because we wll learn from what computers can teach us that we
can actually play more notes (and understand them) n a shorter
perod o tme.
There wll be more notes sustaned over a longer perod o
tme, because we wll learn from what electrcty can teach us that
we can actually sustan our attenton to notes over a longer

perod o tme.
The mportant stylstc noveltes that I have notced and admred whle so-called serous musc n Amerca renvented
motor rhythms are two (both n popular musc): one s what I
beleve s called, New Age Musc, whch certanly s derent
and whch certanly changed somethng (and whch has remaned,
curously, anonymous; someone should look nto ths). The other
s: Afrcan-Amercan talkng musc (I wont use labels here,
because I cant keep up wth the label changes.) Ths style has
become the commodty, and has remaned short; that s, modeled
on the commodty form o popular musc. I dont see why t has
to be almost always short (except that Afrcan-Amercans usually
need the money that a good commodty provdes). Short can be
powerful. But there must be longer stores to tell from the
Afrcan-Amercan communty. There must be some way that the
composer clamng the Afrcan-Amercan experence, and who
can aord to, can make an epc statement, somethng that lasts
longer than three mnutes and stll has the power o talkng
musc (Correct me, ths musc exsts.)
As you can see, I lke Afrcan-Amercan talkng musc and I
lke ts poltcal-ness, though sometmes not all o ts poltcs. I
lke t because t s not nostalgc. But I thnk t wll come to
nothng except style, and then be supplanted by another
style, unless t gets nto the muscal populaton at large. Its
dangerslots o wordsmust be taken up by the muscal populaton at large (especally older folks), must be assmlated (oh,
God) to do us any good. It must be assmlated, lke we assmlated seralsm, lke we assmlated the drone.
You wll answer that composers assmlated rock and roll and
that that s what I am complanng about. But thats not rght.
Composers dd not assmlate rock and roll untl t had lost ts
power. Composers assmlated motor-rhythms, the academc
musc o the s. And lost t.
One more tme. We are n nostalga for the moment, not long
ago, when a muscal dea could have poltcal consequences. I
dont mean elect a new presdent or change the rules about tellng
the consumer about whats n the toothpaste, but poltcal n the
sense that havng heard the musc the world s not the same for
you anymore.

There are exceptons. There are peces that dentely are not
lkely to be a commodty. I play them whenever I have the
feelng that I have lost the vson. I wll play a few examples
later.
I wll say t agan. We are n nostalga for the tme when musc
meant somethng. That s what I mean by nostalga. We are
hobbled by our nablty to change our habts about what musc
mght sound lke and mght accomplsh, t were changed, t
could shock us nto payng attenton.
The future o musc, for us, has to nclude, logcally, the possblty that there may not be any musc at all, except for the
commodty-musc playng n the background. In spte o what I
have sad about the solated ndvdual dong t ust for varety,
ust for fun, whch s the most lkely scenaro, there s the possblty that the varety could dsappear. Books and learnng dsappeared from Europe for a few hundred years durng the so-called
Dark Ages. (See: How the Irsh Saved Cvlzaton, Thomas
Cahll, Anchor Books/Doubleday, New York, .) Musc n all
o ts varety could smply dsappear for a whle.
I say that ths s an unlkely scenaro, because certan psychologsts (see: The Orgn o Conscousness n the Breakdown o the
Bcameral Mnd, Julan Jaynes, Houghton Mn, Boston, )
have suggested that the bran makes some form o musc for
some functonal purpose, whether we want t to or not, and that,
we dont admt that message as musc, we thnk the gods are
talkng to us (and we get put away.) In other words, the dea that
there wont be any new musc s preposterous, not only from a
common-sense pont o vew (she could sng before she could
talk), but n the opnon o speculatve scence.
But, o course, that depends on what you mean by musc
There could be mad-men and mad-women, safely locked up and
sngng away, but no musc schools. What would the world sound
lke then?
John Cage famously suggested that we could drect our attenton to the outsde world o sounds, where every sound has a
specc meanng (the trac, the brd, etcetera), and be ust as
happy. No matter that t ddnt work for hm (he went back to or
never stopped composng) and that hs dea followed suspcously
on and Brave New World, t s a bg dea. The dea that

