Improvisation, Power, Cultural History-bending

Tony Conrad

This text is the transcript of a lecture given at the University Museum of  Contemporary Art (MUAC) in Mexico City on March 20, 2010, at the invitation of Eric Namour, independant music programmer, as part of the 9th Radar Festival.

Hello. I’m going to speak in English and Eric Namour will tell you in Spanish what I’ve said. If you have any questions or a comment, he and I are up on the stage here, but let’s pretend that we’re just sitting in a circle. I want to hear what your questions are and what your thoughts are. But first I wanted to say a little about my performance last night.

I come from a background in a founding area of what we call minimal music. The work that we did in 1963 and 1964 to develop this minimal music came out of improvisation. The improvisational approach was very important to building the ideas and building the sensibility of the music. But because this was improvised music, it was never comfortably incorporated into the tradition of serious music.

I’ll give you an example. I teach in a university like this one, about the same size, and I teach in the media department. Since I teach in this department I have almost no contact with the music department, because that is not my professional area of importance. My professional certification is not in music, you see; it’s in media. So there’s an interesting boundary between building something through improvisation and building something through the serious culture tradition.

Yesterday I had a conversation about this distance between “serious” music and the new improvisational music. We were discussing: what’s going on with this distance? You can notice, for example, that in our “new music” events yesterday and the last several days1, much of the new music is improvised. Also, some of the music is “serious,” while some of it is not really understood as serious music. For example [Mauricio] Kagel’s music is notated; it’s serious music—but some of the other music that’s also very interesting, that may sound as interesting, is not understood as serious music. I think it’s very important to understand this distance between the “serious” tradition and another tradition, often involving improvisation, for example, that is also “new music.”

I’m living in New York, you’re living in Mexico; but both of us, all of us, are enveloped in the European social tradition of serious culture. The “serious” thing is based in a European cultural background, it’s not native to this continent; so it’s natural to examine its European social and cultural history. Now there’s something very funny about this, and that is that when we find out about “serious” Western music we are inclined to think, “This is ancient . . . ancient!” . . . but it’s not. It’s not a timeless tradition; it’s a tradition with its own history that was founded in a particular way that has to do with a certain social formation. In order to understand this distance, we need to understand how “serious” culture grew in its socio-political context.

I’m not going to describe this whole history, but I think it’s exciting to give a few examples and to look at the situations in which music, history, serious music, and the social and political environment have become locked together. These are situations that I think are interesting because if we can see the way in which these appeared, where there is a divergence between, say, an improvisation tradition and the emergence of a serious culture, then we may be able to say, “I want to go there and do something that would have structured this differently.” You might look at what the defining social and political conditions were and decide, “I don’t like them, and I would like to make this happen differently.” And then you might be able to construct a different approach to culture, to cultural production, and in this way you might be able to make use of history instead of throwing it away. “Serious” culture pretends that we should just throw history away and move onward into the future, but I think it’s very valuable to have an alternative way to look at the usage of history, especially where in history there are breaks in the formation of serious culture.

I would like to suggest that thinking, “We want to make new music and we have to throw away the old music” does not mean we have to throw history away or that we just have to go back to the old ways and do traditional music. Instead we can approach this problem in a new way by looking at how “serious” work is defined in its cultural and historical context, and then making new decisions about how to structure those relationships. And maybe then we come up with something very amazing, that’s useful today, and that makes use of our own historical heritage.

The thing is, the heritage of European serious culture has affected us so much. But that’s not the only background that we have access to. We can use a lot of other things, especially in a global environment; the world is open to us. One of the things that excited me in reading music history more carefully was to discover that some dance music, some of the people’s dance music, was built into serious culture in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe. Some dances that came from the unwritten folk tradition were cleaned up a little and brought to the court. When you read the history of the symphony you find that it’s based on the French Suite, which is a collection of dances, and this includes dances like the passacaglia, sarabande, canary, and chaconne. Some of these came from the “New World.” In other words, the Americas and the Atlantic Islands have had a profound effect, one that we don’t usually think of, on the development of European music. And I have to add that some of these dances were considered scandalous at the time, because the people, when they were doing them, moved in ways that were considered risqué. Yeah. But then, when these dances were written by serious composers and went to court, they were much more refined.

