The New York School:
Then and Now
Lecture for LiveWire 7
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Friday, October 28, 2016
2:00 PM
What follows is a lecture for general audiences I gave on the so-called New York School of Composers (pictured above, left to right: Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, John Cage, Morton Feldman) as part of the LiveWire 7 music festival, at the invitation of my friend and colleague Tom Goldstein who organized the festival. My appearance also included a performance by me of John Cage's Child of Tree and composer-pianist Curt Cacioppo performing the World Premiere of my complete Preludes for solo piano: World's End Preludes (2015) followed by Devisadero (2007).
Before
I begin I want to thank Tom Goldstein for inviting me, allowing me the chance
to perform one of my favorite pieces, talk about what I regard as one of the
most important moments in the musical history of the last century, give some
personal observations about the experimental tradition, which I regard as the
most important American contribution to the history of composed classical
music, and then end with a performance of my own recent contribution to that
tradition. I’d also like to acknowledge two
important sources for what follows: Steven Johnson’s excellent collection, The New York Schools of Music and Visual
Art, which includes a very important essay by Thomas DeLio who is present
today and whose music will be featured at Stacy Mastrian’s concert on Saturday.
And the recently published Selected Letters of John Cage, edited by Laura
Kuhn, director of the John Cage Trust.
So to begin: What was the New York School, who was part of it, and when historically did it happen? Normally I'd need to include the where but in this case I think we all understand that it happened in New York City. Let's address these questions in reverse beginning with when. Most scholars consider the dates when the New York School of Composers were most active as beginning in 1950, when John Cage was living on 326 Monroe Street, in what he called the "Bozza Mansion," named after his landlord, and definitely not a "mansion." In 1954, Cage left New York City to join an artistic community founded by ex-Black Mountain College student Paul Williams at Stony Point, on the west side of the Hudson river, about 40 miles north of New York City. And by the time he left for Stony Point, the New York School of Composers, as a group in regular contact with each other, no longer existed. You can probably guess who the composers were just by looking at the music being programmed but I'll list them here: John Cage, already mentioned, born in 1912 and therefore the oldest at 38 in 1950, he is also the reason why the school exists at all. Everything, at least initially, revolved around him in the sense that everyone who is considered part of the New York School, with possibly one exception who I'll mention later, came in contact with each other through him. And, in fact, as the correspondence recently published makes clear, the relations were not always so congenial between the others and often the relations were one-on-one to Cage. I'll explain this in some detail in what follows, but first let me introduce the other composers, or instead why don't we have Morton Feldman do the honors: "Four composers--John Cage, Earle Brown Christian Wolff and myself--became friends, saw each other constantly--and something happened." (Johnson p.53)
The first contact between composers of the New York School was between John Cage and Morton Feldman, on January 26, 1950 to be exact, at Carnegie Hall where they heard Webern's Symphony Op. 21 conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos. According to Feldman, he walked over to Cage, whom he had never met, and said "Wasn't that beautiful?" and they immediately made arrangements to meet. At that time, Cage was an already established and well-known composer; Feldman on the other hand, born in 1926 and 24 at the time, was completely unknown, studying composition with Wallingford Riegger and Stefan Wolpe. Their relationship was definitely the closest of any of the group, unless you include David Tudor, who also studied with Stefan Wolpe and who Cage met through Feldman. Tudor is a special case and I won't include him here because his connection to the New York School, and Cage in particular, is really a subject to itself. You can get a very good sense of the closeness between Cage and Feldman by listening to conversations that were recorded at WBAI radio in NYC, between July 1966-January 1967, which you can hear for yourself on the Other Minds Audio Archive.
Clearly by then they knew each other well. When they first met, they would talk for hours at a time, and often more about painting than music. Their shared love of art was a strong initial attraction, with Feldman in particular being interested in the Abstract Expressionists and especially close to the painter Philip Guston.
 |
| Phillip Guston, Attar (1953) |
And the term New York School originates with those same artists, among others active in New York in the 1940s and early 1950s, with art historian Irving Sandler being the initial champion of the label, even though his work hasn't aged particularly well. There are many strong connections between the New York Schools of Art and Music but perhaps the one most important to mention here is one the British musicologist David Nicholls posits, that, both in music and art, it was the first time a group of composers and visual artists from the United States had a truly international impact.
 |
| Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923) |
 |
| Jasper Johns, Flag (1954-55) |
 |
| Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting (1951) |
Feldman's relations with Cage were both close and volatile, as their correspondence, in part, shows. There are no letters in the published correspondence prior to 1954, where Cage writes "it has been a great source of sorrow to me to lose your friendship." And after that only three others, all business-like. According to Laura Kuhn, the relations were increasingly strained by Cage's bringing Earle Brown to the group in 1952. And the break between Cage and Feldman, with both leaving the Bozza Mansion, Feldman to Washington Square, Cage as mentioned to Stony Point, is where scholars draw an end to the New York School.
