This is an uncorrected draft of Virginia Anderson, ‘British after Nyman’, from Tomorrow is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music, ed. Benjamin Piekut (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), pp. 159–179. The pages have been broken up to reflect the pagination in the book. Thanks to University of Michigan press for allowing the reproduction and dissemination of this draft.

British Experimental Music after Nyman Virginia Anderson In the last twenty years or so, the features that constitute an understanding of “experimental music” have been shifted from those delineated by in Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond to include the work of continental avant-garde composers.1 Nyman had primarily defined experimental music in opposition to “the music of such avant-garde composers as Boulez, Kagel, Xenakis, Birtwistle, Berio, Stockhausen, Bussotti, which is conceived and executed along the well-trodden but sanctified path of the post-Renaissance tradition.”2 Yet Bjorn Heile calls Nyman’s definition “anti-European”;3 Christopher Fox castigates the book for “[its] central thesis, that a music called ‘experimental’ existed in a directly oppositional relationship to another music called ‘avant-garde’”;4 David Ryan calls Nyman’s separation of the experimental and avant-garde movements a “segregation”;5 and James Saunders claims that “the distinctions made by Nyman between experimental and avant-garde music seem less clear with time.”6 This shift in understanding complicates what was already a muddle of multiple, contradictory definitions of what “experimental music” is. In the early 1950s, experimental referred both to the (mostly acoustic) indeterminacy of the Cage group and to the (mostly avant-garde, even serial) work of the early European electronic studios. More recently examples have become so varied in social context and compositional technique that Joanna Demers could only define experimental music as “anything that has departed significantly from the norms of the time,”7 and the term lacks an entry in the present Grove dictionary. By now Experimental Music is not only a history of the experimental movement but also a historical document in that same movement; in other words, we can read Nyman’s text as evidence of how experimentalists in the

159 160 Tomorrow is the Question 1960s and 1970s conceptualized their practice. Although his taxonomy emphasized the “purely musical issues” of indeterminacy, notation, and musical structure, he also defined experimental music on more social grounds: “[I]t would be foolish to try and separate sound from the aesthetic, conceptual, philosophical and ethical considerations that the music enshrines.”8 The more recent trend toward conceiving a larger European “experimentalism” concentrates only on technical elements based in an “avant-garde” canonic lineage and thus seems to cast aside important evidence of how experimentalism took shape historically.9 In the following essay, I shall examine aspects of Nyman’s taxonomy as it reflected the attitudes of and other musicians in the English experimental movement, focusing in particular on the work of four “Leicester School” composers. The name Leicester School is the jocular invention of the composer , ironic because it confers associations of “lineage” on four composers (White, , , and ) who question the whole idea of traditional lineage to begin with. Even though they now write music that may sound to some ears as “unexperimental” as possible—perhaps indicating to these more recent writers that they no longer belong in conversations about experimental music—I will show that the Leicester School composers continue and extend many of the traits and tendencies that Nyman and his contemporaries used to define experimentalism in the first place. These composers’ indeterminate music in the 1960s and early 1970s was, in a social and philosophical sense, recognizably “experimental”; their more consonant music after 1975 is also “experimental” on the same grounds. In taking this approach, I follow the example of recent writers on experimentalism who understand elements of musical style to be part of a larger ensemble of social associations forged by historical actors. David Nicholls, for example, calls attention to the economic institutionalization of different networks: “[V]ery generally, avant-garde music can be viewed as occupying an extreme position within the tradition, while experimental music lies outside it. The distinction may appear slight, but when applied to such areas as institutional support, ‘official’ recognition, and financial reward, the avant-garde’s links with tradition—however tenuous—can carry enormous weight.”10 More recently Benjamin Piekut adapted Bruno Latour’s actor network theory (ANT) to the New York experimental scene in 1964.11 Latour proposed a “sociology of associations,” cautioning that “it is no longer enough to limit actors to the role of informers offering cases of some well-known types. . . . Using a slogan from ANT, you have ‘to follow the actors themselves,’ that is try to catch up with their often wild innova- British Experimental Music after Nyman 161 tions in order to learn from them.”12 Another example of such an approach can be found in Gavin Bryars’s foreword to a recent volume on experimental music, where he focuses on participants in experimental music as a social group rather than in terms of their lineage or techniques.13 He explains how the influence of Cage, Feldman, Wolff, and Young on Cardew planted “the seeds of a new and peculiarly English music.”14 Bryars also notes the impact of visual arts and Fluxus on the graphic scores and text compositions of the and the impact of visual arts schools, not only on members of the Scratch Orchestra but also on British minimalist composers (who, inspired by the systems art group, wrote systems