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Just the Job for That Lazy Sunday Afternoon’: British Readymades and Systems Music

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Just the Job for That Lazy Sunday Afternoon’: British Readymades and Systems Music ‘Just the job for that lazy Sunday afternoon’: British Readymades and Systems Music An amplification of a paper given at the First International Conference on Minimalism, University of Wales, Bangor, 31 August–2 September 2007 Virginia Anderson, University of Nottingham THIS PAPER is concerned with definitions and their change and application over time and space. Take the term ‘systems music’, or its associated terms, ‘systems’ and ‘sys- temic music’, also ‘systematic’ music. Nobody seems to know exactly what these terms mean. In fact, the use of the term ‘systems’ became so vague that although it had appeared in the first New Grove of 1980, ‘systems’ disappeared as a definition in New Grove II in 2001. This would imply that ‘system’ is not only an old term, but a meaningless one. Is the term ‘system’ just another synonym for ‘process’, a way of structuring minimal music? Is the term ‘system’ is just outdated slang for repetitive minimalism? ‘System’ has been considered to be either a synonym or an archaism for repetitive music, sometimes both, at different times and to different scholars. However, there is a reason for bringing back the term ‘systems music’, with a clear definition. If we return ‘systems music’ to the group of British experimental com- posers who first used it, we find that it is also of use as applied to some music by this group today. Even so, we must clarify the use of the term ‘system’ within British experimental composition, because the way that each composer uses it depends on the time and situation in which it is used. In its widest possible definition, systems music has many points of similarity to American repetitive process music. In general, both British systems and American minimalism can be described as using processes that in most cases can be expressed numerically. When the governing process is exhausted, the piece ends. Steve Reich’s phase pieces, such as Come Out (1966) and It’s Gonna Rain (1965), use simultaneous presentations of a given material, each presentation having a different duration that can be expressed numerically, as can the differences in tempo between each player in Morton Feldman’s Piece for Four Pianos (1957). Terry Riley’s In C (1964) proceeds through limited performance indeterminacy1 using fifty-four thematic elements of varying lengths, so it, too, could be said to have a numerical basis, as could Reich’s later additive constructions in Drumming (1970-1) and Music for Eighteen Musicians (1976). The numbers governing these pieces either work at a thematic level (as in In C), variably (as in the choice of tempo in Piece for Four Pianos), or act simply and evenly throughout. However, the numerical constructs in most British systems tend to occur at a microcosmic level, and in strict systems, this level is note-to-note. 1 A piece that is indeterminate as to performance offers composed variables that can be altered in performance, as opposed to compositional indeterminacy, in which compositional elements are de- termined by means that are beyond the direct control of the composer (as in dice throws or paper imperfections). These results are then fixed in notation for performance. In C has limited perform- ance indeterminacy in that each performer can determine the number of repetitions of each thematic element. However, the number of repetitions is limited, so that the group moves through the material in roughly the same time. Like American repetitive minimalism, British systems are an experimental inven- tion, and like American minimalism, systems can be divided between ‘modern’ ex- perimentalism and ‘postmodern’ experimentalism. I have dealt with this distinction more closely elsewhere.2 In short, ‘modern’ experimentalism comprises the technical aesthetic that had its backgrounds in American pioneers like Ives and Cowell and in non-Americans like Erik Satie, but which flourished and obtained a coherent aes- thetic in the era of indeterminacy (most strongly from Cage’s 4'33" through the 1950s New York School, to Fluxus and lastly in Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learn- ing (1968-71)). ‘Modern’ experimentalism and its backgrounds differ from the twen- tieth-century avant-garde tradition in fundamental attitudes toward the nature of mu- sic, music construction and narrative, and of influence (particularly in the use of non- Western philosophy).3 The underlying perceptions of ‘postmodern’ experimentalism are similar to those of ‘modern’ experimentalism: the avoidance of a central tradition and a linear historical progression, a lack of monumentalism, and an emphasis on philosophical and psychological associations, especially, in the case of postmodern repetitive music, through hypnotic or meditative perception.4 However, ‘postmod- ern’ experimentalism often celebrates traditional narrative discourse and a love of consonance not often found in modernism. This distinction is not hard-and-fast: In C both uses modern experimental performance indeterminacy and postmodern