Now I’m going to give an example from Renaissance serious culture. Anyone who knows Renaissance music knows that it was very different from our music. It was polyphony; it had a way of voices moving that was not based on chords and singing over triads, like the pop music on the radio. It wasn’t based on chords and melody; it was based on sung polyphony and it has a very different kind of sound. Of course, the fact is that today chords and melody rule the world! So how and why did this change take place? I want to know: where did chords and melody come from? When did it start? Where did our globally hegemonic music come from? I’ve been trying to find out— and no one has a quick answer.

But apparently it came from improvisation, a tradition of improvisation, maybe in southern Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries; and then it was imported into the serious culture. And this led to some confusion and difficulty, because it was so different from what was going on in the serious culture. So then you had a mixture of polyphony and triads and everything mixed together. Next, a dramatic thing happened in music. Once it was understood, in the 16th century, a hundred years later, that music was going to work by triads, chords, instead of polyphony, then people who were writing serious music began to understand that these chords no longer had the old “modal” relationship to the scale. The chords can be anywhere on the scale. The triad was cut loose, and the result was an avant-garde of atonality (they call it chromaticism). So in court culture, the prince’s culture, the triad led to the exploitation of triadic chromaticism by composers like Cipriano de Rore, Carlo Gesualdo, and Nicola Vicentino. These were bizarre composers who wrote in the 16th century, and it’s interesting then that their free modulations implied the twelve-tone equal tempered system. This is hard to believe, but I brought my book and I’m going to read a little paragraph.

Although the chromatic movement acts as a powerful counterthrustto tonal consolidation, in a larger sense it opens the way to a wider concept of tonality. One element indispensable in a definition of modern tonality is the opening of the whole harmonic space so as to allow each of the twelve tones of the chromatic scale to become the basis of a triad, and each triad to enter into a relationship with each other triad. This is what the chromatic movement accomplished, and in this sense the tonal and the chromatic movements not only opposed but also supplemented each other [. . .] Equal temperament turned out to be the only practical and effective answer to the problems created by chromaticism and modulation. [43–47]

It says what I say but in a little more careful detail. This is from a book called Tonality and Atonality in Sixteenth-Century Music by Edward Lowinsky [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961]. It’s an old book, but it’s interesting. Okay, so one more sentence and then I’m through.

Enough is known to show that chromaticism in the sixteenth century represents a full-fledged movement carried forward by a circle of imaginative and highly gifted musicians, furthered by a sophisticated group of humanists and aristocrats, a movement that marked a total break with theory, esthetics, tuning systems, and harmonic and tonal thinking of the past and, in its most radical form, planted the seeds of atonality. [50]

The question here is, if atonality started in the serious culture of the 16th century as an outgrowth of an unwritten folk style, then what happened, what was the distance between popular or folk music and the serious culture that let this get away? . . . And is this an opportunity to return to that time and find something we could use now? And another question is, could 20th century atonality, also, be seen as a historical divergence like this between serious culture and pop culture? Obviously everybody knows that pop music isn’t atonal. But not so fast! Because in movie soundtracks there are all kinds of weird sounds and the use of atonal material, and all kinds of audio which the university is very slow to encourage and recognize. My university’s music department doesn’t want to think that it trains people to make movie music. So this distance is very interesting!

And when we go to a new music improvised concert today, we hear more and more music that is atonal in nature or even that incorporates noise—so what is keeping this distance? What can we say about this? I think it’s a complicated problem because today there seems to be a breakthrough between serious culture and pop culture; but also there’s the influence of recordings. In the history of the triad, one of the reasons no one can tell me where this music came from is because there are no recordings. And with recording technology, improvised music and notated music begin to be able to merge.