every sound (from the outsde world) has a specc meanng (s a

sgn, as they say) and that the pattern o those sounds could
satsfy us as much as any pattern o sounds we could nvent, s a
bg dea. It suggests that we can stop thnkng muscally. All o
those muscal thoughts could be replaced by somethng else, I
dont know what. But, for example, I do know people, wonderfully smart people, whose calculatng thoughts have been replaced
by the pocket calculator. (She sad to me as I dd the budget n
my head: How do you do that? I sad, the multplcaton tables,
o course. She sad, the multplcaton tables? My heart stopped.
Talk about a generaton gap. I explaned the multplcaton tables
and that they were smply memorzed. She sad, Why would I
want to know that?)
The dea that every sound n musc has a partcular meanng s
o nterest for me, because o my obsesson wth opera. Words,
they are real words, have a partcular meanng and are the essence
o opera.
That s, they are real words, wth a real meanng n the real
world, lke hello, love and goodbye, the words can be used
n opera.
I have veered o nto opera, my obsesson. Sorry.
Hermeneutcs, for nstance, apart from how werd t sounds,
cannot be used n opera, because t s not a real word. It s a label.
In fact, t s not even a label from the real world, lke char It s
a label for an ntellectual preoccupaton, lke categorzaton,
racalzaton and, for example, preoccupaton
Footnote: A dstngushed professor o physcs at Prnceton, who had
won a Nobel prze, was asked, upon hs retrement, what he looked forward
to n retrement. I suppose the ntervewer expected an answer lke: Buy a
house n Mexco and pursue my nterest n desert gardenng. The professor
sad, In my retrement I wll never agan have to go to the dctonary and
look up the meanng o hermeneutcs I mysel have looked t up three
tmes. Snce then I have gven up. The Websters denton s: the study
o the methodologcal prncples o nterpretatons and explanatons

Hermeneutcs: the study o the methodologcal prncples o

nterpretatons and explanatons
Hermeneutcs s apparently a knd o ntellectual modelralroadng.
Cullng through all o the words to nd real ones, I cant get rd
o all labels. For nstance, char But I get rd o as many as I

can. Otherwse, how can you tell a story?

Our nostalga for the tme when a muscal composton, n ts
resolute abstractness, n ts deant derentness, could change
the world for the lstener, has left us wth a tool that doesnt work
any longer. Ths s the nostalga that crpples Reynolds and me
and you. And there s nothng we can do about t wthout resortng to drastc measures. (Lttle pun.)
Dont msunderstand, please. I lke Roger Reynoldss musc, as
I always have. Forty years. I lsten to t. I mean, wthn reason.
There are ust twenty-four hours n a day, some o whch has to
be gven over to makng a lvng. And, o course, there s everybody else. Lke Reynolds, I have a small reputaton for lkng
other peoples musc and tryng to help t be heard. I havent
done ths as much recently as n the past, when I could do t, but
n my home town, among my frends, there s a sort o standng
oke along the lnes of: why s an old guy lke you stll gong to
hear concerts? Whats the payo?
In preparaton for ths vst to UCSD, I spent a specal amount
o tme lstenng to Reynoldss recent works. The Pars Peces,
Kokoro, Aradnes Thread and Focus
The musc s curously smlar throughout (throughout the
three CDs) n ts ablty to ntmdate me wth ts skll n conveyng the musc to the page. I cant do that. I dont have access
to the scores, but I am dazzled by the very number o notes and
by the knowledge that these notes have been wrtten for a functonally anonymous group o players and that, as I know to be the
case wth Reynolds, the composer has had to make up a new knd
o graphc language, a new set o symbols, to tell the players what
to do. Ths s the most brllant musc n ts style and
medumthat s, wrttenthat I have heard n a long, long
tme. I could not do anythng o the sort.
My musc has become complcated over the past thrty-ve
years by ts nvolvement wth verbal deas. Probably nobody else
can do anythng o the sort.
Roger and I and a lot o composers I know share two thngs.
We have extraordnary sklls. We have lost our power.
My complant about the nostalga s that we have lost our
power. It was there and now ts gone. We have lost our power to
make musc mportant. Now ts up to the kds. Good luck, kds.

