my ears 33 years ago …
Last week I had the opportunity to hear a graduating percussion student at NYU perform my piece Ever-livin’ rhythm in his senior recital. The student, Garrett Lanzet did a great job, though he was a little shaken by syncing up at the end … makes me think that I should really go back to the piece and put a click track on it, so that the player can really know where he is all the time. But that never crossed my mind when I wrote the piece.
What was interesting for me, though, was how similar and how different the piece is from what I write now. It was my first piece for computer sound … and then, as now, I rejected the idea of writing “for loud speakers” and felt compelled to include a performer, so that the piece could be a performance.
I wrote the piece in 1977 … so that’s 33 years ago. I can hear in the piece places where I tried to make the music a little more abstract that I would if I were writing it now. I also am very aware that the musical themes are directly taken from the old Folkways LP recordings of the Ba Benzele pygmies which I was listening to a lot at the time, trying to understand and get a handle on their polyrhythmic world. And I was fascinated then, as now, with the idea of using the computer to create a kind of magic in the realm of timbre and sound and coordination which the player alone can’t do.
I recall that the electronic crashes in the piece, which seem to echo and compliment the cymbal crashes, are actually made up of a chaotic pile of the little rhythmic motive, but at a speed of quarter note equals about 3000 beats per minute. I don’t think anyone will ever hear that little compositional tid-bit. And today I might try something like that, but if I couldn’t really hear its significance, I’d probably chuck it in a minute.
More successfully, the ways the bowed vibes and the FM-synth melody interact in the middle are really lovely, as is the complex poly-rhythm built by the combination of percussion & tape at the end. However, I feel as though I know a lot more about writing for performers today than I did then … and either through the use of real interaction, or with a click track, I’d have been more careful to help the player find their way in the piece, so that they’re not searching for the sync pulse, as Garrett was at the end of the piece last week.
And of course … I remember that the piece actually made some interesting use of stereo effects, with the sounds swirling about the percussionist some. Unfortunately, I can’t hear that anymore … I presume it was at the performance last week, but I have no way of telling. THAT is very strange, still.
What’s also a bit strange is that there’s an element of my musical language which has persisted in all this time. Even in 1977, the music was focused on melody. And there are real harmonic and rhythmic anchors. I spoke afterward with Jonathan Haas, Garrett’s teacher, and the one who turned him on to the piece. Jonathan and I hung out at Aspen in 1975, and again I think in ‘78 when Ever-livin’ Rhythm was played at the festival there. We haven’t really seen each other in the many years since. He praised the piece, and said he tried to get all his students to play the piece, but Garrett was only the second who had really taken it on, because it’s so difficult. He compared it to Berio’s Circles or Stockhausen’s Zyklus … classic 20th Century percussion tour de forces using a huge set up for a single players, as does Ever-livin’ Rhythm. My response was that, indeed, those had both been models for me, but that I needed mine to groove as well. That wasn’t an issue for either Berio or Stockhausen. But it still is for me, even after all these years.
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