Jonathan Wall 606: Music and Dr. Rubinoff 10 April 2013

Worlds of Echoes: Repetition in Arthur Russell’s

Popular Music and Instrumental Compositions

Despite his central importance to ’s art music, dance, and scenes in the 1970s and 1980s, composer, cellist, and 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 ) is connected to his later disco and pop music compositions through a focus on repetition.

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Downtown Music and The Kitchen

New York’s “Downtown” art scene—a term first employed in the 1950s as a way of distinguishing 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 —became the starting point for Downtown art music; “loft ” developed into a de-institutionalized opportunity for musicians (particularly avant- garde African-American musicians who were unable to find performances elsewhere); and and new-wave bands like Television, The , 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, ’ 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 first played viola in ’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.

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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 , 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 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 , Music for 18 percussionist , 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, , 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 .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. The glacial harmonies and monolithic pulselessness of the 1978 recordings, however, seem to have more in common with Tower of Meaning

(originally intended as a soundtrack for Robert Wilson’s staging of Medea that was

13 Lawrence, 243.

14 First Thought Best Thought, Audika AU-1005-2, CD, 2006.

15 Lawrence, 75.

16 Rhys Chatham and Christian Wolff, “Figure Among Motifs,” Artforum International 47, no. 8 (Apr 2009), 77-80.

17 Lawrence, 75.

Wall 7 eventually scored by Gavin Bryars).18 Since Gordon’s recent revival seems to have more in common with the earlier recordings and Russell was especially fond of them, I will focus on the 1975 recording (subtitled “Volume 1” on First Thought Best Thought).

The 10 excerpts of Instrumentals, Volume 1 last from just thirty seconds (Part 10) to nearly six minutes (Part 4). There is nearly always an eighth-note pulse provided by the ensemble’s two percussionists, often with one musician providing syncopated offbeats.

Each section otherwise consists of several repetitions of two– to six–chord progressions, with the harmonies suggesting a modal mixture somewhere between straightforward pop and the neo-Riemannian voice-leading of Philip Glass (see Example 1).

Example 1. Harmonic changes in Instrumentals, Volume 1, Parts 2 (top) and 3 (bottom).

As shown in these harmonic frameworks, Russell seems to favor chord progressions that are either stepwise (particularly at the beginning of phrases) or connected by cross relations (often at the end). This has the advantage of making the melodic playing relatively forgiving—“wrong” notes have a tendency to correct themselves if held into the

18 Ibid., 191-2. Wall 8 next chord. It is likely that these looped harmonies are only fragments of the larger framework; Peter Gordon remembers that the ensemble would play through the piece until reaching a natural pause, with Russell then playing back a recording of the rehearsal and leading a discussion on which elements were most successful. Gordon writes that the process was “fascinating” as the ensemble “discover[ed] the possibilities of different chord progressions… Cage, free jazz, the DJ set—these were parallel energies.”19

While Gordon may remember these rehearsals fondly, their collaborative and open- ended nature proved difficult in training a collection of musicians who were beginning to grow accustomed to the type of rigor demanded by bandleaders like Philip Glass or Steve

Reich. Even though the chords, melodies, and improvisation styles demanded by Russell were all conventional—and he was demanding, even as he asked the other musicians to make demands of their own—the shifting rhythms, repetitive phrases, and the composer’s own constant changes to the manuscript kept the ensemble from growing too accustomed to the piece. While the poppy instrumentation and “beautiful” harmonic changes made for a satisfying listening experience, the 1975 performance was unable to reach the extreme durations that Russell had originally planned the piece to achieve. Regardless of these potential shortcomings, however, the composition remains a prime example of what Carlo

McCormick refers to as Downtown’s distinct postminimalist approach; rather than being trapped in the absolute reductionism of the minimalists’ “glorified guild of coffin makers,” pop-allowing composers like Russell, Peter Gordon, and guitarist introduced their own “personal and idiosyncratic expressions.”20 It is also worth pointing out that while Russell enjoyed a lifelong friendship with Glass, Gibson, and other members of the

19 Ibid., 76. 20 Carlo McCormick, “A Crack in Time,” in The Downtown Book, 70. Wall 9 minimalist elite, his curatorship of The Kitchen is most notable for its first “Rock and Roll

Show”—an evening of music provided by rockers Jonathan Richman and the Modern

Lovers in March 1975.