The second composer to enter Cage's circle was Christian Wolff, born in 1934 and thus only 16 years old. They met in April of 1950, not long after the first meeting between Cage and Feldman, through Wolff's piano teacher Grete Sultan, a good friend of Cage, who would eventually compose a monumental piano work for her, his Etudes Australes. She sent Wolff to Cage in order for him to study composition. Cage was especially fond of Wolff and his music. In the correspondence there are more letters (seven) written to Wolff than all the other composers combined. And they often happen at important moments in Cage's career, so much so that I'll mention some of them briefly: the first is in 1951 as Cage was writing the second part of his Music of Changes; and it is important to note that Wolff, whose father was the publisher of Pantheon books, gave Cage as a gift one of his father's publications, a newly translated edition, with a forward by Carl Jung, of the I-Ching, which Cage was using to write his Music of Changes and which he used to compose for the rest of his life; the second in 1956, while living at Stony Point, just as he had finished his ill-fated book on Virgil Thomson (which Thomson didn't like); the third was in 1960 where he writes "Your music remains my favorite music"; the fourth in 1961 only months before his first book "Silence" is published; the fifth in 1974, a long letter on the subject of "power" during a time when Christian Wolff was deeply involved in politics, a lifelong concern of his, and particularly the work of Cornelius Cardew. Cage writes that he's "not as optimistic as a musician, as I was. At least I do not see that by my continuing my work that society will change. They why do I go on? I think the going on is partly habit, partly some continuing energy, and partly hope of discovery." (Selected Letters, p.444) 1974, it should be noted, is when Cage finished his Empty Words, a work I regard as where he finally "silenced the self" from the writing of poetry, something you can read more about in my Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition, which recently came out in a second edition published (again) by Northeastern University Press.
And it is after this that Cage composes Child of Tree, an important piece for Cage, as result of his "hope for discovery" which I see as "what comes after the silence of nothing," where sound and silence, intention and non-intention co-exist. And Cage's enthusiasm for Wolff's music was life long. In 1988, I organized a retrospective concert of Cage's music when he was the headlining composer at the John Donald Robb Composers' Symposium, the beginning of what has been, for me, a lifelong study of his work. It is a tradition to take the headlining composer to lunch on the last day of the festival and ask for recommendations as to what composers we might invite in the future. John Cage had only one recommendation: Christian Wolff. It took us until 1993 to take him up on that recommendation, I organized the festival that year, and it was my first of many meetings with Christian Wolff.
So now, I've moved from scholar to participant in a way, by letting the audience know of my personal associations with Cage and Wolff. I only met Morton Feldman once, at Darmstadt in 1986 and he died, way too young, the following year. The only composer in the group I never met was Earle Brown and I definitely know less about him than the other three, though I think his work of the four is the most in need of becoming better known. Even Feldman, who liked him least, felt that his work had been appropriated without credit by composers like Berio and Lutoslawski who became better known using some of Brown's original ideas. His music was perhaps the most visually connected to the arts of the time, he was especially interested in the improvisatory "all-over" painting methods of Jackson Pollock, and ever more influenced by the mobiles of Alexander Calder which he used as models for compositions he wrote.
