Wall, Worlds of Echo

Jonathan Wall Music 606: Music and Minimalism Dr. Rubinoff 10 April 2013 Worlds of Echoes: Repetition in Arthur Russell’s Popular Music and Instrumental Compositions Despite his central importance to New York’s art music, dance, and pop music scenes in the 1970s and 1980s, composer, cellist, and disco producer Arthur Russell (1951- 1992) has only recently gained popular appreciation—both as a musician and as a singularly genre-crossing figure. Through the reissue of his discography and the release of a film (Matt Wolf’s Wild Combination, 2008) and book (Tim Lawrence’s Hold On to Your Dreams, 2009) on Russell’s life, his influence has begun to be understood more firmly, particularly his contributions to dance and pop music. However, Russell’s roots in composition and art music performance have received less attention—perhaps because of their relative scarceness, their “uncatchiness” in comparison to his pop work, or even their strangeness when compared against more “mainstream” minimalist composers. Despite this popular mistreatment, I consider these early chamber works to be significant in understanding Russell’s later musical pursuits. Arthur Russell’s experience as a composer, performer, and director at The Kitchen (an important venue for New York experimental music) is connected to his later disco and pop music compositions through a focus on repetition. Wall 2 Downtown Music and The Kitchen New York’s “Downtown” art scene—a term first employed in the 1950s as a way of distinguishing John Cage from his serial counterparts at “Uptown” Columbia University1— was an uncoordinated group of artists, filmmakers, poets, musicians, and performers working between the 1960s and 1980s “within the traditional structures of artistic media and the culture that had grown up around them” to dismantle traditional social structures, subvert cultural expectations, and find new modes of artistic expression.2 In his collection of essays on this era, Marvin J. Taylor has narrowed this period down from 1974 (the year that Nixon resigned, the punk band Television began playing at CBGB’s, and laws were put into place protecting residents of New York’s living/working space “loft” hybrids) to 1984—not only for its Orwellian relevance, but for Reagan’s reelection and a new sense of commercialism that had encroached on the previously underground Downtown scene.3 Downtown music came to describe several intersecting genres that shared performance, rehearsal, and living spaces (and occasionally even members) during this time. Despite its West Coast and academic roots, minimalist composers—particularly Philip Glass and Steve Reich—became the starting point for Downtown art music; “loft jazz” developed into a de-institutionalized opportunity for musicians (particularly avant- garde African-American musicians who were unable to find performances elsewhere); and punk rock and new-wave bands like Television, The Talking Heads, and Blondie continued 1 Marvin J. Taylor, “Playing the Field: The Downtown Scene and Cultural Production, an Introduction,” in The Downtown Art Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984, edited by Taylor (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006),18. 2 Ibid., 21. 3 Ibid., 18-9, 35. Wall 3 the strain of New York art rock first explored by groups like The Velvet Underground4 in the 1960s. As these new groups of musicians began to come together, new performance spaces became necessary (although some of the most successful minimalists—Glass and Reich— were able to find venues Uptown, most of their audience came from Downtown).5 Initially, performance spaces were found in the Mercer Arts Center, a former hotel that housed The Kitchen—for experimental video art and, later, music—and the Oscar Wilde Room, a home for early rock and punk shows.6 When the hotel collapsed in 1973, CBGB-OMFUG became Downtown’s primary rock club and The Kitchen relocated to the SoHo district, each cementing its role in New York’s musical history. The Kitchen was founded by Steina and Woody Vasulka in April 1971 as a site for early video art performance, with experimental music (under composer-guitarist Rhys Chatham) being added soon after.7 Within a few years, music became the dominant focus at The Kitchen, with the venue hosting early performances of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach and the inaugural installment of the annual New Music America festival. Concerts extended beyond compositional art music as well, with jazz and punk groups joining the fray as new directors began to inspire more radical programming—particularly Arthur Russell’s tenure from 1974 to 1975. 4 Downtown’s pervading sense of collaboration can be seen even here—Velvet Underground guitarist John Cale first played viola in La Monte Young’s mid-sixties Theatre of Eternal Music group. 5 Bernard Gendron, “The Downtown Music Scene,” in The Downtown Art Book, 43. 6 Ibid., 44. 