While Russell’s love of pop music as laid bare in Instrumentals would move to the foreground in the 1980s with his transition to the recording studio, his problematic working style was already apparent. His compulsion to hear every available option as a composition developed made musicians impatient and denied the superiority of any “final version.” While this relentless energy made him a dynamic figure in the studio, it also frustrated his friends and family who wanted him to successfully finish a work—the public can’t buy a work in progress.

Disco Composition: 24 → 24 Music

By 1976, Russell had begun to transition from a series of long-distance girlfriends into his identity as a young gay New York artist. Part of his introduction to this new world was through dance clubs and the rise of disco. Russell, who had previously been drawn to musical repetition via Eastern traditions and the (not unrelated) cycles and rhythms found within minimalism, was suddenly exposed to the same concept that had been successfully turning listeners on to R&B, funk, and disco music for decades. Quickly aligning himself with Nicky Siano, a DJ at the popular Gallery dance club, Russell began production on “Kiss

Me Again,” his first disco single (indeed, his first recorded output). Despite working in a new format—both individually and as disco’s first compositional ambassador—Russell brought his unusual creative approach to the recording studio, employing two drummers and two bassists alongside Talking Head guitarist , a number of Kitchen Wall 10 mainstays, and his own cello playing.21 Although it was difficult to convince the musicians to play with the unbalanced style that the composer was looking for, the nervous energy of

“Kiss Me Again” (released in 1978 under Russell’s “Dinosaur” alias) was a moderate club success, leading to an approach that Russell would continue to explore in singles like “Is It

All Over My Face?” and “Pop Your Funk.”

In 1979, Russell took his newfound love of disco music back to The Kitchen, writing a groove-oriented improvisational composition for a group of his frequent collaborators, including Gordon, trombonist Peter Zummo, and percussionist Mustafa Ahmed. While the composer’s disco cohorts formed a spontaneous dance party in the back of the room, many

Kitchen regulars were unsure of the piece’s merit. Disco was no longer trendy, with the infamous Chicago “Disco Demolition Night” riots only a few weeks away, and the venue had begun to orient itself towards -driven postminimalist rock under Chatham’s second directorship (ironically, it was Russell who had first brought into The Kitchen, and now the instrument threatened to kick him out).22 With the exception of Peter Gordon’s

Love of Life Orchestra, no new music composers were willing to engage with disco—even as it resubmerged into the underground and transformed into the house and techno craze of the 1980s.

Intrigued by the possibilities established by his first evening of improvised orchestral disco, Russell rushed into the recording studio to preserve the project on multitrack tape. However, rather than providing the musicians with concrete instructions—which, though scattered, had guided his previous disco sessions—Russell used “conceptual scores filled with staves and colored Cagean parabolas,” with an emphasis

21 Lawrence, 130-1.

22 Ibid., 158.

Wall 11 on emotion and mood rather than pitches or rhythms.23 Despite an apparent lack of cohesion or purpose, Russell continued recording individual musicians and vocalists fragments with no sense of arrangement. When the sessions were finished, he began manipulating the material on two large twenty-four-track tape machines that he would synchronize in different combinations, forming songs out of an uncoordinated sonic ether—the technical process that would later give 24 → 24 Music its name. By wielding the recording studio as a creative tool rather than a simple step capturing or editing the

“honesty” of live sound, Russell was following the path of dub musicians like King Tubby or dance music’s “extended remixers” like Tom Moulton who, in ’s words, work “in the identical position of the painter… working directly with a material… retain[ing] the options to chop and change, to paint a bit out, add a piece, etc.”24

