A Journal for Contemporary Music (1971-1988)
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Contact: A Journal for Contemporary Music (1971-1988) http://contactjournal.gold.ac.uk Citation Tilbury, John. 1981. ‘The Experimental Years: A View from the Left’. Contact, 22. pp. 16-21. ISSN 0308-5066. ! [{]JOHN TILBURY The Years: A View from the Left INTRODUCTION of the decade considerable notoriety and popularity. Late in 1960 Cornelius Cardew and I gave a concert of Strictly speaking, Riley's music was not single-sound music for two pianos at the Con way Hall in London. The music, through like the blues it created that illusion. It programme consisted of American music - by John was not radical and lacked the purity of Young's; the Cage, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff - and components were musically and aesthetically more con- music by Cardew himself. It was my first involvement in ventional. It thus managed to bridge the gap between the experimental music and the first in a series of concerts experimentalists and the pop world: the repetitive nature which Cardew and I took around to various parts of the and harmonious quality of the music appealed to the country. The predominance of American music in our experimentalists, but its language was modal (A Rainbow in progammes was of significance; in particular it reflected Curved Air, 1966) and tonal (In C, 1964), it used an attitude to the past which, like that of the Americans, electric organs and saxophones and it had a beat. Riley's was pure and simple: we rejected it. But at the same time music became an important part ofthe new 'underground we were ignorant of it: we did not understand how the pop' movement in the 60s. music of the past had come about. We knew nothing of The Scratch Orchestra, which emerged a little later (in the changing social role that music had played across the 1969, out of Cardew's composition class at Morley centuries. We had no grasp of the concept of class values College in London), was an enterprising body of per- in relation to art. formers, playing all sorts of experimental music (Cage, The music of Cage and his followers embodied this Wolff, Riley, Young, Rzewski and their own works) in all anti-historical stance and naturally we took to it like fish kinds of situations for all classes of people: for Cornish to water. Personally, I had never been enamoured of the farm-workers in village squares, for the young industrial European avant-garde; I resented its musical dogma, its workers of north-west England and for both urban and melodic and harmonic conventions alienated me, it seem- rural communities on the continent, as well as for the ed to me to be at once academic and aggressive, and it had music lovers who frequented the Royal Festival Hall. The neither wit nor soul. On the other hand, and paradoxical- SO consisted of an assortment of people from various ly perhaps, in Feldman's music I was strongly aware of a walks of life (some of them with considerable artistic human agency at work, of an imaginative musical mind, talent) and there was no more enthusiastic, more com- and the fact that the Americans had not banned certain mitted and more serious collection of individuals working chords and progressions from their work impressed me. in the field of contemporary art at that time. During the True, in the last analysis they too had created artificial first two years of its existence the SO's performance and systems, but these did not seem to 'police' the music in the compositional output was prolific. At the same time the way that European serialism did. nature and intensity of these activities engendered con- For the experimentalists John Cage is the key per- tradictions that eventually gave rise to a crisis. Feelings of sonality whose influence cannot be overestimated, but in discontent and frustration had accumulated and finally, the 60s a new figure emerged in America, La Monte at two long and harrowing meetings in September 1971 , Young, who made an immediate and dramatic impact on souls were bared, reasons sought and excuses offered. The the scene. Nowadays we hear only the residue and rarely guitarist Keith Rowe and I put forward an analysis of the the real thing: Young aestheticised or commercialised by situation, a conscious attempt to understand and explain a host of composers such as the Americans Philip Glass, our predicament. Rowe and I pinpointed a fundamental Steve Reich and Terry Riley and, in England, Gavin disunity of theory and practice in the SO as the primary Bryars, Christopher Hobbs, Michael Nyman and source of discontent among its members. In theory we Michael Parsons. These are talented musicians, but the believed in integration and being gregarious, in practice excitement and daring of Young's music in the 60s, to we were isolationists and parochialists; in theory we which they owe so much, was never recaptured during the rejected the musical establishment, in practice we asked 70s. Naturally there were other influences, but Young's for its support (Arts Council grants, BBC television and radical single-sound aesthetic became the springboard for Festival Hall appearances); in theory we wished to be 'an musical experimentation: in works such as X for Henry instrument of inspiration', in practice we appeared to Flynt ( 1960), a loud, heavy sound-usually performed as a many as 'a pessimistic symptom of a system in decay'; 1 in large piano cluster - repeated X times, Studies in the theory we wished to build an open society, in practice we Bowed Disc for a four-foot steel gong ( 1963) and The Well- had created a closed fraternity; in theory we regarded Tuned Piano (1964), each piece (or rather each people as a source of inspiration and in practice we were process) consists of a characteristic sound in which the suspicious of our audiences. And so on. We willed one listener immerses himself. Young's influence has also, in thing and caused its opposite: the anarchist's dilemma! my opinion, extended to the pop world, with devastating The members of the SO reacted strongly to our analysis. effects. 'Pioneer' groups like The Who became identified In particular, a passage we quoted from Christopher by their 'sound', not by the songs they performed, because Caudwell generated considerable discussion and it the musical components- melody, harmony, rhythm - therefore seems worth quoting it in full. were obliterated for the listener by sheer amplitude. Pop was a physical but hardly an auditory experience. In bourgeois society social relations are denied in Young's music contrived to be both: the listener par- the form of relations between men, and take the ticipated, he was not bludgeoned and rendered totally form of a relation between man and a thing, a passive. The sounds were not only rich, complex and property relation, which, because it is a dominating interesting; his music appealed aesthetically. People relation, is believed to make men free. But this is an illusion. The property relation is only a disguise for found beauty in it. relations which now become unconscious and It was on the crest of the 'beautiful sound wave' that Terry Riley emerged and achieved during the second half 1 Phrases quoted from the Scratch Orchestra's 'Discontent File'. 16 therefore anarchic but are still between man and THE IDEOLOGICAL FACTOR man, and in particular between exploiter and ex- A study of music presupposes a study of man. Art is an ploited. active socio-historical process produced by the tension The artist in bourgeois culture is asked to do the same thing. He is asked to regard the art work as a between changing social relations and outmoded con- finished commodity and the process of art as a sciousness. Works of art do not drop out of the heavens relation between himself and the work, which then into the minds of geniuses. Nor can any individual work disappears into the market. There is a further of art claim eternal life. A study of the re-creation of relation between the art work and the buyer, but works of art is as necessary and illuminating as a study of with this he can hardly be concerned. The whole their creation. True, Greek art survives, but nothing pressure of bourgeois society is to make him regard survives in the same form. Greek art as the Greeks the art work as hypostatised and his relation to it as understood it is dead because Greek society is dead. primarily that of a producer for the market. Means and relations of production determine men's This will have two results. ways of life and condition, which in turn determine their (i) The mere fact that he has to earn his living by the sale of the concrete hypostatised entity as· psychology, their modes of thought and emotional make- a property right - copyright, picture, statue - up. These factors determine their works of art; social may drive him to estimate his work as an artist psychology is expressed in works of art as the cultural by the market chances which produce a high tastes of a given period. total return for these property rights. This leads to the commercialisation or vulgarisation of art. Every poetical work is an integral unity, in which (ii) But art is not in any case a relation to a thing, it sounds, ideas, imagery, etc. are component parts is a relation between men, between artist and synthetically united. On the other hand, it is also a audience, and the art work is only like a machine unity from the sociological viewpoint, since all the which they must both grasp as part of the component parts and their synthesis taken together process.