Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond

Not only is this a great introduction for someone who doesn't know his or her way around this subject, but it offers more experienced listeners and readers Nyman's own sensitive, and (to my mind) highly accurate, takes on what Cage, Feldman, Brown, Cardew, LaMonte Young and others were up to back in the pre-revolutionary 50's and the revolutionary 60's and 70's. This is a snapshot, if you will, of many of the giants fully formed, and some, like Gavin Bryars, in the larval stages of their genius, so it makes for a fascinating read. Nyman's prose is pellucid, and his explanations cogent. My dream is that Michael Nyman will someday return to update this book and offer some insights on the new, strange paths, experimental music has taken in the age of the personal computer, robotics and the Internet.

In this work originally published in 1974, Nyman discusses the work of composers and performers who shifted the boundaries of music as regards notation, time, space, and the roles of the composer, performer and audience. The author seeks to identify and explain a whole body of musical work that existed outside the classical tradition and the avant-garde orthodoxies that flowed from it. He thus explores the Anglo-American musical tradition loosely associated with John Cage. Since 1974 this book has been considered the classical work on the radical alternative to the mainstream avant-garde as represented by Berio, Boulez and Stockhausen. Many of the current popular composers like Glass and Reich trace their root to this experimental school. The most fascinating chapter to me is "Minimal Music, Determinacy And The New Tonality" in which the Theatre Of Eternal Music (Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Marion Zazeela and John Cale) as well as the work of Terry Riley is discussed. Photographs, illustrations and musical notations enliven the text and the book concludes with a selected source bibliography, a discography of experimental music and a bibliography of publications since 1974. Brian Eno has contributed an interesting foreword to this edition. The text can get a bit technical for the non-musician, but it remains a detailed work on a radical musical direction that has borne great fruit in the years since it was first analysed in this thorough and scholarly work.

Nyman's 1974 classic is here reprinted sans revisions. Brilliant! It captures a moment -- as Nyman concludes his preface, "Thank goodness I wrote it when I did." EM is not a survey of 20th century avant-garde music. It focuses on one trend, inaugurated by Cage, Wolff, Feldman and Brown in the 1950s, a trend which explicitly attempted to overturn the traditional avant-garde then marching under the banner of total serialism. Nyman contrasts Wolff to Stockhausen, then a leading serialist: "Stockhausen is speaking of an unwanted situation needing to be remedied by his intervention, Wolff of a situation he is quite happy to accept, leaving sounds to go their own way." (27) As Cage says in his "Silence," "Not an attempt to understand... Just an attention to the activity of sounds." One of the great strengths of Nyman's short book is his careful attempt to define experimental music before he moves on to discuss the artists and their music. To summarize and paraphrase, he says experimental composers are excited by creating "a process of generating action," involving situations or fields delineated by compositional rules, but leaving them open to the performers. (4) Experimental music is uncompromisingly radical, and represents an ongoing influence on creative music, but has certainly not become any sort of popular movement. So for instance, while the early "minimalists" Young and Riley were arguably part of the experimental tendency, as were Reich's early phase patterns, (and hence are included here by Nyman), the later works of Reich, and especially Glass, are no longer open and experimental. And while Eno and recent techno/ambient artists have been influenced, their innovations have been more technical than conceptual by comparison. My recommendation if this sounds intriguing -- check out anything by the English free-improv group AMM, which is nowadays constituted by Eddie Prevost on percussion, Keith Rowe on guitar and electronics, and John Tilbury on piano!

When Michael Nyman first published this work in the 70s, it was the only book of its kind to discuss some of the most cutting-edge stuff going around. Most musical texts avoided discussing the Fluxus group as "music," but Nyman integrates these radicals easily, and provided the first discussion of the Scratch Orchestra (Cardew et al), and related topics. The book still contains some of the clearest discussions of these topics around. It's great to have it back in print, though too bad Nyman couldn't be bothered to provide updates on some of the folks discussed, like Hugh Skempton.

Before Michael Nyman was a successful composer topping a millionaire gross worth, he was indeed a perceptive writer,with a turn of poetic phrase as when he described Cardew's magnum opus The Great Learning. There he described the confluence of Cardew's use of the Analects of Confucius with expression for the common man/woman,Cardew's intent utilized graphics as a common language read by anyone, a music for amateurs and professional instrumentalists to sing and play simultaneously.Nyman's rather modest pamphlet here when written, it was the only comprehensive explanation of what for the most part remained a confused, variegated,and fragemented avant-garde.One with no discernable direction,nor creative agenda accept possibly not to have one,in the typical Zen fashion of the times. The departures here and most of what Nyman discusses emanate from the Post-Cage realm of non-expression. The concern was in process,in graphic notation, in the means rather than the ends, how a process can undergo multiplication either through determinate means, actual writing of music or improvisation, or a mixtures of both.Cage began much of these departures along with associates Morton Feldman and Earle Brown, and later Christian Wolff.Here Cage with his various Variations, was the biginning marks where the performers needed to prepare a score to perform from a set of guidelines determining tones,rhythm,duration,physical placement and selection of instrument.The score was a set of instructions, a blueprint in a way.There was no right or wrong way merely one that didn't excite and inspire. This reduction of the creative process to its bare minimum was an exciting step hence there was plenty of room for divine intervention. Schoenberg, Cage's teacher had taught him the wealth of processes in music from the reservoir of variation form. And his use of it throughout his life, is akin to an unoffical hommage to the master of dodecaphonic thinking.Cage went on to compose seven such works each entitled Variations with a successive number. It was like a diary. Nyman is a perceptive writer discussing the minimalist expressions as well,a realm which came to work for him.Back when he wrote this work minimalism was just beginning to be recognized as a viable road a subversion of the Western Canon, and what was labeled as the tyrannical serial road as practiced by the Europeans. Reading Nyman today in retrospect is far more interesting however than appraising the repetitive patterns cadre today, for back in the late Sixties, early Seventies, these minimalists concepts, of transforming, scaling,nuanced timbral changes and permutating rhythm as mosaic patterns indeed opened up a creative chasm that has only been closed now. The market success of it is all a matter of history now.Even the Post-minimalists a la John Adams have exhausted its bleak emotive world. But Nyman was the first to discuss Reich's music, and that of Phillip Glass, and there e