Monthly Playlists

 Contributed by Newton Armstrong

In the diverse range of approaches that constitute the work of the painters associated under the rubric New York School—a group that included figures such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Franz Kline, among others—there's a palpable sense of a shared concern for the creation of an art freed from the constraints and formalisms of the European tradition. In much the same way, it's not difficult to discern in the diverse musics of the New York School composers—John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, and David Tudor—a radical rethinking and reformulation of the traditional models of musical material and form. As Feldman would put it, the basic elements of musical composition were "decontrolled"; that is, they were systematically disassociated from the linear, discursive, expressive, and rhetorical ends to which they had been put in the European art music of the preceding two centuries.

Between 1950 and 1952, Cage, Feldman, Wolff, and Tudor were in near-constant contact, routinely exchanging work and ideas. Brown arrived in New York in 1952 and quickly joined these exchanges, the discussion often extending to include other composers—notably Stefan Wolpe and Edgard Varèse—as well as the downtown painters and poets. In that brief period, the New York School musicians laid the foundations for entirely new approaches to composing, performing, conceptualizing, and listening to music; approaches that have had significant and lasting implications. It's not easy to determine exactly what it was about the encounter that led to such a conclusive break, except perhaps to note that the composers gave one another both license and incentive to begin again; to rethink the practice of music outside the boundaries of the received wisdom, and unimpeded by the establishment's intrinsic patterns of acculturated expectation. As Feldman would put it: "What was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment—maybe, say, six weeks—nobody understood art. That's why it all happened."

Stefan Wolpe, Battle Piece (1943-44/47)

Wolpe is not regularly considered a "canonical" member of the New York School, but he associated closely with the younger composers, and was a teacher to both Feldman and Tudor. It's also not much of a stretch to suggest that Wolpe's music from the 1940s could be viewed as prototypical of a kind of New York School sensibility, providing cues that would be picked up by the core group, and expanded upon throughout the 1950s. By the time he composed Battle Piece, for example, Wolpe had for the most part abandoned developmental and discursive approaches to form, relying rather upon a kind of asymmetrical and shifting stratification of sonorities, energized by the play of contrasts. This "layered" approach to musical spaces would be taken up most notably by Feldman and Brown.

Feldman's Projection I holds the distinction of being the first piece by a New York School composer to introduce indeterminate elements into the notation, leaving certain aspects of the work's realization to the performer. On the face of it, it may seem a relatively small step to take, but there was something profound at stake; as Feldman would put it some years later, "only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves." The "unfixing" in this specific instance is implemented most clearly in the domain of pitch, which is specified only in terms of high, middle, and low registers, with instructions from the composer stipulating that "any tones within the ranges indicated may be sounded." Although the original notion may have turned out to be somewhat disingenuous (Feldman was known to admonish performers for choosing the "wrong" tones), an important precedent had nonetheless been set. And the precedent opened up possibilities that would be addressed in radically different ways by Cage, Brown, and Wolff.

John Cage, Music of Changes (1951)

Music of Changes is the first of Cage's compositions in which the ordering of musical materials was determined through consulting the 64-hexagram chart of the I Ching. (It was Christian Wolff who introduced Cage to the I Ching, following its publication in English translation by Kurt and Helen Wolff's Pantheon Books.) The procedure at which Cage arrived effectively removed composerly intention from the layering and sequencing of events, thus undermining any residual instincts towards linear thinking, and engendering a music that would conform to the composer's injunction to "let sounds be themselves." It was the cause of some concern for Cage that the painstakingly precise notation of the piece precluded the performer from playing a significant role in its realization; he would write some years later that "these things that constitute it, though only sounds, have come together to control a human being, the performer." But it would also not be long before Cage would extend his utilization of chance techniques to accord a more participatory role to the performer.

Earle Brown, Folio: December 1952 (1952)

It's understandable that Earle Brown would eventually seek to distance himself from December 1952, given that this somewhat atypical work had effectively become an emblem of mid-century experimentalism. But despite the composer's protests, the piece stands as one of the most considered and innovative investigations into the possibilities of graphic notation. The score consists of 30 lines and rectangles, of varying sizes, distributed on a single page. But the distribution is far from arbitrary: the patterns seeming to suggest that traces have been left by a random selection process applied to the edges of objects arranged on a projective grid in 3-dimensional space. Brown was fascinated by the potential that a score might hold for a wide range of realizations ("If I do my job well, I get back various versions, all acceptable to me"). And the latitude that the performers are accorded in terms of how they choose to navigate the score to December 1952 has led to a wide range of realizations over the years. But across all these realizations there remains a certain resilience to the work's character; a kind of "hovering" quality, as though sound objects are suspended in a space distinguished by the constant reconfiguration of its intrinsic geometries.

Christian Wolff, For Five or Ten Players (1962)

In the second half of the 1950s, Christian Wolff began to develop approaches to notation that would lead, in turn, to the development of a markedly idiosyncratic music. (Or, it could be said that Wolff began to develop approaches to music that would lead, in turn, to the development of a markedly idiosyncratic system of notation.) The performers were provided with a precise set of cueing instructions; instructions that required a high degree of focus, concentrated listening, and a considered responsiveness to events initiated by other members of the ensemble. The music emerges within the systems of interaction thus set in motion, with each player accorded equal status in the decision-making process that would lead to the eventual realization (a process that Wolff would term "parliamentary participation"). For Five or Ten Players builds upon these foundations, and also extends the indeterminate aspect to the level of orchestration—the work being Wolff's first piece "for unspecified instruments in variable numbers." There's a certain economy—perhaps even a cool austerity—to the Wolff soundworld; a surface effect that seems somehow at odds with the volatile internal mechanisms through which it is generated. But it's precisely in the careful calibration of interacting forces that a precarious balance is reached between local and global behaviors. As the composer would put it: "Actions are indicated directly and simply. Their results, the sounds and rhythm of the pieces ... could, as far as I know, be brought about in no other way."

A note from DRAM:

This playlist is comprised of only one important work from each composer’s oeuvre. However, all five of the artists above were incredibly prolific in their output. In addition to the works above, DRAM features Mode Records’ ongoing collections of the complete John Cage, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff recordings. There are also a number of recordings dedicated to the work of Earle Brown and Stefan Wolpe from other labels like New World and CRI. Besides these large volumes of different works, each realization of a single work can vary subtly or drastically depending on the conceptual impetus of the composer and the aesthetic sensibilities of each particular performer or ensemble. For example, there are three recordings of Brown’s Folio: December 1952 in DRAM. We have included the solo piano version by David Tudor here for its historical interest in conjunction with the topic of the playlist, but the others versions are no less exciting musically.

Our deepest thanks to Newton for opening these windows into an important reference point in the changing of the American musical landscape.  

Newton Armstrong is a composer and performer working mainly in digital musics. His work has encompassed a wide range of activities, including collaborative projects with improvising musicians, dancers, choreographers, film, video, and installation artists, projects for children, and pieces designed for radio, art galleries, and the internet. He completed a Ph.D. at Princeton University, where his research focused on cognitive and phenomenological issues in digital performance practices. He currently teaches in the Music Department and Graduate Program in Electroacoustic Music at Dartmouth College.