: As I am workng on ths essay (March, ) I have

ust receved a wonderful book from Granary Books, Arcana:
Muscans on Musc, edted by John Zorn. It s made up o
essays, remarks, techncal hnts, whatever, from thrty composers.
In hs Preface, Zorn complans that, though these muscans have
been at t for some tmethey are all enterng nto or thrvng n
mddle agethey have had no recognton (at all!) n the crtcal
press. In other words, nobody cares that they exst, except for
ther fans. That s what I mean by loss o power.
I know almost every one o the thrty composers from at least a
concert or two. Some are extraordnary muscans, as good as or
better on ther nstruments than anybody n the world. Ther
deas n composton could not be more vared. But the composers are not commodtes. Ther musc s, n most cases, not a
commodty. And I thnk they do not want to be commodtes or
to make commodtes. But, as Zorn ponts out, nobody cares.
They are powerless. Musc has stopped meanng anythng poltcally.
I could not have nvented a more perfect example o the pont I
am tryng to make. Ths s a plug for the book (http://www.granarybooks.com). Zorn says t rght out: ...after more than twenty years o musc-makng on the New York scene, except for the
occasonal revew n trade magaznes/perodcals (whch because
o the context n whch they appear and the speed wth whch
they are wrtten dont really count anyway), not one sngle wrter
has ever come forward to champon or even to ntellgently
analyze what t s that we have been dong. Indeed, they hardly
seem able even to descrbe t Welcome to the club, John.
What I remark about the bookand ths s not a crtcsm o
the muscs how solated each o the composers seems. In ther
deas. There s great regard for mprovsaton; the noton occurs
n many o the essays. Maybe I can learn somethng. But even
though I know these muscans play together n varous combnatonsbecause I have seen and heard tI would not know from
the book that any one o them knows any one o the others. I
thnk ths s far. Each o them s a prvate unverse. Encapsulated, as t were. Travelng throughout the world to world-wde fan
clubs, but quarantned from the world. It seems almost worse
than when I was a kd. I thnk t s not ther fault. I thnk they

are trapped n the bubble o poltcally meanngless musc. Have

mercy on ther souls.
Now I wll stop pckng on Reynolds and everybody else
ncludng now the Europeans and the younger composersand
ust pck on myself.
For the rest o ths speech, wth the excepton o one remark, I
wll speak about opera, whch s somethng I know lttle about
and care a lot about. It certanly gures nto the future for me.
The exceptonal one remark s that I thnk counterpont, that
s, the muscal technque o many nstruments playng together,
each tryng to make sense and each tryng to stay away from
collsons wth other nstruments, s on ts way to beng dead as a
door nal. Maybe a couple o generatons. Roger Reynolds, Bran
Ferneyhough, George Lews, Anthony Davsto name a few o
the local celebrtesand I compose n counterpont, because that
s what we were taught; that dogs are too old to learn new trcks,
and the tme s not rpe anyway. But computer programmng
suggests that there s the possblty o a whole musc (n the
sense that the lver s a whole human organ: that s, wthout
parts) n whch the causes and eects are too complcated to be
understood for a long tme (.e. requrng eventually a new musc
theory), n whch there are no lnes (as n counterpont) and n
whch (unlke n counterpont) no element can be removed
wthout brngng down the whole house o cards. I am sorry I
wont be around to hear ths musc.
. What s t? And who cares? And who cares, because
what s t has not a chance n the world o beng altered n my
lfetme.
It s strange to use the word poverty n ths audence, where
almost certanly everybody owns a car ( not a parkng space), a
closet full o nce clothes, a ktchen full o food and a mnd full o
bg plans for the future. But, n fact, there s an unacknowledged
poverty, and t s probably more mportant to us than the car, the
clothes, the food and the bg plans.
We are mpovershed n our ablty to change musc. And for
us, now, change s God (to quote my own work). It s mpossble
for us to magne takng musc to the dvne realm o thrll that
caused us to become muscans n the rst place. We are mpovershed, because the resources are so meager. I I dared, and f, n