While less explicitly club-ready than his previous disco singles, 24 → 24 Music

(released by Sleeping Back Records in 1981) represents Russell’s crowning achievement in the genre.25 Although his production was already distinctive for its mishmash of jumbled rhythms and instrumentals, the sheer of voices, keyboards, percussion, and guitars on tracks like “#5 (Go Bang!)” places the in its own leftfield territory. However, despite the inherent strangeness of the orchestration and lyrics like “you showed us the face of delusion / to uproot the cause of confusion” (from “#1 (You’re Gonna Be Clean On

Your Bean)”), there is a persistently infectious groove being played by the rhythm section

(five members of The Ingram Kingdom, an African-American family band). Russell’s new- music artfulness is also on full display, both literally (a brief excerpt of the original Kitchen

23 Ibid., 161.

24 Brian Eno, “The Studio as Compositional Tool,” in Audio Culture, edited by Cristoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York and London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), 129.

25 24 → 24 Music, Traffic Entertainment Group TEG-76530-2, CD, 2007. Wall 12 recording is included as the album’s midpoint) and on deeper compositional levels: the opening track’s saxophone motif, which alternates between six– and eight-beat phrases on top of a four-on-the-floor drum beat; the angular trombone and trumpet lines that have more in common with the sparseness of chamber music than the energy of a funk horn section; ’s operatic delivery of lines like “in the corn-belt-corn-corn!”

Even the composers who supported these disco experiments were baffled by the juxtaposition of two very different worlds. Russell’s former roommate Rhys Chatham, who had been encouraged to include high-energy electric guitar in his compositions after seeing the play in 1976, wrote in 2009 that “to this day [he has] never understood why

Arthur took up disco the way a number of us had taken on rock and punk.”26 Recently, musicologist Robert Fink has explored aesthetic and structural similarities between minimalist compositions and mainstream disco—namely Steve Reich’s Music for 18

Musicians and Giorgio Moroder’s extended mix of Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You

Baby”—concluding that both proceed via “recombinant teleologies.”27 The two genres deny traditional narratives found within much classical and pop music but simultaneously allow for individual listeners to form their own periods of tension and release, often on time scales impossible in other music.28 Although Fink’s book was published before the rediscovery of Russell’s music, he briefly mentions the composer as one of the true points of convergence alongside of Tubular Bells fame, who released a “disco remix” of a Philip Glass recording, and Glass himself (in his role as producer/keyboardist for the

26 Chatham and Wolff, 80.

27 Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice, 43

28 Ibid., 44. Wall 13

New Wave band Polyrock). Also omitted from Fink’s essay is Peter Gordon, who explained the appeal that he and Russell found in disco:

Disco was joyous, fun, and social. Arthur never embraced the nihilism and negativity of punk rock. He never felt comfortable with the darkness and angry dissonance of (what was later called) "No Wave." Note that when Arthur brought rock to the Kitchen, it was with the Modern Lovers, and with Jonathan Richman's unabashed positivism and innocence. Arthur… was also beginning to openly embrace his gay identity and there was a feeling of communality on the dance floor. In contrast to the punk/rock scene (typically angry, white, and heterosexual), disco was a culturally diverse party.29

Solo Composition: World of Echo

In the 1980s, a steady boyfriend—and later, an AIDS diagnosis—served to diminish

Russell’s fascination with disco (although the introduction of affordable electronic drum machines and synthesizers and the influence of hip-hop resulted in a second wave of leftfield dance later in the decade). Around 1984, he began working on a series of songs for amplified cello, voice, and occasionally harmonica (again, an early glimpse of these pieces was performed at The Kitchen). After three years of splicing, re-recording, discarding, and applying heavy studio effects, he had refined these songs into World of Echo, first released in 1986 by Upside Records.30

The album’s extensive use of digital to process Russell’s voice and cello playing displays his interest in repetition at its most literal extreme. Practically every note is followed by a second iteration, with the composer often utilizing a “slapback” delay (a single repetition at equal volume, rather than the traditional “echo” delay that sounds multiple times, each occurrence decreasing in volume). Russell’s stark cello playing

