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SYNAESTHESIA FOR YOUR TV Visual music experiences from Steve Roach, Philip Glass, Robert Rich, Michael Stearns, BT, and Fritz Heede |
Stockhausen on Sgt. Pepper album cover
Stockhausen cartoons
Contemplating a Musical Lineage
by John Diliberto
From the avant-garde to pop, acoustic music to electronic music, the circuitry is woven not only across cultures, but across time and generations. Artists are touched, sometimes in ways they'll never know, by sounds they've never heard, at least not directly.
I recently reproduced a series of non-narrative pieces called Thought s in Sound with a handful of the leading thinkers in modern music. It's sometimes forgotten how much influence avant-garde music exerts on more popular and contemporary music sounds. The music of Radiohead or Pink Floyd, Ulrich Schnauss or Coldplay, Explosions in the Sky or even Metallica, is unthinkable without the exploratory, groundbreaking work of people like Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and Steve Reich. If only from the way they've been filtered through Brian Eno, their influence has pervaded contemporary music from Devo to U2. In Thoughts in Sound, Stockhausen, Cage, Reich and Eno are joined by Keith Jarrett, Philip Glass, La Monte Young and Terry Riley in an exploration into the very sourcepoint of sound and music.
Returning to these interviews, which dated between 1982 and 1993, I was struck once again not only by the vision of these artists, but the impact their music has had across the modern music spectrum. From hip-hop to new age, jazz to minimalism, electronic to acoustic music, the sonic fingerprints of seminal figures from the avant-garde can be heard.
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When you talk about modern music, it doesn't get any more seminal than John Cage. The composer, who realized his earliest works in 1932 and who died in 1992, is in the DNA of just about every modern musician, whether they know it or not. As a young student, Cage worked with composer Henry Cowell who would put foreign objects into the piano and pluck the strings by hand to generate ethereal sounds like those heard on "The Banshee" and "Aeolian Harp." Cage took those ideas to create his "Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano." |
These works, with their gamelan-like timbres, reverberated in more ways than one. They planted one of the seeds for world music, sending composers like Colin McPhee to Bali and Java to pick up on this music directly, and also influenced a generation who weren't in the avant-garde, but who expanded their music with these techniques. The Velvet Underground used prepared piano on "All Tomorrow's Parties" and The Grateful Dead employed it on their most psychedelic album, Anthem of the Sun. Fred Frith who has played with Henry Cow, John Zorn and Brian Eno, prepared his guitar and played it with everything from violin bows, drum sticks to wind up toys and chains. Even George Winston goes inside his piano on pieces like "Tamarack Pines," damping and plucking the strings.
| Probably no musician was shaped by the John Cage ethos more than Brian Eno. "I think without John Cage I wouldn't have been involved in music at all actually," Eno confessed. "Because Cage created the atmosphere within which it was possible for a lot of other people to start thinking you could make music using this or that or no instruments or some instruments or people who could play or who can't play. Suddenly it broke down the boundary between the group of people called composers and the rest of the world." |
 Brian Eno (L) & John Diliberto |
The idea that you could use chance in music had a direct influence on Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards with phrases on them that could be used to break a creative block or reveal a different way of proceeding. Something like "Honour thy error as a hidden intention," is a brilliant Cageism, even though Cage insisted on precise performances of his work once the chance operations of composition had taken place. Through Eno, the influence of Cage has worked in overt and subtle ways on the music of U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie and Paul Simon.
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Perhaps because of his humility and humor, John Cage has superceded his contemporary, the more imperious Karlheinz Stockhausen, as an avant-garde signpost, although I thought Stockhausen was the ultimate avant-icon when we interviewed him in 1982. At that time, Stockhausen had appeared on the cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and John and Yoko were listening to his music when they composed works like "Revolution Number 9" and the album, Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins. You know, the one with the nude cover of John and Yoko. On a more accessible level, you could hear the effect of Stockhausen in numerous Pink Floyd songs right up through Dark Side of the Moon. |
Twenty five years after our interview, and only a few months after his passing in December of 2007, Stockhausen is less of a household name, but no less influential in music circles. There isn't an industrial electronic band around, from Throbbing Gristle to Nine Inch Nails that doesn't owe a debt to the composer, who came to renown in post-war Germany creating some of the earliest electronic music with some of the most primitive means. Anytime you hear music processing from stuttering vocal effects, sampling of any kind or pure, filtered noise, you can trace its lineage back to Stockhausen works like "Gesang der Junglinge," "Telemusik" and "Aus Den Sieben Tagen." It was Stockhausen who inadvertently shaped German Krautrock and space music. His students included Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt from the avant-rock band Can, and they took Stockhausen's principles and added a beat and electric guitars. Rap and electronica artists using cut-ups and voice samples are a direct lift from Czukay albums like 1979's Movies, and he got it from Stockhausen works like Hymnen. Stockhausen's vocal piece, Stimmung presaged the harmonic overtone singing trend, which led to the current chant and kirtan boom.
I asked Stockhausen if he ever considered putting a beat to his music. He replied, without irony, "All my music has a beat." |
Perhaps so, but not on the order of artists like Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk who took what would in effect be Stockhausen-esque texture pieces and applied rolling four-four sequencer grooves to them.
Stockhausen was not only an influence but an antagonist. He's the musician that minimalists were revolting against. Philip Glass called his music neurotic and said he had to denounce artists like Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez to get them out of the way. All the minimalists cite John Cage's book, Silence, as a turning point in their musical thinking, but they just as readily point to Stockhausen as all that went wrong in music. It was Stockhausen and his disciples who provided the ground upon which minimalism built its contrast in modern music.