some extraordnary change n my nancal crcumstances (tme

and money s no problem, sr), I could make an opera that was
derent from any opera ever known, that opera would not be
played.
I I made the opera for orchestra and vocesgnorng for the
moment what the term orchestra mght meanthere would be
no orchestra to play t. Every opera company would refuse. Or
magne some opera mpresaro n a moment o absolute madness
decdng yes we wll do ths, the orchestra could not play the
work on sx hours o rehearsal. Imagne that I asked for and got
one-hundred hours o rehearsal wth the voces to teach the old
dogs new trcks, what would benet the sngers from those new
trcks n the larger world o tomato sauce.
Ths s not unduly pessmstc, nvokng the peoratve. It s
smply pessmstc, because we are talkng about my lfe. We are
not talkng about the future o musc. I am talkng about me. I
dont want some peces o paper n my le cabnet that n a
century wll change musc. I want now. Grls ust want to have
fun.
Or magne that wth my unlmted resources o tme and
money I went nto the most sophstcated recordng studo n the
worldGermany, Los Angeles, Nashvlleand spent some years
wth my dea (takng tme o, o course, to go to the tropcs
when the magnaton smply went dry), where would that
recordng be heard?
But ths s foolsh. I dont have unlmted anythng.
So what am I do to, burdened wth the habt o counterpont,
expected to produce works wth voces and orchestra, expected to
keep the message alve n the underground, requred to be respectable (check out the term, accessble) and wth no resources
to speak of?
One answer s to go forward n tme. Very far forward. To a
tme when the poverty o our resources wll have fully matured
and there wll be ust muscal commodtes and, somewhere else,
strange people dong strange muscal thngs. To a tme when
there are no orchestras, to a tme when there are ust stores n
song form. Ths evokes the mage o some perhaps mythcal blnd
Greek, maybe strummng a few strngs, but bascally ust sngng
hs heart out.(And hopng to get pad and not executed.) I must

admt that, even though ths answer doesnt appeal to me much,

because t suggests folk-sngng, whch n turn suggests
poverty, I am drawn to t, because t s practcal. That s, I can
contnue to make opera, werd as t wll seem, unwelcome (and
unavalable) as t wll be.
I confess that for forty years I dreamed o opera as voces wth
orchestra, and I have made voces wth orchestra. I have pursued
the dream aganst all odds o success (that s, performance) and
aganst all practcal suggestons that I have lost my mnd and that
I am, n fact, not a composer at all. I wont apologze for ths
mstake. I thnk I have made some good peces.
But somethng has happened recently that I can hardly handle.
I am begnnng to magne pure sngng. Nothng as pure as ust
my forlorn and agng voce, but many sngers brought together n
a new technque. Forget bar-lnes, forget harmonc archtecture,
forget harmony, except maybe a few voces comng together to
renforce a certan lne or two. Most mportant, forget orchestra.
Dont thnk o Welsh choral groups or church choruses. Thnk
o numbers o sngers, or ust a few sngers assertng ther rght,
poltcally, to make musc out o the ncoherent whatever o what
s gong on n ther mnds that they cant stop and that they have
decded not to stop. Thnk o ust sngng. Certanly wth mcrophones. But ust sngng.
What I can hardly handle s that ths magnaton suggests pure
speech. Or, maybe, mpure speech. (It doesnt suggest to me, for
nstance, keenng or any o the other non-verbal vocal sounds
that people have made for centures and make today.) It suggests
crazed story-tellng. It suggests speech, because speech s needed
for story-tellng.
In fact, many years ago I worked wth a group o persons who
were brllant speakers, but who had no muscal tranng: that s,
speccally they had no experence n ptch nectons outsde o
the range o ther natural speech and no experence wth how to
rehearse those specal nectons and to reproduce them and to
further embellsh them. Ths was the now legendary ONCE
Group.
And because I was ust begnnng and ddnt know exactly what
I was dong, there was no possblty that I could teach them
these technques. And so I ust made operas that were extraord