music). Bryars extends the story of English experimentalism beyond Experimental Music through the 1970s to include a week devoted to English experimental music at the Europalia in Brussels in 1973, ’s Obscure label series, the Experimental Music Catalogue (a non-profit publisher), and other endeavors. Bryars’s account of experimental music is not only movement based; it is also actor oriented, built from the personal interaction of its participants. People met, heard each other’s music, and exchanged ideas. Fluxus members attended Cage’s New School for Social Research classes; Cardew met Cage, Tudor, Wolff, and the pianist ; Hobbs, White, and Bryars worked with Cardew, but they also met George Brecht (who lived in London in the late 1960s) and worked with the British systems artists. While noting an “aesthetic kinship” between minimalist artists and composers in New York, Bryars stresses that in England, “people [were] actually working together.”15 Such collaborations resulted in what some writers, such as Keith Potter, have analyzed as the shared beliefs and intangible values held by British experimental musicians.16 The following description of English experimental music culture relies on all aspects of these musicians’ behavior, including their stated frame of mind and other elements of their shared ethos. I will show that the cultural activities of the Leicester School remain largely the same—“experimental”—even though their stylistic changes over the years are the most radical of the English experimental group. The British Experimental Ethos The Leicester School shares the same basic values as earlier English experimentalists, particularly from the late 1960s onward. From his compositions Autumn 60 through the final version of his 193-page graphic score Treatise (1963–67), Cardew’s philosophical ideas supported his compositional techniques using indeterminate—mostly graphic—notation. 162 Tomorrow is the Question These early compositions allowed performers liberties within rules that are primarily musical. As these rules ask for (or imply) the use of conductors or preperformance agreements, most performers try to intuit the intention of the composer and formulate entirely musical interpretations.17 Toward the mid-1960s, however, during the prepublication performances of Treatise, Cardew worked increasingly with improvising musicians (he became a member of the group AMM). He also became interested in Fluxus (through indirect contact with Young through John Cale and direct contact with Yoko Ono).18 After 1967 Cardew expressed his philosophical ideas within the pieces themselves using text, instructions, or “verbal” notation. These compositions gave rules only to describe a performance situation and anticipate and prevent undesired interpretations. These later pieces thus depended less on the composer and more on the performance group to collaborate (or not) as a social unit in real time. Original performances, which might not be purely musical, were highly valued. This emphasis on discourse over musical technique can be found in the activities of the Leicester School composers, as we shall see. Cardew’s musical change was not a precedent for his later conversion to communism; it was in accord with the ethos of the experimentalism around him. Bryars, who had studied philosophy, not music, at university, had abandoned improvisation to study with Cage in Illinois. His text pieces feature interactions between performers and present music as a social activity. The Scratch Orchestra, founded by , Michael Parsons, and Cardew in 1969 (and including White, Hobbs, and later Smith), could be seen as an alternative, “hippie-ish” society.19 In the tradition of Fluxus, the Scratch Orchestra used both mixed media and intermedia; its members were composer-performers (testing the nature of composition and performance in the process).20 These and other late 1960s indeterminate ensembles exhibit many traits that are still common to the Leicester School today. The first trait is an ironic approach to music history and the “great composer” lineage. For example, the “Beethoven Today” concert at the Purcell Room on September 25, 1970, commemorated the Beethoven bicentennial with arrangements and paraphrases of Beethoven’s music played by the Scratch Orchestra, the Portsmouth Sinfonia (of which Bryars was a founding member), and other ensembles and soloists. Almost every piece on this program was satirical, but Beethoven himself was not the target; instead, these performers satirized the idolatry of Beethoven. For example, White played selections from Beethoven’s piano sonatas on the bass tuba.21 For the interval, Hobbs and Bryars created a tape of four or five British Experimental Music after Nyman 163 simultaneous recordings of the Eroica Symphony, which, as Bryars joked, resulted in “the kind of thing Beethoven might have done had not got there first.”22 These performers did not demolish music history; they democratized it. One category of musical activity in the Scratch Orchestra Draft Constitution, “Popular Classics,” focused not on greatness but on familiarity. Scratch Orchestra Popular Classics were pieces that most or all members knew well enough to improvise, which included pops concert favorites, “masterworks,” and experimental pieces. While Pierrot Lunaire and the William Tell Overture were listed as Popular Classics in the Draft Constitution, Riley’s In C and Hobbs’s Voicepiece were later added to the pantheon.23 The Portsmouth Sinfonia, a group of students from Portsmouth Arts College, where Bryars and Parsons taught, specialized in playing concert classics, including the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite, and William Tell,24 on instruments in which they were not proficient. Some Portsmouth Sinfonia players, being musically illiterate, played their parts as indeterminate graphic scores. 25