7 Ibid., 45. Wall 4 Arthur Russell Born Charles Arthur Russell in Oskaloosa, Iowa in 1951, Russell started piano lessons at age six and switched to cello in fourth grade.8 Temperamental and unathletic, he did not make friends easily until finding a group of older boys who spent every weekend experimenting with rock music, drugs, and Eastern philosophy. At the age of 16, he ran away and lived briefly in Iowa City before moving to San Francisco in 1968. After being arrested for marijuana possession, he was released into the custody of a Buddhist commune in 1969. At the commune, Russell began studying the cello in earnest with a member of the San Francisco Symphony Chamber Orchestra, using the instrument for meditation and leading chants back at the temple.9 Around 1970, Russell began an education both at the Ali Akbar [Khan] College of Music, studying Indian classical vocal music and transferring its instrumental techniques to the cello, and part-time at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, beginning composition studies there with William Allaudin Mathieu (who had studied with Pandit Pran Nath, the Indian singer responsible for introducing Terry Riley and La Monte Young to Eastern music).10 During this formative time, the other main artistic figure in Russell’s life was the poet Allen Ginsburg, who had lived in San Francisco since 1954. Russell began providing cello drones for poetry readings but developed into a partner who would push the less experienced Ginsberg’s songs into more adventurous musical territory. To this day, Russell’s only published scores are his transcriptions for Ginsberg’s First Blues: Rags, Ballads & Harmonium Songs 1971-1974, where the poet thanks the “Buddhist pop star” for 8 Tim Lawrence, Hold on to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 (Durham, NC and London: 2009), 14. 9 Ibid., 23-4. 10 Ibid., 25, 30. Wall 5 teaching him new chords.11 But Russell was not satisfied by studio sessions for Ginsberg or the West Coast’s waning counterculture, and he decided to move to New York in 1973. Art Music Composition: Instrumentals Even if his performance skills were somewhat underdeveloped, Russell’s creative intensity and dedication to new musical expression quickly won friends in New York’s new music scene, including composer Christian Wolff, guitarist Rhys Chatham, Music for 18 percussionist David Van Tieghem, and saxophonist Jon Gibson (who had played on the premier performances of Terry Riley’s In C, Glass’ Music in the ShaPe of a SQuare, and Reich’s Drumming). His relationship with Chatham proved especially important, as the two became roommates and Chatham recommended him for the music directorship at The Kitchen. Russell did not focus as heavily on the rising stars of Reich and Glass, instead focusing on more experimentally minded composers, including Cornelius Cardes, Phil Niblock, Ingram Marshall, and trombonist Garrett List, and a four-hour culinary event/performance art piece by Fluxux artists Jean Dupuy titled “Soup and Tart” with performances by over three dozen Kitchen artists, including Russell, Gibson, Charlemagne Palestine, Laurie Anderson, and Richard Serra.12 Around this time, Russell also began work on Instrumentals—an amorphous ensemble piece that, along with Tower of Meaning (first released by Philip Glass), is among the only recorded output of Russell-as-composer. First disastrously released in 1984 by the Belgian label Les Disques du Crépuscule—with the earlier recordings discarded, 11 Allen Ginsberg, First Blues: Rags, Ballads & Harmonium Songs 1971-1974 (New York: Full Court Press, 1975), iv-v. 12 Peter Frank, review of “Soup and Tart,” in Collective Consciousness: Art Performances in the Seventies, edited by Jean Dupuy (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1980), 20. Wall 6 performers attributed incorrectly, and the B-side recorded at half-speed13—the piece was rescued in 2006 and reissued by Audika, using recordings made at three different concerts in 1975, 1977, and 1978.14 Instrumentals consists of 72 lines of chord changes that could be navigated in a number of ways, with each player being asked to improvise around their melodic lines—short loops drawn from a “postmodern musical maze” that could theoretically last a Satiesque 48 hours.15 The harmonies are drawn from popular music— Rhys Chatham notes that ii7–V7–I was especially prominent16—and the melodic lines (particularly in the 1975 and 1977 recordings) are sweet and lilting, their silhouettes drawn from the Muzak “beautiful music” stations that fascinated Russell and Instrumentals keyboardist Peter Gordon.17 The three versions of Instrumentals found on First Thought Best Thought—as well as excerpts found on YouTube from recent revivals staged by Peter Gordon with many of the original performers—demonstrate the twists and turns that the composition could take. In the 1975 recordings, the ensemble is unable to stay to navigate the tangle of changing meters for longer than a few minutes; the brief 1977 recording has a similar mood, but is able to stay together for much longer.

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