narly spoken But not merely spoken. There were rules, as n

musc. Surprsngly, I dd come up wth compostonal technques
that dd not use bar-lnes, harmonc archtecture or even harmony
as such, but that allowed the speech to be n the rght place at the
rght tme. And I ddnt even know what I was dong. None o
those works was recorded (because there was no mult-track
recordng n those days). For me those works were the bg ones
that got away. I would gve almost anythng, you know what I
mean. I was very happy. I thnk nobody, except me and the
Group, thought that we were makng musc. But I ddnt care,
because I thought I would lve forever and that eventually,
sooner than later, somethng would come along n the way o
support.
I was wrong. Our expectatons got bgger, naturally, and the
operas became more ambtous, but the phone never rang and so
eventually we had to gve up. But I learned somethng that
changed me forever.
I was stll nto counterpont o a more or less conventonal
nature. That s, the ndvdual lnes o speech exsted as potental
muscal lnes. I I had mult-track recordngs o those peces now,
I could take them nto the studo and make o them more or less
what I am nterested n rght now.
If.
I I had wngs, I mght be a brd.
, for a few years. Entrely. Almost ve
years.
Then a new stuaton, full o promse, developed and I got back
nto t.
Gradually, very gradually, too gradually to satsfy my dreams o
( years), I learned what I wanted to do, and I found four
sngers who can do more or less perfectly what I have come to
dream of. These four persons, n alphabetcal order, are: Sam
Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Jacquelne Humbert and Joan La
Barbara. And we are asssted n our exploratons by the great
sound engneer and composer, Tom Hamlton. I would also lke
to gve credt here to muscans who, earler, helped me dscover
how these dreams could be made nto musc: n order o appearance, Blue Gene Tyranny, Paul Shorr, Davd Rosenboom and
Tom Erbe.

I would lke to be techncal about my deas about opera for a

few paragraphs. What I wll say s commonplace for many composers and antthetcal for others, but Ill say t.
The smple fact s that Amercan Englsh does not t
European, tradtonal, operatc models o melody and rhythm.
Amercan Englsh s dstngushed by an nntely subtle varety
o melodc and rhythmc stresses on ts consonants: frcatves,
sblants, plosves, etcetera. The vowels n Amercan Englsh
cannot bear the weght o the knd o melodc stressesduratons
and embellshmentsthat are used n, say, Italan opera. It
makes them sound stupd. I ddnt make t happen, but ts true.
There have been some successful exceptons to ths rule. The
exceptons are n Broadway muscal songs from George M.
Cohan to about Rchard Rodgers (when I stopped lstenng).
Maybe ts stll happenng, but I dont hear t n, for nstance,
Andrew Lloyd Weber and I never heard t n Bernsten. Maybe
Im ust wrong, because Im not payng attenton, but for me t
stopped beng successful tecncally around South Pacc
More mportantly there have been extraordnary exceptons n
Amercan popular musc, whch exceptons have contnued n a
knd o avalanche snce, say, Chuck Berry (n one style) and, say,
Hank Wllams (n another). Or Blle Holday and Patsy Clne.
In popular musclets take country musc as an examplethe
treatment o the vowelsand I dont know where t came from
s so specal that you almost cant do t unless you learned t
before you could learn anythng else. And even then t has to be
rened by studyng wth a master-snger.
I heard an ntervew wth a young country snger on the rado
I ddnt catch her nameabout her career. She sad, Well, you
spend a couple o years n the studo as a harmony snger, learnng the gldes.. I thnk I know what the gldes are, but I
couldnt learn them any more than I could learn North Indan
sngng or Joe Turner. There are some thngs you cannot learn.
Back to the techncaltes. On the other hand, apart from the
gldes, you could almost take out the vowels n many a popular
song and t would stll be a song. I exaggerate horrbly, o course,
but ust to make a pont. About Amercan Englsh. The techncalty s that n de-emphaszng the vowels, you dont put n
the gldes, everythng goes faster. Consonants dont take up