So now, I've moved from scholar to participant in a way, by letting the audience know of my personal associations with Cage and Wolff. I only met Morton Feldman once, at Darmstadt in 1986 and he died, way too young, the following year. The only composer in the group I never met was Earle Brown and I definitely know less about him than the other three, though I think his work of the four is the most in need of becoming better known. Even Feldman, who liked him least, felt that his work had been appropriated without credit by composers like Berio and Lutoslawski who became better known using some of Brown's original ideas. His music was perhaps the most visually connected to the arts of the time, he was especially interested in the improvisatory "all-over" painting methods of Jackson Pollock, and ever more influenced by the mobiles of Alexander Calder which he used as models for compositions he wrote.
 |
| Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) |
 |
| Alexander Calder, Yellow Sail (1950) |
Brown came late to the group, through Cage's invitation, after meeting in Denver following a Cunningham dance concert, likely for practical reasons: Earle Brown would come to assist Cage in the thankless task of putting together Cage's piece for magnetic tape Williams Mix and his wife at the time, Carolyn Brown would become a lead dancer for the Cunningham Dance Company. The only letter to Brown from Cage predates the couple's coming to New York. Arriving in 1952, as mentioned earlier, Brown was a polarizing figure. Feldman didn't want him to be part of the group, and Brown himself never included Christian Wolff when talking about the group. Cage was the only truly connective tissue holding things together. For someone who once wrote about the composers we now regard as the New York School, "Henry Cowell remarked at the New School, before a concert of works by Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and myself, that here were four composers who were getting rid of the glue," (Johnson, p.21) it is interesting to note that in keeping the New York School intact for as long as it did, Cage himself was the "glue."
But let's not linger regarding the personal difficulties of keeping such an enormously talented group of composers in such close contact together long-term. And there are plenty of opportunities during this festival to hear and draw your own conclusions as to the merits of their compositions, not by listening to me talk about them but instead by listening to the music yourselves. What I would like to emphasize here is how Cage continues, in his "History of Experimental Music in the United States" essay from which I quoted, where he writes "where people had felt the necessity to stick sounds together to make a continuity, we four felt the opposite necessity to get rid of the glue so that sounds would be themselves."
"Sounds would be themselves." Unfix the continuity, between sounds, between present and past, to seek the newness in what one hears directly. This connects the composers of the New York School to themselves, regardless of their differences which were many, connects them with their great predecessors, which makes them part of the American Experimental Tradition, as described theoretically by Henry Cowell in his great New Musical Resources which all experimental composers, then and now, have read and learned from. Cowell as the great "open sesame" to New Music, which is not the same as the German Neue Musik which wants to separate. No Cowell's New Music wants to connect, to bring together all music that seeks to be new by how it sounds, not by how it is made. It was Cowell who introduced everyone to the music of Charles Ives, was the conduit, at least initially of bringing Edgard Varèse to the attention of composers like Cage and Feldman even more so. And Varèse, as well as Stefan Wolpe (teacher of Feldman and Tudor) who, like Cage and Feldman attended the Artist Club meetings where visual artists regularly gave talks in the early 50s, as they themselves did, provide the European connection that wants to be inclusive. In fact Cage once said that if artists hadn't come to his concerts, the halls would have been empty. Painters and composers in the same room, connected by the one thing they share: being an artist in the larger, more inclusive sense. As Morton Feldman once said about Cage, the real question is, "Is music an art form? For that is what John Cage is forcing us to decide." To these composers, and those of us influenced by them, the answer is yes.
This inclusive world, which whether conservatives here and everywhere like it or not, is perhaps more than anything how the sensibility of the New York School, it's predecessors and successors, influences our present day most. Inclusiveness about sounds, how they are made, who makes them, how they are heard and who hears them, when we think this way it is primarily about openness, which for me at least is grounded in listening. John Cage all the way back when he was a teenager wrote an essay later published in a collection of his writings, about our relation to our Mexican neighbor called "Other People Think", something as relevant and maybe more so now than then and what he said was this: "they don't think like we do." And how to you respond to that? You listen. For me, the great legacy of the New York School, as well as the American Experimental Tradition of which it is part, is that: listening. The composers and performers who I have met, many of whom write and perform differently from me and from each other, if they see themselves as experimental like I do, it comes from listening as primary--aural perception more central than conception.
I've always thought the legacy of the New York School specifically and more generally of the experimental tradition can be thought favoring means versus ends. The means or process as it has often been called, nowadays is often through improvisation, Malcolm Goldstein, headliner for this festival, has been one of the pioneers of this in my opinion, and I also think of Pauline Oliveros who is as well, frequently aided with electronics. And these two combined, live in the moment improvisation with electronics, is where I frequently hear the most interesting experimental music today. I also think Child of Tree is a great example of how Cage embraces both electronics and improvisation, which he used to dislike, by removing what he called one's "taste and memory." Now this is a loaded subject and composer/historian George Lewis has rightly questioned this as a way of erasing memories essential to cultural experiences. But we need not decide for or against what Cage desires and what Lewis criticizes, not anyway if we follow the path of inclusiveness that I find essential to the experimental tradition, which Cage and Lewis both share. Stefan Wolpe, who is also seen by some to be tangentially part of the New York School, I alluded to this earlier, once said "Good is to know not to know how much one is knowing." Or as art historian Dore Ashton once wrote regarding the Abstract Expressionists, "the unknown is of higher value than the known." For Cage, Child of Tree offers one the opportunity of improvising in the context of "not knowing."