con- sonances. The split in the British systems ‘family’ between modern and postmodern ex- perimental styles comes somewhere between random systems, best shown in the ear- liest of John White’s Machine series (1968-75) of repetitive pieces using composi- tional indeterminacy, and later, phrase-based systems. Strict systems, found systems and Readymades show both modern and postmodern experimental traits. However, it is best to introduce British systems somewhat centrally in chronological order, by beginning with strict numerical systems, which flourished first in 1973-74. Christo- pher Hobbs defined systems music as works ‘whose structure and/or note-to-note procedure [are] determined by a priori numerical systems’.5 This is the ‘governor’ definition, referred to in my 1983 interview with Michael Nyman,6 and accepted in Michael Parsons’ article on systems and art.7 Brian Dennis quoted Hobbs in The Mu- sical Times in 1974; moreover, he distinguished systems from earlier repetitive music. It is difficult to determine precisely at what point repetitive music becomes ‘sys- temic’. If we take Chris Hobbs’s definition of the latter as ‘music in which the 2 Virginia Anderson, ‘British Systems, Readymades, and the Visual Arts’, paper presented at the Royal Musical Association 42nd Annual Conference, University of Nottingham, 11-14 July 2006. Despite the similarity of title, the paper covered the relationship of systems art and music. 3 The clearest differentiation between avant-garde and experimental music is still Chapter 1, ‘Towards (a definition of) Experimental Music’, in Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1-30. 4 The late Jonathan Kramer set out defining features of postmodernism in music most clearly, espe- cially in his articles, ‘Beyond Unity: Toward an Understanding of Musical Postmodernism’, in Eliza- beth West Marvin and Richard Hermann, eds., Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz since 1945 (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1995), 11-33; and ‘The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmod- ernism’, in Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner, eds., Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought (London: Routledge, 2002), 13-26. There is, to some extent, the sense that much of what is central to postmod- ernism comes from experimentalism (Kramer called it an ‘attitude’), which makes such ‘postmodern’ music as that of Thomas Adès and other composers from the central academic tradition sit uncom- fortably with music by experimentalists. 5 Christopher Hobbs, letter to author, 21 May 1982. 6 Michael Nyman, interview by author, 23 March 1983, London (private tape recording). 7 Michael Parsons, ‘Systems in Art and Music’, The Musical Times, 117/1604 (October 1976), 815-8. structure and note to note procedure are dictated by a numerically expressible con- struct’, some of the pieces so far discussed come close to this. Chance [for instance, John White’s Gothic Chord Machine (four reed organs, 1970), which is compositionally indeterminate] and individual choice [Riley, In C and Rzewski, Le Moutons de Panurge (1969), which are indeterminate as to performer choice] are replaced by precise numbers of repeats or the segments themselves are numerically derived.8 For the first year of their work together as the Hobbs-White Duo (1973-76), Hobbs and John White specialised in percussion music that most closely fits Hobbs’s defini- tion. Other British experimentalists, particularly the duo of Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton, composed and performed systems music, mostly for unpitched percussion, and John Lewis and Dave Smith created systems for piano. Systems Music, Systems Art, and Strict Systems Systemic music took its processes and its name directly from British systems art, which itself was influenced by Constructivist art and the movement called de Stijl. The systems group of artists was co-founded in 1969 by Jeffrey Steele and Malcolm Hughes, which they launched that year with a manifesto and an exhibition in Fin- land. However, earlier process art using the same or similar methods dates as early as 1960 in the British Constructivist movement (Anthony Hill’s Prime Rhythms uses prime numbers to determine the composition of the art work).9 Steele brought Brit- ish experimental composers to the Portsmouth College of Art, where Parsons and Gavin Bryars worked, and Hobbs, White, and Skempton were guest lecturers. Given the antipathy of the British musical establishment, both conservative and modernist, to the ‘Cardew School’ of British experimentalism,10 art and drama schools had been the main, and for some time the only, place for experimental composers to teach.11 Steele’s systemic paintings, Series Sg...., ‘designed to exhibit the maximum range of aesthetic possibilities of diagonal symmetry’,12 was limited to black-and-white ink lines (Ex. 1). 8 Brian Dennis, ‘Repetitive and Systemic Music’, The Musical Times, 115/1582 (December 1974), 1037. Brackets are mine, following topics that Dennis had covered in previous paragraphs. 9 The information about the origins of British systems comes from Alan Fowler, ‘Constructivist Art in Britain 1913-2005’ (Unpublished Ph.D.
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