much tme and they cant stand embellshment. So the words ust
whz by, and they dont whz by they sound stupd. They
sound wrong. Consonants are beautful n Amercan Englsh.
Shes got a tcket to rde sounds wonderful n song, but t s
twce as fast as any sx words n any European opera. Except for
the dphthong n the last wordwhch s an awfully fast dphthongthe sentence s almost all consonants. Notce how beautful that last d s.
Consonants are beautful n Amercan Englsh. And they make
the words whz by.
So the composer has to use a lot o words to tell a long story
and to make an opera.
There are probably more words n any one o my operas than n
the complete works o Verd. Its got to be that way.
So, above all I am nterested n speed and how to make somethng beautful out o t. (Ths s so academc and confessonal I
am embarrassed. But I thnk thats what Im gettng pad for.)
The dea o speed, quckness, as a beautful thngas n Bll
Monroe, Art Tatum, Anthony Braxton and a few other muscans
I admre n popular muschas entrely dsappeared from our
noton o opera. Now we are nto turgd tempos ( there s any
tempo at all), the proected vbrato and left-over vowel embellshment, whch, handed down, s now wrtten nto the score.
I would lke to explan my use o the term, speed I am ndebted to Jacke Humbert for gvng me ths way o explanng
the dea.
You can use your car n at least three, derent ways: () to go
to the grocery store; () to go sght-seeng on a Sunday
afternoon; () for the sake o drvng
In gong to the grocery store, speed doesnt matter, except n
specal crcumstances, and except that you want to avod gettng a
tcket. In sght-seeng, excessve speed can become a negatve
factor; you can go too fast to really enoy seeng. Excessve speed
focuses everybodys attenton on the road and on the trac. Slow
s good. In drvng for the sake o drvng, speed s almost the
sole, essental ngredent. That s, for utmost pleasure, the car
should move exactly as fast as the speed the road was desgned
for. (We forget, probably more than we forget anythng n our
culture, that roads are desgned by human bengs, lke ourselves,

who have appled ther skll and educaton and ther taste for
drvng to makng the road as good as possble; that s, safe,
ecent and pleasurable. Not unlke a muscal composton.) We
can take specal pleasure n drvng too fast or n drvng too
slow. But n those pleasures we are not n collaboraton wth the
desgner o the road. For nstance, n the Bay Area o Calforna
there are some o the most beautfully desgned roads I have ever
drven. I one drves those roads exactly at the speed called for,
the car seems sometmes to drve tself. It seems to oat. Ths s
the specal pleasure o drvng There s no substtute.
One mght say that n speech and n sngng, tempo, or speed,
s everythng. That would be an exaggeraton, but not much.
For my taste, as I have sad, Englsh sounds bad t s sung too
slowly, and t s usually sung too slowly n so-called serous
musc. The vowels are dragged out as almost every Englsh
vowel were not a dphthong, and so the pecular speed o the
dphthong s lost. The consonants are treated as an embarrassment. Over-attenton to consonants s thought o as a part o
extended vocal technque ( that term stll exsts n teachng
voce.)