The means can also include, as it does for me, location: in other words where you are listening not just what you hear. For me, this happens during long walks and my piano preludes were written during very long walks in the New Mexico wilderness and the Pennsylvania woods. You can read about this in the program notes, preferably before the piece is played.
When I first agreed to be part of this festival, I made some off-hand remark to Tom Goldstein about me not being part of the New York School when considering a performance of my music at this festival. Tom being Tom held on to that thought, which I had completely forgotten, and brought it up last week saying he thought my connection was through this relationship I have with nature. There is some truth to take I think, first of all regarding place as I mentioned but also definitely regarding how I listen when I walk in those mountains and woods. Sounds one hears when silent, how I prepare myself to compose and how these preludes came to be written, is remarkably like what one hears when listening to Cage's masterpiece 4'33". I think also this idea of control is important, to "get rid of the glue" in a sense is a willingness to let go, to let those sounds be themselves, to co-exist, as I've often called it, with your materials, or for that matter with the world you live in. A music that comes out of discovery either of sounds heard on a trail, as in Devisadero, or the voices of spirits heard, leading one to a horrifying story of a displaced people as in my World's End Preludes.*
But let's not linger regarding the personal difficulties of keeping such an enormously talented group of composers in such close contact together long-term. And there are plenty of opportunities during this festival to hear and draw your own conclusions as to the merits of their compositions, not by listening to me talk about them but instead by listening to the music yourselves. What I would like to emphasize here is how Cage continues, in his "History of Experimental Music in the United States" essay from which I quoted, where he writes "where people had felt the necessity to stick sounds together to make a continuity, we four felt the opposite necessity to get rid of the glue so that sounds would be themselves."
"Sounds would be themselves." Unfix the continuity, between sounds, between present and past, to seek the newness in what one hears directly. This connects the composers of the New York School to themselves, regardless of their differences which were many, connects them with their great predecessors, which makes them part of the American Experimental Tradition, as described theoretically by Henry Cowell in his great New Musical Resources which all experimental composers, then and now, have read and learned from. Cowell as the great "open sesame" to New Music, which is not the same as the German Neue Musik which wants to separate. No Cowell's New Music wants to connect, to bring together all music that seeks to be new by how it sounds, not by how it is made. It was Cowell who introduced everyone to the music of Charles Ives, was the conduit, at least initially of bringing Edgard Varèse to the attention of composers like Cage and Feldman even more so. And Varèse, as well as Stefan Wolpe (teacher of Feldman and Tudor) who, like Cage and Feldman attended the Artist Club meetings where visual artists regularly gave talks in the early 50s, as they themselves did, provide the European connection that wants to be inclusive. In fact Cage once said that if artists hadn't come to his concerts, the halls would have been empty. Painters and composers in the same room, connected by the one thing they share: being an artist in the larger, more inclusive sense. As Morton Feldman once said about Cage, the real question is, "Is music an art form? For that is what John Cage is forcing us to decide." To these composers, and those of us influenced by them, the answer is yes.
.............................................................................................................................................
This inclusive world, which whether conservatives here and everywhere like it or not, is perhaps more than anything how the sensibility of the New York School, it's predecessors and successors, influences our present day most. Inclusiveness about sounds, how they are made, who makes them, how they are heard and who hears them, when we think this way it is primarily about openness, which for me at least is grounded in listening. John Cage all the way back when he was a teenager wrote an essay later published in a collection of his writings, about our relation to our Mexican neighbor called "Other People Think", something as relevant and maybe more so now than then and what he said was this: "they don't think like we do." And how to you respond to that? You listen. For me, the great legacy of the New York School, as well as the American Experimental Tradition of which it is part, is that: listening. The composers and performers who I have met, many of whom write and perform differently from me and from each other, if they see themselves as experimental like I do, it comes from listening as primary--aural perception more central than conception.