The second trait is an attraction to so-called minor composers. Just as American experimentalists used nonwestern, especially Asian, music, the English experimentalists employed a large range of influences. These included noncanonized composers of art and popular music, Edwardiana, literature, visual arts, and nonwestern thought. The experimentalists tended only to lampoon music in the western art-music canon that they liked. They rarely referenced British concert music (e.g., Elgar or Britten) or music in the central late romantic and early modernist tradition (from Brahms and Schoenberg through the Darmstadt School). The Leicester School composers, in particular, could not stand Brahms. In a lighthearted survey conducted by the Independent newspaper asking what cultural artifacts should be blown up to celebrate the New Year, 1995, Bryars offered the works of Brahms on the basis that it would free up time in the BBC schedules for the music of other Romantic composers. “It would also rid the world of a phenomenon which John White used to call ‘that development noise,’ which can be heard both in and out of the development sections of the symphonies, a study of which has sent too many composers down a blind alley.”26 Mahler, however, seems to have escaped their disdain because his music is not so doggedly developmental.27 His Sixth Symphony represented the brain (as the most “cerebral” piece) in the Scratch Orchestra’s Fantastic Voyage concert, “Pilgrimage from Scattered Points on the Surface of the Body to the Heart, the Stomach, and the Inner Ear,” at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on November 23, 1970. (The symphony was 164 Tomorrow is the Question performed solely by Hobbs, who played the bassoon part.) On the one hand, Bryars liked the music of Mahler, Wolf, and the early Zemlinsky and Schoenberg because of its internal contradictions: “It has that quality of being dangerously tonal. It tries to go somewhere else, while trying to stay rooted.”28 On the other, the Scratch Orchestra and other groups, such as the Promenade Theatre Orchestra (or PTO), celebrated the music of Albert Ketèlbey, a composer of early-twentieth-century light . The interests of these composers were, even in the 1960s, too eclectic to explain through the western “masterwork” tradition. The bulk of their influences comes from compositions by these “minor” composers, pop and folk music, and nonmusical sources. Bryars said that in a duo concert with John White in Rome in the early 1970s, “We did duets of John’s, some of my things, but we did Lord Berners’ Valses bourgeoises, Grainger’s English Waltz, Rachmaninov. . . . All those composers, like Satie, have been viewed as being marginal, as minor composers.”29 Berners is best known as the “English Satie” and is, with Grainger and other composers, part of a kind of eclectic “background,” or alternative canon, for Bryars. White also claims to have a connection with a changing roster of these “minor” composers (including Alkan, Medtner, Scriabin, and others) in “almost a spiritual sense.”30 Yet the PTO, a composer-performer quartet founded by White in 1969, also referenced music lying completely outside the canon (salon pieces, folk, and music hall songs). Members of this group played their own minimalist compositions, but they did so, quite seriously, on toy pianos and reed organs. The PTO also arranged Edwardian popular songs (Shrapnel’s Carolina Moon) and wrote their own pastiches (Hobbs’s Oxford Street Walk). This mix of “serious” and “light” music and orchestration is a peculiarly British experimental trait; it also reflects late experimental eclecticism. At a Scratch Orchestra performance at the Munich Olympic Festival in 1972, Carole Finer realized an instruction in Christian Wolff ’s Burdocks (1970)—the number seven—by playing seven folk songs on her banjo. Cage, Feldman, and Tudor, who were in attendance, denounced Finer’s performance because they considered the “7” to mean seven individual sounds, not seven tonal pieces. Richard Ascough, who liaised between the Americans and the Scratch Orchestra, said, “They seemed to think that the performance was a sort of pastiche avant-garde, which could be found anywhere around Europe. . . . They thought the whole thing was sort of relaxed.”31 Wolff, who was not in Munich, has since said, “[G]iven the nature of that particular group, that it would have been very beautiful,” and he attended a performance of Burdocks in 1994, in which Finer repeated her performance.32 The British Experimental Music after Nyman 165 PTO and the Scratch Orchestra thus treated high art, neglected art, and so-called low art with equal admiration and equal humor, quite differently from the “secondary aesthetic practices” that Bernard Gendron noticed in the use of popular music by the historical avant garde.33 Generally, the English experimentalists tend to integrate their sources at a compositional level rather than standing aside and placing them within musical frames and quotation marks. These composers use these sources in the same way that Duchamp used everyday items, as integral components of their art. This is a practical, even domestic, mode of music making that is closely connected with the visual arts, which leads to a third trait of experimentalism in England: its affiliation with visual arts and graphic scores. Like Fluxus, the Scratch Orchestra benefited from the membership of a number of visual artists, including Stella Cardew, Tom Phillips, Carole Finer, Stephan Szcelkun, Judith Euren, and David Jackman. Another Scratch Orchestra member, , who is better known as the guitarist of AMM, was also a pop artist. Experimental musicians taught in such arts colleges as Bath, Winchester, and especially Portsmouth. Bryars and Parsons worked at Portsmouth Arts College; White, Hobbs, Tilbury, and Cardew gave guest lectures. Their contact with Portsmouth systems artists (Jeffrey Steele, Dave Saunders, and others) inspired White, Hobbs, and Parsons to create systems music, the first original process in Britain. Artists also accounted for the founding of the Scratch Orchestra and dominated its first mailing list. The Scratch Orchestra had an extraordinarily large female membership (at one point, almost 30 percent) for a composer-performer ensemble.34 Most of these women were artists. Ilona Halberstadt was one of the few nonartists. A contemporary of Cardew’s who invited Cage and Tudor to her Oxford college in 1958, and had a significant early effect on Cardew’s philosophical thinking, Halberstadt lectured in politics and philosophy.35 Under her married name, Phombeah, both Halberstadt and her children took part in Scratch Orchestra activities. Finer, a lecturer at the London School of Printing, wrote five Improvisation Rites for the first Scratch Orchestra publication, Nature Study Notes, all of which use quotidian items (such as a deck of cards) and employ game play to speculate cogently on the limits and nature of composition (“Improvisation Rites” was the generic name for this kind of text piece, which were written by all members of the orchestra).36 Her other work is, however, purely graphic, often employing patterns that are seemingly inspired by textiles. The artist members may be given less space in Scratch Orchestra research because of their notation and media. Finer designed graphic scores 166 Tomorrow is the Question that are not symbolic—there is no specific correlation between shapes and musical symbols —so they are difficult to analyze. Catherine Williams appears to have presented more performance art than written compositions (her contribution to “Beethoven Today” was to move around the hall blindfolded, with a stick, on the basis