henry threadgill and zooid @ queen elisabeth hall 11/19/2011

words _ gian paolo galasi

Everytime I think about Henry Threadgill, the other name that comes to my mind is Eric Dolphy. Both multi-instrumentalists - and both flutists and alto players, both on a fertile middle ground between composition and improvisation, both responsibles for some of the finest music put on record - what about 'Out to Lunch!', 'Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket', 'Iron Man', or 'Too Much Sugar for a Dime'?

The fact is that as far as Eric Dolphy was ahead of his time - he studied flute and composition at Darmstadt in the '50s with Italian contemporary musician Federico Gazzelloni, but more than that, his practice of harmonic resolution was so wider than Charlie Parker's that his faster playing was resulting in fact so slow ... and one really understand why some of his best playing can be heard on his pieces for cello, vibes and bass clarinet, while his approach to group composing as heard on Ornette's 'Free Jazz' was so oblique and spacey that, compared to many big free jazz bands today, you really hear what the sense of instantaneous composition can be - so Henry Threadgill can be considered today one of the best composers you'll ever meet both on record and on concert. 

Few names can be put at his level: Anthony Braxton, Lawrence D. 'Butch' Morris (the only younger composer to reach the peak of this previous generation) for sure. Cecil Taylor. And such undeservedly underestimated composers/improvisers as Anthony Davis and George Lewis. Julius Hemphill, if he were alive and well. Not by chance many young players, the most interesting nowadays - I wrote directly and with great pleasure about them on this blog: skim through it to find them, then enjoy their own music - were working with many of the names I put down there.

And more, there are the musicians on the stage. Stomu Takeishi (bass guitar) came in the US in 1983 as a koto player (an instrument now well known in the avant garde / improvised milieu also thanks to the post-modern efforts of the second 'loft-era' generation, but at that time almost unknown as Japanese music in general), then deeply involved in studying and performing fretless bass guitar so to become one of the most sensitive performers on that instrument as far as sound and timbre - check out Myra Melford's Crush trio on records. 

Christopher Liberty Ellman was born in London in 1971 but studied and started playing guitar in San Francisco, listening to the music of Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis and jamming after seeing people like Tony Williams, McCoy Tyner, Ahmad Jamal, Oscar Peterson and, while in NY, playing with Trevor Dunn, Vijay Iyer and Steve Coleman, just to name a few. José Davila played trombone and tuba with Ray Charles and Tito Puente. Christopher Hoffman is a multi-instrumentalist - he plays cello with Zooid - and his range of collaborations deals with Marc Ribot, Marianne Faithfull, Bebel Gilberto, Willie Nile, John Zorn. Elliott Kavee has in his roster Myra Melford, Omar Sosa and Rudresh Mahanthappa. 

If you want an idea of what Zooid sounds like, think first about what the word means - 'an organic cell or organized body that has independent movement within a living organism' - and then imagine the music as made by six musicians dealing with all the sound dynamics involved with the timbre and grain of their instruments and their possible nuances, giving life to a slightly suspended groove coming from the same tradition Threadgill was involved since his first steps as a composer - that is, Scott Joplin and dance music - in which the listener can find suggestions coming from the blues, latin rhythms and flamenco, even if none of them is univocally defined. 

There is no single, leading voice in the compositions, even if sometimes Threadgill's alto can work as a collector of energies with its synthetic statements, but there's no dramatic call up, only a sense of suspended and gentle tenderness and a predilection for dialogue   - guitar and bass, or cello and bass - instead of soloing. Zooid is the more delicate incarnation of Threadgill soul, coming rightly after the extroverted Very Very Circus and  his meditative compositions on 1993 'Song Out of my Trees' and the four cellos and four acoustic guitars 'Making a Move' in 1995. The concert was recorded by BBC Radio 3 for a radio broadcast next saturday.

John Cage Night @ Queen Elisabeth Hall 9/13/2011

Words + photos: Gian Paolo Galasi (photos from an exhibition about Cage at O', Milan, 06/27/11)

Unluckily I had the possibility to enter the venue only after 4' 33", Cage's first piece to be performed tonight, was finished. Just the previous Saturday at the Southbank Centre I had the opportunity to see the exhibition Every Day is a Good Day, curated by Hayward Touring in collaboration with BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and the John Cage Trust.

Cage himself was explaining from one of the videos that the meaning of that 'silence' piece - he was showing the scores to the camera - is related to 'experiencing a change of the mind ... if you listen for four minutes to silence when you were supposed to listening to music, that means that you are experiencing the uncertainties of the future'. Far away from anguishes, the effect Cage wanted to reach is the one of self-liberation from preconceived frames.