29 Quoted in Chatham and Wolff, 80.

30 World of Echo, Audika AU-1002-3, CD, 2004. Wall 14 typically provides a droning pulse—or even groove— for his intimate vocals, which are often sung (or whispered) as spiraling lyrical melodies and provide the only discernible element for listeners to orient themselves around. On “Hiding Your Present From You,” for example, the introductory musical motif—a looping series of unpitched electronic wubs that is impossible to even link to its probable origin in the cello—persists beneath spliced- together wisps of bowed cello and reverberant harmonica chords. The entire song sounds like a mess until Russell’s voice enters with “when you see where it is / but don’t know where it is.” In the song’s second section, the introduction’s noise disappears, clipped bass bloops and more cello splices hint at a harmonic shift, the lyrics repeat themselves, and the song is over. None of the tracks on World of Echo follow a traditional song structure, even as they approximate typical pop song lengths; there are reverb-laden ambient offerings

(“Being It” and “See-Through”) and bits of sound poetry with electronic noise (“Tone Bone

Kone”).

While the album versions of these tracks are brief intimate glimpses of Russell’s creative energy at this time, the pieces often lasted much longer when performed live. In two films made by Phil Niblock in 1985, fragments from World of Echo are recombined stretched out past the twenty-minute mark.31 In these live solo performances, a simpler

(by necessity) effects processing chain allows the patterns in Russell’s playing to emerge more directly; despite different playing techniques and a few harmonic departures, each performance is wholly formed from just two chords, often played pizzicato or col legno for rhythmic effect. Even when stripped down to its essentials, Russell’s music seems dependent on the themes of repetition that informed his explicitly multitracked disco work.

31 Phil Niblock, Two Arthur Russell Films, 1985. Archived at UbuWeb, http://ubu.com/film/russell.html (accessed 22 Mar 2013). Wall 15

Conclusions: Worlds of Echoes

It is impossible to force Russell into any one interpretation, even one as open-ended as an acknowledgment of his love of repetition. Like many musicians, he also loved strong tunes; he also desperately wanted to make it in the music industry (despite his frustrating distaste for finishing projects). More straightforward—although still often profound— examples of Russell’s work with new-wave rock group The Necessaries and in Americana- oriented recordings can be found that pursue other musical ambitions. However, I consider this recurring sense of reiteration to be central in understanding part of Russell’s appeal—his persistent role (however obscured) in every corner of Downtown’s art, disco, and pop music scenes. If we are hearing the echoes of these genres through Russell’s oeuvre—the Muzak tambourine in Instrumentals, the additive saxophone phrases in “#1

(You’re Gonna Be Clean On Your Bean)”—they must be understood as echoes. Russell has joined the rank of American maverick artists—, John Cage, and so on—not for stubbornly creating a language where there was none, but precisely because he was so fluid in permeating any number of cultures (Eastern/Western, high art/low art, composed/improvised, metropolitan/rural) to synthesize a new body of work that is distinctly his own. These echoes result in Russell consciously choosing to repeat the sounds, techniques, and energies of one genre in composing for another. Even as he distanced himself from The Kitchen’s more well-known composers with his disco production and later withdrew completely into intimate solo performances, Russell remained the most authentic symbol of the Downtown scene’s purported sense of collaboration, cross-genre interchange, and individual experimentalism.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chatham, Rhys, and Christian Wolff. “Figure Among Motifs.” Artforum International 47, no. 8 (Apr 2009): 77-80.

Dinosaur L. 24 → 24 Music. CD and liner notes. Traffic Entertainment Group TEG-76530-2, 2007.

Eno, Brian. “The Studio as Compositional Tool.” In Audio Culture, edited by Cristoph Cox and Daniel Warner. New York and London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004: 127-130.

Ginsberg, Allen. First Blues: Rags, Ballads & Harmonium Songs 1971-1974. New York: Full Court Press, 1975.

Lawrence, Tim. Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.

Niblock, Phil. Two Arthur Russell Films. 1985. http://ubu.com/film/russell.html.

Russell, Arthur. First Thought Best Thought. CD and liner notes. Audika, AU-1005-2, 2006.

—. World of Echo. CD and liner notes. Audika, AU-1002-3, 2004.

Taylor, Marvin J. The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006.