At this point, who's to say who's had the longer lasting impact? Minimalism pervades modern music, from the concept of looping in hip-hop and electronica to the meditations of the new age. If space musicians like Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze were adapting Stockhausen, they were doing it with minimalist ideas to create their own repeating cycles (Echoes On-Line subscribers: hear an interview with Tangerine Dream).
 La Monte Young  Steve Reich |
Just as Cage looked to the east with the gamelan timbres of his prepared piano works and the Zen philosophy of the I Ching, which he used to compose several works, minimalists looked to the east and the drones of Indian music and the chanting harmonics of Tibetan Buddhists. La Monte Young and Terry Riley were both disciples of eastern religions and practices and studied with Pandit Pran Nath, the famed Indian vocalist. Philip Glass worked with Ravi Shankar and is a practicing Buddhist (Read a review of Philip Glass's Naqoyqatsi) . Steve Reich dabbled with eastern philosophies before settling in to his current Jewish practices. Only John Adams seems relatively free of Eastern influences, which might explain why he was the first to depart minimalism for a more post-modern symphonic and operatic vocabulary. |  Terry Riley  Philip Glass |
But the links from Terry Riley's In C and A Rainbow In Curved Air run right up from John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, through Tangerine Dream and Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, into Robert Rich and out to Loop Guru, The Orb and again, George Winston (hear an interview with George Winston ).
The same can be said of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. In putting together the Echoes Chamber sessions (formerly Secret Sources), there isn't one artist, from Air to Mark Isham for whom "18 Musicians" was not a significant, if not life changing, composition (listen to Mark Isham in the Echoes Chamber). And its threads wind through pop music with tunes like Coldplay's "Clocks."
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It might seem like Keith Jarrett sits outside these concerns and concepts. When it comes to music, he's anti-electric (even though he had played electric keyboards with Miles Davis), and although he's performed classical music, he's found it almost antithetical to his creative process. Jarrett talks about the joy of pure spontaneity and playing music with just one note. That would seem to make him happy to sit next to La Monte Young, the doyen of drone, who talks about pieces that last for days, tones that sit for hours. |
I could spend days drawing lines and parallels between the artists in Thoughts in Sound and music in the greater world. Which is kind of interesting because so much time is often spent walling off musical genres. Minimalists derided 12-tone and experimental composers as neurotic, experimenters derided minimalism for its apparent simplicity, and acoustic musicians deride electronic musicians for, in Keith Jarrett's words, being "poison." Yet, they are all drawing from the same pool, and often in the same end of the pool. Brian Eno related a conversation he once had with John Cage. "I said, 'I thought it was really nice and very useful that some people explored the North Pole but that I would rather live in the South of France.' And he said, 'Yeah, I guess I'm just one of those polar explorers (laughter).' And I thought it's so important for people to understand that all of these jobs are valuable and you don't have to defend one at the expense of the other."
In fact, one wouldn't exist without the other. In Thoughts in Sound, you hear Stockhausen, Cage, Eno, Keith Jarrett and the minimalists grappling with the very source material of music, going past the notes and into the sound. And that's where it all begins.
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Thoughts in Sound Episode #1 Brian Eno: Architect of Ambience Brian Eno has become a defining figure in music over the last three decades. Since his days with Roxy Music in the early 1970s, he's been rock's leading conceptualist, drawing upon the avant-garde traditions of John Cage, along with minimalism and electronic music. But he applies their concepts to the most popular music with his productions of U2, Paul Simon, Talking Heads, David Bowie and Coldplay. His ambient music series has continued to resonate through the last three decades. listen |
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Thoughts in Sound Episode #2 John Cage: Imaginary Landscapes Few contemporary composers had the influence of John Cage. From experimental music to minimalism, Brian Eno to George Winston, echoes of John Cage continue to resound to this day, more than 6 decades after his "Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano" were first published. John Cage was a conceptualist of sound who turned even silence into music as he did with his famous piece, "4:33". John cage died from a stroke in August of 1992. But we hear his thoughts in sound from a 1987 interview. listen |
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Thoughts in Sound Episode #3 A Minimalist Meditation Cyclical music has ancient roots and many modern manifestations. The trance music of Moroccan Sufis and the meditations of Tibet are born in repeating cycles. In the 1960s, ancient mantra met modern music in the form of minimalism. Four of the early pioneers of this music were La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Along with one of their disciples, John Adams, we'll hear their often conflicting and critical thoughts in sound with a Minimalist Meditation. listen |
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Thoughts in Sound Episode #4 Keith Jarrett: Piano Primitive In the 1970s the piano and Keith Jarrett were synonymous. His solo piano albums like The Köln Concert established his reputation for free-form, melodic improvisational flights. Since then he's recorded with orchestras, clavichords, his Standards Trio, and even a CD of over-dubbed impressions for flutes and hand drums called Spirit. Despite being the only purely acoustic musician in this series, Keith Jarrett reveals a music vision based in the inner vibrations of sound. listen |
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Thoughts in Sound Episode #5 Karlheinz Stockhausen: Composing for the Post-Apocalypse Karlheinz Stockhausen died in the midst of our production of his Thoughts in Sound segment. His passing in December 2007 only served to highlight the often forgotten impact of this German music titan. Minimalist composer Philip Glass once referred to Karlheinz Stockhausen's music as "neurotic" but the German icon's adherents have included The Beatles (Stockhausen is pictured on the cover of Sgt. Pepper), Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, Miles Davis and Frank Zappa. Like John Cage, he is as much a philosopher as a composer, writing music for what he called the Post-Apocalypse. He ran into some trouble in 2001 when he called the world trade center bombings "Lucifer's greatest work of art." When you hear Karlheinz Stockhausen's thoughts in sound from this rare 1982 interview, you might understand why he said that. listen |
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