that Beethoven was blind).37 Because Williams’s work is physical rather than sonic, it escapes notice. After the breakup of the Scratch Orchestra, these artists moved away from music, so they simply became harder to contact than the (male) composers.38 The disparity seems to have affected all artists—Tim Mitchell, whose graphic works use patterns and explore map directions, is as neglected as Finer or Williams—but gender cannot be ruled out as a factor in their neglect. The Scratch Orchestra became increasingly political between 1971 and 1972, and the members who did not follow revolutionary Maoism had largely dropped out by 1973. In a way the music of the political groups that followed was postmodern (if not antimodern), but the artists abandoned much of the humor, game play, and invention that characterized British experimental music in the late 1960s, at least until the end of their Maoist phase. Composers who were musically trained turned to traditionally notated music rather than text notation, to minimalist systems rather than indeterminacy. However, we can still see evidence of these original experimental traits in the work of these composers, especially in the educational programs and compositions of the Leicester School. The Leicester School Although White, Bryars, Hobbs, and Smith (who joined the Scratch Orchestra after its 1971 politicization) no longer used indeterminacy as their main compositional technique after 1973, their later work extended the tendencies we have already identified, including alternative historical influences, an indifference to high and low culture, and the composition of practical, day-to-day music. The name Leicester School only appeared in the mid-1980s after Bryars had established music in the performing arts department of Leicester Polytechnic; it was a compositional and ideological “school” based at a physical school. This department, like the Scratch Orchestra and systems music, had a strong connection to the visual arts. Bryars began teaching at Leicester Polytechnic in 1971, in the fine arts department (the school had a policy under which performing artists were “embedded” in other departments). The range of technique and media in fine arts had greatly expanded in the postwar era, so Bryars supervised sound art projects. “Clearly in fine art there were some people who would British Experimental Music after Nyman 167 be making tapes and doing performance on videos, and someone who had gone to the Royal College and studied painting in the 1950s wasn’t going to necessarily be the best tutor for them. So they would have a fine art tutor, but I would also co-tutor them so they would have this other point of view and be reassured that they were not quite so far out on a limb as they thought they were,” he explained.39 The polytechnic system in Britain burgeoned in the 1960s as part of a trend to democratize education. Until 1992 polytechnic colleges focused on applied education, mostly in science and technology. Leicester Polytechnic, however, focused on fine and practical arts, including fashion (clothing, shoes, and corsetry), ceramics, glassware, and jewelry.40 This large art department embedded performing artists in practical arts, as well as fine arts groups, throughout the early 1970s. For instance, theater lecturers worked in the fashion design department and other areas that used staged displays. One of these lecturers, Noel Witts, instigated the development of a separate performing arts department, which opened in 1978 in a former education college in Scraptoft, a village outside Leicester. The Leicester Polytechnic performing arts department curriculum, which included dance, drama, music, and arts administration, was designed to be as practical as the fine arts program. From the beginning, students were allowed to try all disciplines and work with other performers; arts administration covered the business of performance so that graduates could survive as artists.41 Bryars wrote a curriculum that was different from music college or music department offerings, exploring “the things that made me the musician that I was.”42 He recruited musicians who he knew could deliver his program, including Smith, White, and later Hobbs. Since Bryars performed with these composers throughout the 1970s, he knew their musical ideas and strengths very well. Thus the compositional Leicester School implemented a practical application of its ideas through this curriculum. Bryars designed two streams of music history, pre–twentieth century and twentieth century, to be run in tandem through the first two years of study, because he wished the students to know something of recent music from their first year.43 This double stream was unusual for a higher education history sequence in the late 1970s. Beyond these general streams, White felt that the curriculum was free: “Gavin . . . gave me (and Dave and Chris) complete freedom to teach whatever we felt like. No ‘Course Document’ to strangle oneself with! If Country & Western piano had seemed appropriate we could have taught it. Or In a Persian Market (Ketèlbey). We were basically trusted to get on with what we believed in.”44 The composers brought their practical work experience to composition 168 Tomorrow is the Question and other courses. White worked in theater and television music, Hobbs also worked in theater, and Smith worked as an arranger, performer, and musical director for various groups, including Bryars’s and White’s ensembles, plus large political choirs and bands. Students were allowed to compose in a wide range of styles, but serialism was not formally offered as a compositional procedure. Bryars wrote, “We did not do classic serial analysis. Within the music history course there was a lecture on Schoenberg in which the principles of 12-note composition were explained and I think there was a kind of viva in which students had to ‘spot the row.’”45 In effect Bryars relegated serialism to history only a few years after many (notoriously conservative) British programs had begun to accept it as a current compositional style. The curriculum was premodular, meaning that courses were not restricted to semester or term lengths. Lecturers could offer extended courses or short study sessions as they saw fit. This flexibility enhanced performance, composition, and research. White, Bryars, Hobbs, and Smith were all performers who regularly formed and played in each other’s groups, so performance took a central place in the department. Bryars hired specialists in modern music (e.g., the clarinetist Ian Mitchell) and early music (the lutenist Matthew Spring). Bryars had been an improvising bass player in the 1960s in the group with and , but he subsequently rejected improvisation, worrying that the performer becomes identified too closely with his or her improvisations.46 Despite these reservations, Bryars included improvisation in the curriculum, with such teachers as and Paul Rutherford. Partly due to this decision, Bryars occasionally returned to improvised music making, performing in Joseph Holbrooke reunions. The Leicester Polytechnic program also differed radically from that of other contemporary universities. Its big band was named the Leicester Bley Band, because it mostly played music by the alternative big-band director Carla Bley, whose music possesses a combination of modern jazz, politics, eclecticism, and humor similar to the Leicester School style. Bley supported the band and its training group, Baby Bley, by sending her manuscripts to Smith to arrange for the groups, and she invited the Leicester Bley Band to open for her own at the Camden Jazz Festival. The premodular course system also allowed the lecturers to