For me, one of the things that appears attractive to do is to push improvisation very far and very hard, because I think improvisation can be seen as playing such an important role in negotiating this distance between pop culture and serious culture. And it seems that there is a way to look at improvisation as a serious undertaking, even though it still maintains a significant tension with serious culture.

Now, I have some other things that I can talk about, but first of all, maybe someone has a comment or question or something to suggest. I would be fascinated to hear you.

Audience Member 1: I am working with a music group. The music that we sing is composed by the director of the chorus, and he has some trouble with people who say they don’t want his music because it’s very pop and he’s disturbing our traditions. We had some discussion among the people who are performing the music, with the result that we can’t continue using that music. It creates a little confusion, because our ways are very traditional and it’s very difficult to make changes in this kind of music.

T.C.: There’s a partial precedent (if not a solution) for this problem in the history of religious music in the US. In traditional Boston during the 19th century there was a culture of church music whose leaders felt that if you were singing to God, you should sing “well,” so you should probably hire professionals to do it. So they printed the music and hired people to come and sing and play it in the churches. However, in the Southern United States a completely different thing happened: revivalist religious reformers traveled in the countryside and they would say, “Sing out! Sing out!” and everybody sang out, and everybody sang loud and in their own way. When you hear recordings of this, even today, it sounds crazy! In the north where I grew up, meanwhile, because the singing  of hymns was mainly done by professionals, when I learned to sing with everyone else during church I learned to sing like this [He sings a line of song in a very faint, mumbling, almost inaudible way]. And I always wondered where this “not-singing” tradition had come from.

Now I want to say a little a bit about the direct influence of music theory on politics, because I’ve been studying and reading about this for twenty years. One of the things that I’m involved with in my music is the harmonic structure of chords, in part using numbers from the harmonic series. This has led me to be interested in what ancient Greek thought was about this subject, because all of it was figured out by the Pythagoreans in about 500 bc. From their discoveries of the relationship between numbers and harmony they concluded, and this was their big philosophical idea, that Number rules the world. The Pythagoreans invented the modern usages of the words “cosmos,” “philosophy,” “mathematics,” and “harmony.” Formerly in Greek, “harmony” just meant “putting together, “ like, “Oh, I harmonized this jigsaw puzzle.” At that time the idea that there is some absolute Truth behind the world was very appealing to the anti-democratic movement. Democracy was just beginning, and there were some people who didn’t like democracy, like Plato. Plato studied Pythagorean theory and encouraged the notion of an ideal and harmonious Truth. He invented idealism, which is a way of saying that there exists a perfect order for the world, a natural order and a social order, and you should each stay in your place.

So how and why did such intellectual development suddenly emerge in ancient Greece? In part, it happened because of certain intractable problems that arose, as I will describe shortly. The Pythagoreans said: “All is Number,” but the only demonstrable basis they had, the only basis for their belief, was the first scientific fact in Western culture—which was the relation between numbers and the length of strings in harmony on a stringed instrument. And this was the only thing substantiating their claim, except for the movements of heavenly bodies—and the heavens you can’t touch, but music you can. So Pythagoras could say to you, “I hear the song you are singing. You know, the notes in the song you are singing are controlled by a Cosmic Order of Number—and I know the secret and I will show you how the Order of the Cosmos is regulating your body!” It’s a very good advertising technique, and it worked very well— except that it turned out that there was something called the square root of 2, and when the Pythagoreans started to examine the diagonal of a square, they found there was no number that was the ratio of the side of the square to its diagonal. No number! This was a disaster, because a square is very simple. If the whole world is number, but the square isn’t, this is bad, bad, bad news. So the Pythagoreans invented geometry to study this, and they invented logic to study the argument that showed this to be true.

