CHRIS CUTLER Composition and Experimentation in British Rock
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CHRIS CUTLER Composition and Experimentation in British Rock:1966-1976. Workshop – “Compositional Techniques in Progressive Rock Bands”* With Henry Cow, as with the Soft Machine, the method differed with the composer - and all of us came from quite different backgrounds - that was one of the more interesting things about the group: that such different people had somehow to get along and find a musical language they could all agree about. We employed several different compositional methods, and these, and the kinds of compositions we played, changed quite radically over the life of the group. We had four primary composers: Fred Frith, Tim Hodgkinson, Lindsay Cooper and John Greaves. Fred had studied violin but then took up the guitar, after which he – like me – joined a series of groups playing Shadows and Beatles covers - then R and B, then acoustic guitar in folk clubs. Tim Hodgkinson was pretty immersed in jazz, especially the free jazz of the early Sixties: Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and so on. John Greaves had worked in his father’s dance band in Wales, playing standards mostly, and show music. Lindsay Cooper had been in the National Youth Orchestra, and had studied at the Royal College and the Julliard. She was the only member of the group who was fully formally trained. Compositions came to us in the form of written scores, which might be in various states of completion, depending on whose score it was. When I joined, Fred produced fairly skeletal scores as I recall, with riffs, repeated sections, some closely written parts and space for solos. He used a lot of the vocabulary of rock, and at the same time was the composer most influenced by the New York school, especially John Cage and Morton Feldman. The quite catchy tune at the beginning of the first track of our first record was, for instance, composed using chance processes. Fred always composed with some scheme in his mind that was not necessarily audible in the piece. On the second album his main piece, Ruins, draws, for instance, on the Fibonacci series, and the whole composition has a mirror form. It begins with a drone which emerges into a composed melody section - all Fibonacci-based - and then arrives at an organ solo over a repeating measure of fifty- five beats, accented by two alternating chords with varying distances between them. The middle section which is scored for viola and bassoon with unison interruptions of xylophone, bass and snare drum, uses a rhythm relation of five against four, unusual in rock; then the whole composition flips around in the middle and the structure goes into reverse – back through the 55/8 riff, this time with the guitar soloing, and finishing with another melody and a drone. I say this in order to indicate that the way Fred composed was guided by a great deal of pre-planning and of the refinement of the ideas he was working on in any given piece, which were in general either, like Ruins, based on numbers or on chance processes - however much these compositions were articulated and elaborated through a rock perspective, most of the time. Tim would present completely through-composed scores. Every part, except for the drums, was completely written out, and from the beginning there were no solos or riffs in any of Tim’s pieces. In fact there were seldom two bars next to each other in the same meter, and much of the time different parts of the band were playing in different meters. Tim composed in a highly complex, contrapuntal and non-repetitive melodic way, spreading his lines over long stretches of time. They were the most technically demanding pieces the group had to play, and they were difficult to learn: Henry Cow had a rule never to take a score to the stage, so all the music had to be internalised. Tim’s first piece was fifteen minutes of highly involved, overlapping, through-scored music - with no repeats. But we just had to learn it. Another Henry Cow rule was that the composer no longer owned the composition once the band had started to work on it. So, in the course of rehearsing, if someone said “I don’t like this section, we should change it, or take it out”, or “let’s put this here instead of there”, the composer could not say, “no, it has to be as written”. * This is the transcription, taked from the original audio recording of the workshop, held in Palazzo Cittanova, 21st October 2005, and from the Round Table “Le procedure compositive all’incrocio tra i generi”, 22nd October 2005. CHRIS CUTLER – Workshop “Compositional Techniques in Progressive Rock Bands” As the group evolved, pieces with repeats and solos pretty much disappeared from the composing repertoire, so that when in concerts we played pieces with solos and repeats, they were old pieces. Like Soft Machine, from whom we probably stole the idea, a concert would be a kind of macro-structure in which we would sequence different pieces together in a certain order, and then decide how we could bridge them together so that we didn’t have to stop playing. A concert tended to be one or two long blocks, sometimes an hour each. Sometimes one of us would be commissioned to write a bridging piece; otherwise we’d sit around in the rehearsal room and work the bridges out together. To keep life interesting we would frequently change the material around and generate new macro structures. Fred’s material was the most flexible and amenable to changes in treatment, and his pieces tended to open up our live performances, since they lent themselves to variation and rearrangement. In sum, individuals would come in with more or less completed scores, and then the group would work on them collectively. The shape of a whole programme and bridging sections we worked empirically between us. There were three exceptions, which I’d like quickly to mention. The first was when we had to make our second record for Virgin. Lindsay had only recently joined us and we didn’t have enough material written for the new instrumentation – on top of this, she had just had two wisdom teeth removed, which limited our rehearsal possibilities rather. When we’d made the first record, we followed the typical pattern and documented the material we were already playing live and were pretty familiar with. Essentially, we just set up and played. But as we worked, we came to understand that a recording studio is in fact an amazingly flexible compositional tool - and we decided to use that tool to compose the material for the second side of our new LP. It’ s been said many times – and with justice - that recording essentially makes any sound you can hear available for organization. What is said less frequently is that the recording studio is an instrument that makes performances available as raw material for further organisation, offering performers, in particular, the possibility of composing with performances. We worked in several ways: by improvising, listening, mixing, selecting and editing; by considering an edited piece as the base upon which to build with written or improvised additional material; by manipulating the studio itself, blending musique concrete techniques with customised composition and performance. The result was a series of highly structured, but unperformable, pieces. One, for instance was built around a fifty-second loop, which wound all the way around the studio. The friction of the bottles and microphone over which it travelled slowed it down sufficiently to drop the pitch about three semitones, making the sound immediately more interesting. We played this back, adding parts piecemeal to give it further shape, then copied, from another multi-track, a harmonised melody from one of the written pieces we had already recorded, then returning this, at half speed, to the tape we were working on. To this melody we added extra written parts - recorded at double speed, so that they would play back an octave down in pitch. For overall structure, we executed a long cross-fade, over the space of about six minutes, first establishing the loop, then introducing the rather spooky melody which finally faded out alone. As a compositional method these procedures worked primarily through improvising listening,, some customised scoring, and manipulating tape. We eschewed discussion: if somebody said, “I think this would sound interesting”, we would put it to tape first, then see how it sounded. Second: in 1976 we were engaged to play a tour in Holland, meanwhile John Greaves left the band, so we had either to cancel or figure out some alternative programme; we couldn’t play any of the existing repertoire without the bassoon and saxophone, which were structurally indispensable. Tim was in the middle of composing a new piece at the time, and had finished about two and a half minutes of it (it clocked in at 20 minutes when eventually completed). We decided to work with this, and withdrew to a house in Yorkshire for a week where we expanded the two and a half minutes into fifty. The process was wholly collective: we disassembled Tim’s fragment, repeating and developing sections or phrases of it, adding solo sections, and interpolating two long textured plateaus. It wound up as a coherent, rather formally structured piece which, since it was all generated from a very small amount of original material, was very thematically consistent. It fell into five sections. One, three and five were all derived from Tim’s score, and were introduced by one of us playing a short solo, based on the same material.