schedule large stand-alone projects. Smith, for example, transcribed Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians, which the students rehearsed over the course of a year. At the time there was no complete score, as Reich worked this piece out with members of his ensemble in rehearsal. Using only Reich’s partial British Experimental Music after Nyman 169 draft, which he obtained from Boosey & Hawkes, and the recording, Smith created the only complete performing score of this work that existed until 1998, when Marc Mellits was commissioned by Boosey & Hawkes to produce a full score. Smith’s score (only a dozen or so pages of A3 paper) is both practical and “experimental” in its rationalization of Reich’s manuscript. Rather than a conductor, the vibraphone player in Smith’s version leads the other musicians, who shift their downbeat patterns and sectional changes in response to this part.47 Students also performed in a mandatory mallet percussion ensemble throughout their study, no matter what primary instrument they played. Their repertoire emphasized transcriptions from the music of such alternative composers as Khachaturian, Liszt, Grainger, and Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique. The Polytechnic library had significant gaps in its holdings, but also unique inclusions. When he began teaching piano at Leicester, Hobbs was surprised to find that the library, while holding practically every piece by Liszt and Alkan available, did not have a single copy of Chopin’s piano music.48 Instead a library visitor would find rare copies of experimental music and other publications. The department itself boasted what may have been the best collection of music by Percy Grainger outside the Grainger Museum in Melbourne. Bryars put together the Leicester Grainger Archive with music donated by John Bird, Grainger’s biographer, and the Australian pianist Leslie Howard. The Grainger Museum then gave Bryars everything it had with permission to copy anything at will.49 Alongside the establishment of the institutional basis for their branch of English experimentalism, the Leicester composers created a body of work, often in an extended tonal postmodernist style, that emphasized “verbal” content. Thus is perhaps a more proximal musical model for these composers than Cage or Cardew. One of Bryars’s first performances at Leicester Polytechnic was on March 16, 1971, when he and Hobbs performed Satie’s at Fletcher Hall as part of a series entitled “The Invention of Problems.” Satie’s score famously includes the indication “Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif, il sera bon de se préparer au préalable, et dans le plus grand silence, par des immobilités sérieuses.” This indication is conditional: if one were to play the piece 840 times, one must prepare with silence and “serious immobility.” Although Vexations could be performed once as a miniature, it is more often presented 840 times as a test of stamina. Teams of pianists often take shifts for either a certain number of hours or a certain number of repetitions. Bryars and Hobbs performed Vexations, however, as a piece of music. They decided on a duo performance: solo performances were too strenuous and prone to errors, and team interpre- 170 Tomorrow is the Question tations were too variable. Their performance, lasting fourteen and a half hours, observed the terms of Satie’s score rigorously, and Bryars’s account of the performance, as well as a history of other performances, is one of the best accounts of Vexations and its performance practice.50 Although British experimentalists and the Leicester School composers opposed the western canon, they formulated an alternative canon of Satie, Medtner, Alkan, Cage, Cardew, and others, with John White as its central current figure. Satie influenced the concision of White’s piano sonatas and other music. Bryars considers White to be perhaps more important than Cardew, using Satie as a parallel: “One might almost see a kind of parallel between the flow and ebb of the working relationship of Satie and Debussy and that of White and Cardew. Indeed, the extent to which the public, musical and otherwise, erroneously identifies the latter partner of each pair as being the more important and influential partially confirms the analogy.”51 There is a Satiean element in the miniatures, jokes, and puns that these four composers use—these jokes are often titular and applied to music of a more serious affect. Like Satie, these composers accord as much weight to satire, irony, and jokes as they do to more hefty topics. The wordplay in these pieces could be thought provoking rather than humorous. Bryars, in particular, writes music that is thoughtful and meditative, and so he has designed thoughtful, multilayered titles. Cross- Channel Ferry refers to a method of travel and the ’pataphysical writer Jean Ferry. The physical performance can also reflect the musical idea: in Bryars’s Ponukelian Melody (1975), based on Satie’s Pantin dansant and the Rose + Croix notebooks, the ends of pages rather conveniently determine the placement of silences to allow page turns, as well as to act as structural signposts. The toy pianos of the PTO and the battery-operated synthesizers and amplifiers in Hobbs’s and White’s Live Batts! duo performances of the early 1990s are also physical symbols of their musical ethos. These composers do not evolve gradually from one compositional technique to another; instead they can make radical changes while retaining fundamental characteristics. In only a few years, White moved from the extreme minimalism of Sonata 43 (1969), in which single notes and sonorities are held for at least five seconds, to Sonata 95 (1977), a delicate and virtuosic waltz. Reflecting on this period, White describes the effects this change had on his appearance at the Europalia at the Palais de Beaux Arts in Brussels in 1973. Having spent about 10 years doing kind-of performance-art pieces with Cardew and then repetitive minimalist (Brit-style, not as mech- British Experimental Music after Nyman 171 anistic as Riley, Glass and Reich) and musique trouvée stuff with the PTO, I found myself contributing music that had themes, harmonic strategy, and narrative content to a festival of contemporary music. Could this be interpreted as a backwards step? Not as far as I was concerned! If I remember rightly, there were people like Alvin Lucier there, doing well-established modern-type things with live electrics, and I just didn’t want to “join in the chorus.”52 Sonata 95 does not represent a “conversion” to accessible music for White; rather it represents one of a number of stylistic approaches that he adopts from piece to piece. Sonata 95 certainly presents no sounds to scare conservative audiences, but its features, such as a concluding whole-tone scale and other eccentricities, link this short piece to Satie rather than the salon. Bryars has related the fast section of his Out of Zaleski’s Gazebo (1977) to the obsessive repetition of Satie’s Relâche, but this piece also has associations with Karg-Elert, Berners, and Grainger. These associations remain, despite Bryars’s interest in other references over the years, perhaps most recently in his Grainger-inspired piano variations Ramble on Cortona (2010). Just as the Scratch Orchestra’s and Duchamp’s readymade objets trouvé troubled the distinction between art and everyday life, the work of the Leicester School composers often expresses themes of the mundane. For example, White represented the samurai as a normal salaryman in The Merry Samurai’s Return from Work (1987), and he arranged the best-known themes from Stravinsky’s Russian ballets as the playing sounds in a video