Footnote: I have read that the earlest Italan operas, say, Monteverd,
were crtczed n ther tme as beng more spoken than sung. What could
that mean? When I hear Monteverd now, t always seems lke t s beng
played at half-speed. I I say ths out loud, my frends tell me to shut up.
But I cant help t. My muscal ntuton, whch has not faled me yet,
tells me that I am not hearng the beautful Italan o Monteverd; I am
hearng some werd verson o Italan fashoned by somebody who lves
where the sun comes up only a couple o months a year and everythng
moves very slowly, because o the cold. Too bad, Monteverd. Thats the
breaks. I anybody s stll around n a few hundred years to perform one o
my -mnute operas, they wll probably decde I ddnt know what I was
dong and take t to about four hours. To mprove the ntellgblty. There
s a eld o scholarshp that thnks that the Shakespeare we thnk s ntermnable at three and a hal hours was done n the Globe n an hour and a
half. To be or not to be You know what I mean?

Now there s an nterestng techncal relatonshp between vocal

speed and the orchestra Namely, you sng fast enough and
wth spectacular grace and embellshment and wldness and
abandon, you mght not need an orchestra.
I have been tryng to do ths for the past few years. I havent
accomplshed anythng, because I dont have the nerve. And I

dont have the technque. But I am tryng.

I would, I could, replace the external orchestra synchronzed wth the voces by the conductor or by tme-code. I would
replace t wth an electronc orchestra desgned to be synchronzed
wth the voces. In ths technque, then, the voces could go at
any speed n Amercan Englsh and the orchestra would always
be wth them. Ths s currently called processng, or
eects (as n, cause and eect), whch s ever so slghtly
peoratve. I I suggested that I would lke to process the voces
at the Met, can you magne?
The problem I have at ths very moment s that I cant aord t.
It can be done, but I cant aord t. I cant aord the equpment
and I cant aord the techncal assstance. I have the voces,
nally. But I cant aord the orchestra o voce-processors. I can
only hnt at t.
So I wll contnue wth the sound o the drone. I wll contnue wth counterpont; that s, wth as many tracks as I can aord.
I wll contnue wth my fascnaton wth speed. I wll contnue to
make t possble, through the combnatons o the words, for the
sngers to sng ever faster. I wll contnue to make operas that
wll allow the ournalsts to say, Thats not sngng. Thats
talkng It wll be a well-kept secret. I mean, that t s sngng.
I wll be followed by composers who are smarter and more
experenced than I am. And better equpped. I hope.
I dont know about the future o musc. As I sad at the begnnng, t s too bg a subect for me. But I thnk I know the future
o opera.
I hope I have covered the subect.
As you mght have guessed, I lke popular musc. That means I
lke some musc that s desgned to be a commodty. I wsh there
were tme for more musc n my lfe, so that I wouldnt feel
gulty about lkng Dolly Parton so much. Or George Strat or
Danel Lanos. (I know these names only because frends have
gven me the records. The Afrcan-Amercan talkng musc
performers wll have to go un-named, because I dont have the
records and Im not gong to buy them. I hear them on the
rado.) I would lke to not feel gulty about lkng the musc o
people who probably wouldnt lke methat s, my musc
they knew me.

One commodty every day, all day, everywhere.

I am short o tme.
Dd I say nostalga enough tmes?
Ideas I ddnt have tme or patence for:
() absence o mutual crtcsm among composers
() what could an mportant change o commodty mean
and has ths ever happened n musc?
___________________
The Future o Musc for three hours. That s my mandate.
Most was talk. Now I wll play nne examples. None s more than
three or four mnutes long. Only two o the nne are complete
peces. The rest have to be faded out. (Ths means I have had to
take them out o the dgtal doman and through my console.)
Every example s taken from the begnnng o the CD or from
the begnnng o the selecton. The examples, o course, cant do
ustce to the whole workthe changes, sometmes extremely
dramatcthe eect o lstenng for mnutes.
These are the knds o thngs I lsten to when I have the feelng
that I have lost the vson.