This is also the reason of his involvement with Zen, I-Ching, chances operations. Odd as it can seem, hearing how a cactus would sound - as we did in Queen Elisabeth Hall - is, for Cage, a matter of experiencing freedom. That's probably what the Apartment House ensemble would think of. 

The ensemble, that just few days before, on Sept. 8, performed Yannis Kiryakides Atopia and Phil Niblock Five More String Quartet at the Oxford Playhouse, is a pioneering ensemble devoted to contemporary and experimental music behind the boundaries - performing regularly works by composers as diverse as George Maciunias, Cornelius Cardew, Anthony Braxton, Karlheinz Stockhausen and many others. On Tuesday 15 they performed a repertoire featuring also Radio Music for 8 performers, Child of the tree for solo percussion, Concert for piano and orchestra/Fontana mix, String Quartet in four parts, Music for nine, spanning from 1948 to 1966.

Radio Music is a work composed using chance operations. The 8 parts indicate between 26 (part E) and 64 (parts C and G) different frequencies between 55 and 156 kHz, notated using numbers (and not using conventional staves, like in Imaginary Landscape No.4). Lines indicate silences, "expressed by maximum amplitude". The number of silences varies between parts: from 9 in part D to 27 in part G. Cage mentions that every part is in 4 sections, with or without silences between them, to be programmed by the player(s). The published score consists of a title page and 10 typed leaves containing 8 parts (parts C and G 2 pages each).

Child of the tree is a composition for found instruments, using the I Ching to determine the number of instruments, order, and length of performance. Being on a tour in Arizona with the Cunningham Dance Company in 1975, one of dancers (Charles Moulton) brought a dried cactus to Cage, placed it near his ear and plucked the spines of it. This inspired Cage to use cacti as musical instruments.

The score consists solely of performance instructions on how to select 10 instruments, using I-Ching chance operations. All instruments should be made of plant materials, or be just the plant materials themselves (e.g. leaves from trees, branches etc.). One of the instruments should be a pod (rattle) from a poinciana tree, which grow in Mexico.

"Using a stopwatch, the soloist improvises clarifying the time structure by means of the instruments. This improvisation is the performance". is based off of chance and aleatoric principles.

The Concert for Piano and Orchestra has no overall score, but all parts are written in detail. A performance of the Concert may include all of the instruments, but also can be performed as a solo, duet, trio or any combination of the given instruments. The notation of all orchestral parts uses a system where space is relative to time. The amount of time is determined by the musician and later, during the performance, altered by the conductor who has his or her own part and acts like a living chronometer.

Notes are of 3 sizes. This may refer to duration or amplitude or both, the interpretation being determined by the performer. All of these solos involve as many playing techniques as possible. The part for pianist is an aggregate of 84 different kinds of notations, written on 63 pages and composed using 84 different compositional techniques. The pianist may play the material in whole or in part, choosing any notations, elements or parts and playing them in any order. The composing means involved chance operations, as well as the observation of imperfections in the paper upon which the music was written.

The String Quartet consists of four movements: Quietly flowing along - Slowly rocking - Nearly stationary - Quodlibet. Like the Sonatas and Interludes it deals with the Indian notion of the nine permanent emotions (more information on this subject can be read under Sonatas and Interludes), as well as about the Indian notion of the seasons, creation, preservation, destruction and quiescence. In the first movement the subject is Summer in France, in the second it is Fall in America. The third movement is about Winter and the fourth about Spring as a quodlibet.

The work uses gamuts of sound, as in most of his compositions from this period. The collection of sonorities in this work is relatively small and they are not transposed, fragmented or arpeggiated. The strings are played without vibrato and those to be used for the tone production are specified.

Music for (Nine) was concieved as seventeen parts for voice and instruments without overall score. The title is to be completed by adding the number of performers, eg. Music for Five. Each part consists of "pieces" and "interludes". The parts are notated on two systems and use flexible time-brackets.

Part of the "pieces" are made up of single held tones, preceded and followed by silence, can be repeated any number of times and are to be played softly. Others consist of sequences of tones with various pitches, notated proportionally. These tones are not to be repeated and have various dynamics, timbres and durations. 

The "Interludes", lasting 5, 10 or 15 seconds, are to be played freely with respect to dynamics and durations of single notes, and played normally with respect to timbre. The work uses microtonal pitches.

The piano is played by bowing the strings with fishing line or horse hair. The percussionists have fifty instruments each, to be chosen by the performer. Selected instruments must be able to produce held tones. The string parts follow the notation of Freeman Etudes.

The players may decide on the amount of pieces and interludes to be performed, resulting in a maximum duration of thirty minutes.

The description of Cage's works are taken from the John Cage database.