game in Down at the Arcade with Igor (1982). This impulse can also be found in the treatment of musical “classics” and other types of found material. Pretty Tough Cookie is one of Hobbs’s many “readymade” pieces, based around an almost unnoticed horn ostinato in Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture. Hobbs’s other musical readymade and text sources include newspaper puzzles, knitting patterns, and soap opera guides.53 White’s electronic music, which he has been creating since the early 1980s, often includes novelty noises (dog barks, ray guns, farts, and belches). In Pagina tres puella (1985), he translated the captions of page 3 topless model pictures in The Sun newspaper into schoolboy “dog” Latin. Bryars takes pains to insist that his work Serenely Beaming and Leaning on a Five-Barred Gate (1970) is not a satire of its source, Patience Strong (née Winifred Emma May, 1907–90), who wrote sentimental and religious songs and poetry for the Daily Mirror and This England: “The piece is in no sense a ‘guying’ of Miss Strong’s work, for which I have a profound admiration and I recall, with pleasure, an enlightening hour spent over coffee with Miss Strong at 172 Tomorrow is the Question the Charing Cross Hotel, London, one winter morning in 1970, when we discussed, among many other things, the piece here described.”54 Bryars treats Strong as respectfully as he does other sources, which include the recording of an old man singing in Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1972), English football (offered as a possible structure for Serenely Beaming), detective fiction (numerous examples), and eyewitness accounts in The Sinking of the Titanic (1972). Bryars’s stance is typical: although these composers often ridicule “great art” idolatry—see, for example, Smith’s piano miniatures “The Mozart Defect” and “Postromantic Strauss Disorder”—they show little aggression toward those who, like Strong, are considered “kitsch.” The Leicester School activities often reflect recreation, entertainment, and a bon vivant outlook. White creates punning names for groups—the Garden Furniture Music Ensemble (a pun on Satie’s musique d’ameublement or “furniture music”) and the Farewell Symphony Orchestra (after Haydn)—and pieces (e.g., Grieg Takeaway, a pun on “Greek takeaway”). His central message is one of bonhomie: “My ‘concert’ pieces are composed in the spirit of a person at a party, emboldened by drink, free to say things trivial, emotionally charged, quaintly old-fashioned, placatory, thoughtfully constructed, contentious, profound (do what?), rabble-rousing, commonplace, or plain silly, as the moment suggests.”55 Even here White summarizes his artistic purpose and makes light of it at the same time. His comment “do what?” refers to an English humor genre, Essex jokes (similar to the Valley Girl jokes in America in the 1980s). His ensemble piece Not WUT again! (no way, Shitface!) (1988), uses multilayered references in the title. It refers, first, to a musical direction in the first movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (mit Wut, or “with rage”). It is also an Essex joke (with WUT pronounced as the dialect word “wot”) and a play in meaning between “not-WUT again” (the second piece of Not-WUT, a category of White’s music that was less energetic than his WUT pieces) and “Not WUT again!” (meaning, “oh, no, not another WUT piece!”). 56 And yet the title of Not WUT again! (no way, Shitface!) reveals nothing of the piece itself, any more than Satie’s Trois morceaux en forme de poire are actually pear shaped. Overt self-promotion is a breach of etiquette for these composers. Although he is the best known of these four composers, Bryars took pains to declare in his interview that he had never sought promotion himself but was approached by agents who wished to represent him. He thinks that White is even less assertive: “John is not a pushy person. . . . I think John’s career path has been personal and absolutely honest, with fantastic personal integrity. He hasn’t ever, as far as I can think, gone for the main British Experimental Music after Nyman 173 chance to make a buck and get his name in the papers.”57 Bryars wrote that because “English experimental music was noticeably without any official support . . . the music was able to develop without composers seeking an external approval and there was no real interest in self-publicity.”58 This disconnect between the Leicester School and the mainstream contemporary music community has led to some odd commentaries. In a review of White’s fiftieth birthday concert, Paul Griffiths wrote, “[M]aybe it is some incentive to cultivate an esoteric personality if one has so blank a name as ‘John White.’ . . . White’s simplicity opens up a great conceptual hole into which one shovels approaches and arguments, and gets nowhere.” However, there is an equally clear indication that Griffiths was lost without the certainties of the post-Renaissance tradition: “Boulez, though, is so much easier to understand.”59 English experimental music is, as Bryars wrote, “still little known,” despite its importance, but he added, “[O]f course, this is not ultimately something that would cause any distress to any of these composers.”60 White placed the work of the Leicester Polytechnic composers outside both mainstream and avant-garde traditions: “The ‘Scraptoft Group’ was a lot of fun to be in touch with, in that we were able to share a wide range of musical discoveries with each other (and the students) without the threat of being laughed off the platform for not being totally under the spell of either Stockhausen or Malcolm Arnold. Bread rolls at dawn!”61 White’s call for bread rolls alludes to P. G. Wodehouse’s fictional Drones’ Club, whose members fritter away their time devising indoor cricket matches using bread rolls instead of balls. White’s reference, at the same time recreational, funny, and mundane, is typical of the Leicester School’s way of thinking. As we have seen, these composers share an attitude and overall approach to music making that is consonant with some of the ways Nyman talks about experimentalism, and exemplified by various groups in the 1960s and 1970s.62 Space precludes an exploration of anomalies in the Leicester School, most of which—but not all—arise from the activities of composers too young to have taken part in the experimental music about which Nyman writes. Some composers leave the experimental ethos temporarily. Hugh Shrapnel became concerned with political music in the 1970s, only to return to “experimental” compositional activity in the 1980s. They can leave permanently, as did Benedict Mason, a former composer-performer with the Garden Furniture Music Ensemble. Of the younger composers, John Lely (b. 1976) works both with White in the LelyWhite Ensemble (a pun on the 174 Tomorrow is the Question sporting goods clothiers Lillywhites) and with Nyman critics Saunders and Fox. Contact between experimental composers and other musicians, such as Bryars’s collaborations with the or Lawrence Crane’s emulation of Howard Skempton’s musical style, does not necessarily mean that Crane or the Hilliard Ensemble have adopted the experimental ethos. However, these later anomalies do not mean that we should ignore the importance of nonmusical factors when understanding English experimental music in its historical context. When we define this movement through its actors and their traits, the core of a unified experimental ethos begins to appear. The Leicester School, in retaining much of the same actors and attitude despite a radical change of technique, demonstrates just how impor- tant ethos has been to experimental music in England. Notes

1. Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

2. Ibid., 2.

3. Bjorn Heile, “Darmstadt as Other: British and American Responses to Musical ,” Twentieth-Century Music 1, no. 2 (2004): 174.

4. Christopher Fox, “Why Experimental? Why Me?,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music, ed. James Saunders (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 8.

5. David Ryan, “Dal Niente Projects,” Research @ Chelsea 2 (January 2001): 11.

6. James Saunders, introduction to Saunders, The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music, ed. James Saunders (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 1.

7. Joanna Demers, Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 7.

8. Nyman, Experimental Music, 2.

9. Even the harshest contemporary critics of Nyman’s book acknowledged the more intangible facets of attitude and philosophy as defining features of experimental music. For instance, in his 1975 review of the text, Richard Middleton accepted these “‘abstract’ questions” as proof that experimental music was “a rather amateurish branch of philosophy and comparative religion.” Richard Middleton, review of Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, by Michael Nyman, Music & Letters 56, no. 1 (January 1975): 86.

10. David Nicholls, “Avant-Garde and Experimental Music,” in The Cambridge History of American Music, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 518.

11. Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 8.

12. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to the Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 11–12.

13. Gavin Bryars, foreword to The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music, ed. James Saunders (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), xiii–xvi.

14. Ibid. British Experimental Music after Nyman 175 15. Ibid., xiv. It would be natural to assume that since this is a foreword, the composers Bryars mentions would appear in the book that follows. Instead, they are hardly mentioned: White appears as a performer in a concert with Bryars and Dave Smith, another composer on the post-Experimental Music scene (7); two pieces by Bryars, The Sinking of the Titanic and Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, are mentioned briefly (23–24, 303); Nyman’s Experimental Music is mentioned, albeit not always in a positive way; and Hobbs, whose Voicepiece is the first musical example in the original edition of Experimental Music, and who features prominently in Bryars’s foreword, is never mentioned again.

16. See, for instance, Keith Potter, “Some Aspects of an Experimental Attitude: An Interview with Michael Parsons,” Contact 8 (Spring 1974): 20–25; and Keith Potter, “Some Aspects of a Political Attitude: Cornelius Cardew Interviewed,” Contact 10 (Winter 1974–75): 22–27.

17. Mauricio Kagel played in the first prepublication performance of Treatise, in Florence in 1964. Cardew complained of Kagel’s performance in Cornelius Cardew, Treatise Handbook (London: Edition Peters, 1971), ix, and there was little if any musical contact between the two composers other than this one event.

18. Cornelius Cardew, “One Sound: ,” Musical Times 107, no. 1485 (November 1966): 960; John Tilbury, Cornelius Cardew: A Life Unfinished (Matching Tye, Essex: Copula, 2008), 218.

19. I examine this politics in “1968 and the Experimental Revolution in Britain,” in Music and Protest in 1968, ed. Beate Kutschke and Barley Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

20. Mixed media indicates the simultaneous use of different arts or artistic media; intermedia refers to a single artistic event that contains elements of different media. For example, La Monte Young’s Poem for chairs, tables, benches, etc. (1960) contains elements of music, dance, theater, and poetry. See Dick Higgins, “Intermedia,” Leonardo 34, no. 1 (2001): 49–54.

21. “Beethoven Today,” concert program, Purcell Room, London, September 25, 1970.

22. Gavin Bryars, e-mail message to the author, January 10, 2012.

23. Cornelius Cardew, “A Scratch Orchestra: Draft Constitution,” Musical Times 110, no. 1516 (June 1969): 617, 619.

24. Portsmouth Sinfonia, The Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics, Columbia KC 33049, 1974, long-playing record.

25. a.d.r., “Portsmouth Sinfonia,” in Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966–1973, ed. Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 338–39.