Now you could go to school and hear about the “mystery” of how the ancient Greeks suddenly started Western culture. No one can figure out what happened in Greece; suddenly there was the emergence of a culture of logic, mathematics, philosophy, and Plato. It came out of music! It came from questions about music. So here’s a place where a serious culture comes out of music, and yet has nothing to do with another tradition, the contemporary improvised music of ancient Greece. We know little about music performances in ancient Greece because there are a few written descriptions, but Plato and his gang, the rulers, apparently destroyed a lot of these records. In any case, this is a place where at the very beginning of the Western tradition, again there’s a distance between the serious culture and the improvised culture. And in this case, there is a very clear parallel to social and political conditions.

Now you probably want me to have a conclusion, but I don’t think I’m going to make one. First of all, there’s too much to say; second of all, if there’s ever a really good question, then there’s never an answer. Also, if there is a really good question, then you answer it, not me. But I do try.

I would like to say that there are a lot of points in the history of Western thought, music, and politics where these things change and interact in a way that’s very complex, interesting and revealing. I’ll give you one other example, and then I’m through. There was a king in France called Louis xiv, the Sun King; more than anyone else he was the founder of the modern bureaucratic state government. Everybody knows that the way he achieved this was that he gathered the whole nobility, the aristocracy, at Versailles, and then he controlled them using dance. Using dance, he controlled their bodies, the very bodies of the aristocracy. In order to do this he made use of a technique of organization that was based on military organization.

You know, the way Europe conquered the world was by using a system of military discipline that was copied by scholars, from the ancient Roman military tradition. You can read about this: the key figure in the story is Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, a leader in the Dutch wars with Spain. By the time Louis came to the throne, the Europeans had learned to use rigid army discipline in their wars. Rigid discipline was the hydrogen bomb of the early 1600s; it was like a strategic weapon, this style of discipline. What Louis XIV did was to have his musical leader organize the orchestra on this model. The man’s name was Jean-Baptiste Lully: he kept time with a big pole, and in the end he banged it into his foot and died. But he also was given a patent for all the music in France—all the music in France!—so his influence was enormous. He began to feminize the voice of the orchestra by using the violin section to emphasize the soprano voice, and then his orchestra was famous all over Europe for the fact that all the bows went in the same direction at the same time—so disciplined! And he was also famous because all the musicians began playing at the same time. And I thought, “What did they do before?” It’s very intriguing! And I realized that before this, music in Europe was much more like a jazz band! Like, “Hey, want to play some music?”

During the next century the orchestra was progressively structured, to become standardized in tunings, notes, notation, instruments, and the performance discipline—all in the one century up until 1750. I think it’s important to perceive that the tradition of the modern orchestra is not ancient. It’s a tradition that’s based on a military tradition, and its advantage is that the “general” can write orders (which is to say a composition) and give them to the lieutenant (the conductor), and the musical forces go and play the piece. This is another situation where there’s a real distance between the understanding of the music and the social reality.

But that’s enough, no? Questions? Comments?

Audience Member 2: Listening to the first part, it seems that you were using “serious music” as an exact synonym for academic music. Well you didn’t say it, but it seemed so. And now, in recent contemporary improvised music, it seems that there are quite a lot of people who seem to be very, very serious about music. There seems to be among certain improvising people, a pretention of seriousness which even goes beyond what academic music usually does. And the other thing is about professionalism . . .

T.C.: Let me just say about this, I agree one hundred percent. And this is the reason why I think this is an important area to understand and to negotiate and discuss. But go to part two . . .

Audience Member 2: . . . about professionalism and professionalization, which go hand in hand with this. Now in the United States you have quite a few chairs for improvised music at the big universities, which is something a bit new and that you don’t have anywhere else, maybe in Europe but it remains very limited, and it’s always titled “jazz department” or things like that. So can you comment on that?