Steve Peters: n memory o the four wnds (excerpt)

CD Ttle: n memory of te four nds
Label: panssmo ppp c/o nonsequtur
P.O. Box , Albuquerque, NM /
I had ntended to start wth ths composton, before speakng. I
lke the slow fade n. Later the pece becomes very loud. No
short sample could do ustce to ths pece.

Tom Hamlton and Peter Zummo:

Loudspeaker than Words (complete)
CD Ttle: Slybersonc romosome

Label: Penumbra Musc

P.O. Box , Grafton, WI /
I lke the seamless blend o trombone and electroncs.

Davd Behrman: Canons () (complete)

CD Ttle: Davd Berman / Wave ran
Label: alga marghen / plana-B NMN.
Fax: Italy----/attn:CarCano/Dept T
A wonderful seral composton, every aspect seralzed. A
palndrome as well as a canon, wth the two muscans, panst
and percussonst, swtchng roles at ts exact mdpont Performed by Davd Tudor and Chrstoph Caskel. It s very derent from Davd Behrmans recent musc.

Sam Ashley: Ear o the Beholder, Eye o the Storm, Benet o

the Doubt
(for Thomas Buckner) (excerpt)
copyrght controlled by Sam Ashley
a bank o processed snes, each o whch ether stays at the
same ptch, goes down a hal step or up a hal step to lead the
voce, Tom Buckners, to derent song-tones.

Walter Marchett: Natura Morta (excerpt)

CD Ttle: Natura Morta
Label: Cramps CRSCD
Arts Records, Va False , Montevale,
Vcenza, Italy
Fax: ()
I have played ths recordng, whch contnues exactly n the
manner o the excerpt for , many tmes. It heals me. I cant
explan t.

Yasunao Tone: Jao Lao Fruts (excerpt)

CD Ttle: Musca Iconologos
Label: Lovely Musc LCD
Musca Iconologus s an extreme example o the noton that
every sound s a sgn The sounds come from a computer program that scans pctures and makes the result nto sounds. I cant
explan t techncally, because I dont understand t techncally.
But I saw a couple o the pctures. Yasunao Tone took photographs or drawngs o everyday thngs (feet, for example) from
magaznes and made collages n whch the everyday thngs take
the place o brush-strokes n Chnese deograms. (In addton to
beng a wonderful composer, Yasunao Tone s a scholar o classcal Chnese lterature.) As he explaned t to me, a techncan
could take the sound samples from the recordng and translate
them back nto vsual representatons o deograms at a second
remove: feet, not brush-strokes, but clearly deograms tellng the
story o Jao Lao Fruts and Solar Eclpse n October, two
poems from what Mr. Tone descrbes as the earlest Chnese
anthology

Dolly Parton: I Am Ready (excerpt)

CD Ttle: e Grass s Blue
Label: Sugar Hll SUG-CD-
I use ths as an example o voces wthout orchestra. Plus t s
beautful. Also as an example o the queston o beng able to
aord t. The reverb, whch breaks my heart, probably costs more
than I made last year.

Robert Ashley and Jacquelne Humbert: Au Par (excerpt)

copyrght by Robert Ashley and Jacquelne Humbert
Ths s a recordng o a rst performance o a new composton
wth a lbretto by Jacquelne Humbert. I have ncluded t, because t s an example o the way we use a combnaton o harmo

ny and text for ptch nectons and an example o processng as

orchestra.

Annea Lockwood: Feldspar Brook, Mt. Marcy (excerpt)

CD Ttle: A Sound Map of te Hudson Rver
Label: Lovely Musc LCD
I ntended to end the talk wth ths excerpt. The sound map
changes contnuously n tme, because the rver does. And t
changes n place over hundreds o mles from the source o the
Hudson Rver at Mt. Marcy to the Atlantc Ocean at Staten
Island.