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Experimental Music After Nyman’, from Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music, Ed This is an uncorrected draft of Virginia Anderson, ‘British Experimental Music 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 Michael Nyman 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 By now Experimental Music is not only a history of the experimental movement but also a historical document in that same movement; in other words, we can read Nyman’s text as evidence of how experimentalists in the 159 160 Tomorrow is the Question 1960s and 1970s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 Cornelius Cardew 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 John White, ironic because it confers associations of “lineage” on four composers (White, Christopher Hobbs, Gavin Bryars, and Dave Smith) 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 Scratch Orchestra 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, Brian Eno’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 John Tilbury; 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 free improvisation 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 Howard Skempton,
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