T.C.: Of course this raises the question of what is “professional” improvisation. For example, there are, for me, many questions about the aesthetics of practicing. Like consider a musician who tries to play something, but can’t do it—is that improvising? Is that good? Is that acceptable? Suppose I say, “I want to be a professor of music because I can’t play.” There are still a lot of questions here.

Audience Member 3: How do you use this knowledge of musical spheres and spheres of harmonics, etc. in your improvisation? Is it compatible with your own music?

T.C.: You mean, if I use this, how do I explain it? That’s a question that troubled me for a long time, because I realized, O. K. Tony, if you want to challenge this idea of the Order of the Cosmos—which I hate, this “Cosmos”  all of this crap—I have to have my own idea of where this comes from—that is, the relationship between harmony and numbers. So I do have an answer, one I can relate very carefully—but just now I want to do it very quickly—and that is to say that human beings communicate by speech, and speech is made of vowels and consonants. Consonants are noise, and because of the way that they’re made, we can describe vowels as rapidly changing structures of the harmonics of a fundamental frequency. The human brain has a machine that interprets this rapidly changing system of harmonics above a fundamental very quickly and very accurately. That’s how we understand speech.

Now, here comes another sound, harmony, which is rapidly changing harmonics above a fundamental, and your brain wakes up and says, “What’s this?” and recognizes this as a system with interpretive potential, with a potential for meaning. So I would say that my characterizations of vowels and of harmonic structure in music are identical. We have some sort of machinery that is a detector for this kind of sound, for interpreting such sounds. And so what our brain does with this sound, to make something happen with it—like melody, or harmony, or spoken messages—is very complex. It may function in terms of mating calls, group identification, whatever, but notice that I have constructed this description and I never used number. Even though number is a factor in harmonic structure, we don’t need number in order to describe this relationship. And numbers are interesting of course, but to be very precise, harmonic structures are not actually ruled exactly by number. Of course, there are a lot of things that are ruled by numbers, like how many bottles of water I have here, how many pesos I have in my pocket . . .

Audience Member 4: I have a question related to dance music, modern music. There are ways of evolving new things in dance music, and as you mentioned, dance music is related to the moment of Louis XIV’s rehearsals. I would like to know what you think of all this kind of music that is created with songs of the Islands or Brazil and how they create new styles of dancing.

T.C.: Rhythm today, as in the time of Louis XIV, is a system that controls bodies. When I say it “controls bodies” I may make it sound very negative—but we love this! We love to submit; we’re masochistic. Yes. We love to submit; we give in; we love to be regulated, especially in a group, because we are a herd animal. And so—a new dance! Oh, good, good, good, a new dance! It’s exciting, it’s a wonderful thing; it’s an amazing, powerful phenomenon and it helps to cement a whole generation. For my generation it was rock and roll. But if we ignore the positive and the negative aspects, then we see that rhythm is a system of control just like narrative on TV, like commercials, like news, like everything else. But it seems valuable to be aware of this control! It’s useful to understand the ways in which we are being controlled, that’s my feeling. Maybe you don’t care, but . . .

Thank you very much for coming today.

1. Tony Conrad performed at Radar on March 19, 2010, during an evening of concerts that brought together Cellule d’intervention Metamkine, Angélica Castelló and Burkhard Stangl, and Jorge Haro, at the Antigua Escuela de Medicina, Centro Historico, Mexico City. Moreover, this year’s Radar Festival (March 14–21, 2010) programmed a series of concerts focusing on the work on Argentinian composer Mauricio Kagel.

Images : Extracts from the dance manual “Recueil de Dances Composées par M. Pécourt, pensionnaire des menus Plaisirs de Roy et Compositeur des Balets de l’Académie Royale de Musique de Paris Et mise sur le papier Par M. Feuillet, Maître de Dance”. Published in “Paris Chez l’Auteur rue de Bussi Faubourg St-Germain à la Cour Impériale. Avec Privilège du Roy 1709.”