I've always thought the legacy of the New York School specifically and more generally of the experimental tradition can be thought favoring means versus ends. The means or process as it has often been called, nowadays is often through improvisation, Malcolm Goldstein, headliner for this festival, has been one of the pioneers of this in my opinion, and I also think of Pauline Oliveros who is as well, frequently aided with electronics. And these two combined, live in the moment improvisation with electronics, is where I frequently hear the most interesting experimental music today. I also think Child of Tree is a great example of how Cage embraces both electronics and improvisation, which he used to dislike, by removing what he called one's "taste and memory." Now this is a loaded subject and composer/historian George Lewis has rightly questioned this as a way of erasing memories essential to cultural experiences. But we need not decide for or against what Cage desires and what Lewis criticizes, not anyway if we follow the path of inclusiveness that I find essential to the experimental tradition, which Cage and Lewis both share. Stefan Wolpe, who is also seen by some to be tangentially part of the New York School, I alluded to this earlier, once said "Good is to know not to know how much one is knowing." Or as art historian Dore Ashton once wrote regarding the Abstract Expressionists, "the unknown is of higher value than the known." For Cage, Child of Tree offers one the opportunity of improvising in the context of "not knowing."
The means can also include, as it does for me, location: in other words where you are listening not just what you hear. For me, this happens during long walks and my piano preludes were written during very long walks in the New Mexico wilderness and the Pennsylvania woods. You can read about this in the program notes, preferably before the piece is played.
When I first agreed to be part of this festival, I made some off-hand remark to Tom Goldstein about me not being part of the New York School when considering a performance of my music at this festival. Tom being Tom held on to that thought, which I had completely forgotten, and brought it up last week saying he thought my connection was through this relationship I have with nature. There is some truth to take I think, first of all regarding place as I mentioned but also definitely regarding how I listen when I walk in those mountains and woods. Sounds one hears when silent, how I prepare myself to compose and how these preludes came to be written, is remarkably like what one hears when listening to Cage's masterpiece 4'33". I think also this idea of control is important, to "get rid of the glue" in a sense is a willingness to let go, to let those sounds be themselves, to co-exist, as I've often called it, with your materials, or for that matter with the world you live in. A music that comes out of discovery either of sounds heard on a trail, as in Devisadero, or the voices of spirits heard, leading one to a horrifying story of a displaced people as in my World's End Preludes.*
*(I write about this piece in another blog entry: The Making of World's End Preludes)
Morton Feldman once wrote, regarding what he learned from painting, of a "perceptive temperament that waits and observes the inherent mystery of its materials, as opposed to the composer's vested interest in his craft ... the painter achieves mastery by allowing what is being done to be itself. In a way to step aside in order to be in control." (Johnson, p.109)
Stepping aside, that's what I did when I wrote my Preludes, what I do in woods and mountains, why I listen and co-exist with my materials, how I heard those silenced Native American voices in Pennsylvania that then sent me back to New Mexico where I lived with those other voices for decades, and wrote it down.
John Cage wrote a four channel text piece titled "Where are we going? What are we doing?" that was later published in Silence. The idea was that if you had all four voices going at once you wouldn't be able to pick up everything that was said and would instead pick out what you could hear and the experience would be determined by listener rather than writer. When we programmed it for the Cage retrospective in 1988 something had radically changed: you could hear all voices at once and the piece became a totality that could be completely understood. For that reason I take a different view regarding history, holding on to memories myself, experiencing the past not as something learned but, during those long walks of mine, something that can be discovered or perhaps a better word in this context, revealed. Those seem like Cage's "whispered truths to me," and remind me of Thoreau in the Maine Woods, lost probably, frightened certainly, as he found himself above the treeline on Mount Katahdin, where he famously exclaimed, possibly with a sense of panic but that now I believe can be seen as both a question as well as a way of being in the world: "Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?" Let's say this at least, I see it as my way of being in the world, in contact: trying to stay in contact with the shifting sands ever present, above the New Mexico tree line experiencing the fearsome power of nature or in the deep woods of Pennsylvania, lost, trying to find your way, all the while asking "who are we?" and "where are we?"
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Here is the premiere performance of Devisadero by Curt Cacioppo (John Donald Robb Composers' Symposium, Albuquerque, New Mexico 2008) who performed the complete Preludes for solo piano after I read, due to time constraints, a shortened version of this lecture) :
No comments:
Post a Comment