26. Gavin Bryars, quoted in David Benedict, “They’ll None of Them Be Missed,” Independent, January 2, 1995, accessed June 6, 2012, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theyll-none-of-them- be-missed-1566378.html. In 2003 I conducted a survey of composers whose works should be essential, important, or unimportant, either for study or personally, comparing it to a control group of musicologists, composers, and theorists from the American Musicological Society e-mail list. Of the control group, 100 percent of the respondents considered Brahms an essential composer, both for study and personally; of the experimental group, none considered him essential. Of the Leicester School composers who responded, 100 percent considered Brahms unimportant. 176 Tomorrow is the Question 27. Christopher Hobbs, e-mail message to the author, January 13, 2012. 28. Gavin Bryars, “An Interview with Gavin Bryars,” Klassiknet, n.d., accessed June 6, 2012, http:// www.culturekiosque.com/klassik/intervie/e_bryars.htm. 29. Gavin Bryars, in discussion with the author, Billesdon, Leicestershire, September 7, 2011. 30. John White, in discussion with the author, London, March 7, 1983. 31. Richard Ascough, “Comment on Burdocks,” unreleased recorded interview, Munich, August 1972. 32. “Twenty-Five Years from Scratch,” program, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1994; Christian Wolff, Cues/Hinwein (Cologne: MusikTexte, 1998), 256. 33. Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 18. 34. This information was gathered from Scratch Orchestra address lists. For more on this, see Virginia Anderson, “Aspects of British Experimental Music as a Separate Art-Music Culture” (PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2004), 327–45. 35. Tilbury, Cornelius Cardew, 58. 36. In Nature Study Notes, ed. Cornelius Cardew (London: Experimental Music Catalogue, 1969), 13. Finer is spelled throughout as Fyner. 37. Tilbury, Cornelius Cardew, 420. Tilbury explains this as a translation of Beethoven’s disability as a musician to a similar disability for a visual artist like herself, but it could also have been a joke. 38. This was a problem for me in 1983, when I first interviewed Scratch Orchestra members, many of whom had long since moved on to other pursuits. In 2003, however, Internet searches revealed artists who had performed only once or twice. 39. Bryars, discussion with the author. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. John White, e-mail message to the author, September 17, 2011. 45. Gavin Bryars, e-mail message to the author, November 1, 2011. 46. Bryars stated, “My position, through the study of Zen and Cage, is to stand apart from one’s creation. Distancing yourself from what you are doing. Now that becomes impossible with improvisation.” Gavin Bryars, quoted in Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1982), 136. 47. Dave Smith, telephone conversation with the author, March 3, 2012. 48. Christopher Hobbs, e-mail message to the author, January 2, 2012. 49. Gavin Bryars, e-mail message to the author, November 1, 2011. 50. Gavin Bryars, “Vexations and Its Performers,” Contact 26 (Spring 1983): 12–20. 51. Gavin Bryars, “Satie and the British,” Contact 25 (Autumn 1982): 10. 52. John White, e-mail message to the author, September 17, 2011. 53. I have written about Hobbs’s readymades at length in “Systems and Other British Experimental Music after Nyman 177 Minimalism in Britain,” in the Ashgate Recent Researches in Minimalist Music, ed. Pwyll ap Siôn and Keith Potter (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013). 54. Gavin Bryars, Serenely Beaming and Leaning on a Five-Barred Gate, in Verbal Anthology (London: Experimental Music Catalogue, 1972), 17. 55. John White, email message to the author, September 19, 2011. 56. “No way, Shitface” refers to a conversation about American slang between White and this author. 57. Bryars, discussion with the author. 58. Ibid. 59. Paul Griffiths, review of John White’s fiftieth birthday concert, The Times (London), October 31, 1985. 60. Bryars, foreword to The Ashgate Research Companion, xvi. 61. John White, e-mail message to the author, September 19, 2011. 62. One could also find this experimental ethos in the activities of other contemporary English experimental composers such as Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton, who worked together as a duo throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Skempton’s work is particularly Satiean in its simplicity, repetition, and nondirectionality. Similarly modest, Parsons’s exploration of processes occurs on a microscopic, non-bombastic level. Both composers also compose music in an alternative tradition: for instance, Skempton’s “sweet” songs and tunes for accordions or Parsons’s rags and Macedonian pieces. Works Cited a.d.r. “Portsmouth Sinfonia.” In Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966–1973, edited by Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn, 338–39. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Anderson, Virginia. “Aspects of British Experimental Music as a Separate Art-Music Culture.” PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2004. Anderson, Virginia. “1968 and the Experimental Revolution in Britain.” In Music and Protest in 1968, edited by Beate Kutschke and Barley Norton, 171–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Anderson, Virginia. “Systems and Other Minimalism in Britain.” In Ashgate Recent Researches in Minimalist Music, edited by Pwyll ap Siôn and Keith Potter, 87– 106. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013. Ascough, Richard. “Comment on Burdocks.” Unreleased recorded interview, Munich, August 1972. Bailey, Derek. Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice, 133–36. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1982. “Beethoven Today.” Concert program. Purcell Room, London, September 25, 1970. Benedict, David. “They’ll None of Them Be Missed.” Independent, January 2, 1995. Accessed June 6, 2012. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ theyll-none-of-them-be- missed-1566378.html. Bryars, Gavin. Foreword to The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music, edited by James Saunders, xiii–xvi. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. 178 Tomorrow is the Question Bryars, Gavin. “An Interview with Gavin Bryars.” Klassiknet (n.d.). Accessed June 6, 2012. http:// www.culturekiosque.com/klassik/intervie/e_bryars.htm. Bryars, Gavin. “Satie and the British.” Contact 25 (Autumn 1982): 4–14. Reprinted in the Journal of Experimental Music Studies. Uploaded December 25, 2010. http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk/ Experimental_Music_Catalogue/Jems. html. Bryars, Gavin. Serenely Beaming and Leaning on a Five-Barred Gate. In Verbal Anthology, 16–17. London: Experimental Music Catalogue, 1972. Bryars, Gavin. “Vexations and Its Performers.” Contact 26 (Spring 1983): 12–20. Reprinted in the Journal of Experimental Music Studies. Uploaded March 17, 2004. http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk/ Experimental_Music_Catalogue/Jems. html. Cardew, Cornelius. “A Scratch Orchestra: Draft Constitution.” Musical Times 110, no. 1516 (June 1969): 617–19. Cardew, Cornelius, ed. Nature Study Notes. London: Experimental Music Catalogue, 1969. Cardew, Cornelius. “One Sound: La Monte Young.” Musical Times 107, no. 1485 (November 1966): 959–60. Cardew, Cornelius. Treatise Handbook. London: Edition Peters, 1971. Demers, Joanna. Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Fox, Christopher. “Why Experimental? Why Me?” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music, edited by James Saunders, 7–26. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Gendron, Bernard. Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Griffiths, Paul. Review of John White’s fiftieth birthday concert. The Times (London), October 31, 1985. Heile, Bjorn. “Darmstadt as Other: British and American Responses to Musical Modernism.” Twentieth- Century Music 1, no. 2 (2004): 161–78. Higgins, Dick. “Intermedia.” Leonardo 34, no. 1 (2001): 49–54. First published in 1965. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to the Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Middleton, Richard. Review of Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, by Michael Nyman. Music & Letters 56, no. 1 (January 1975): 85–86. Nicholls, David. “Avant-Garde and Experimental Music.” In The Cambridge History of American Music, edited by David Nicholls, 517–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Nyman, Michael. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. First published in 1974 by Studio Vista. Piekut, Benjamin. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Portsmouth Sinfonia. The Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics. Columbia KC 33049, 1974, long- playing record. Potter, Keith. “Some Aspects of an Experimental Attitude: An Interview with Michael Parsons.” Contact 8 (Spring 1974): 20–25. British Experimental Music after Nyman 179 Potter, Keith. “Some Aspects of a Political Attitude: Cornelius Cardew Interviewed,” Contact 10 (Winter 1974–75): 22–27. Ryan, David. “Dal Niente Projects.” Research @ Chelsea 2 (January 2001): 12–17. Saunders, James. Introduction to The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music, ed. James Saunders, 1–4. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Saunders, James, ed. The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Tilbury, John. Cornelius Cardew: A Life Unfinished. Matching Tye, Essex: Copula, 2008. “Twenty-Five Years from Scratch.” Program. Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1994. Wolff, Christian. Cues/Hinwein. Cologne: MusikTexte, 1998.