The Rise of Experimental Music in the 1960s documentary (2005)

Wilton Manors here music is trying to define what music might be it's to do with obviously with pushing pushing back the boundaries particularly in the 1960s [Applause] and the motivation for the sounds is more important than the final result composers giving up a little bit of their power to the performer but it's it's more an attitude than a style [Applause] did you see chance so something might happen that is potentially more beautiful than something that the composer could have planned and and that's where the experiment comes in [Music] [Music] although the term experimental music is specifically used to describe groups of American and British composers working during the 1960's experimenting with music is nothing new throughout history musicians have improvised in search of new and unexpected sounds in the 18th century there was even a game of chance attributed to Mozart which used to throw the dice a numerical grid and a numbered list of musical bars to compose new waltzes entirely at random during the course of this program the contributors will help us to compose a brand-new never before performed walls using Mozart's method puzzle [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] moving forward to centuries the experimental music movement began to develop in the 1950s as a reaction to strictly notated serial compositions of European composers like Beulah's and Stockhausen the so called danced at school whose rigorous and complex scores indicated every note rhythm and dynamic with merciless and mathematical precision and left many players feeling that they were wearing a musical straightjacket every time they performed if you look at some of the very complex scores you see the composer's almost becoming more and more dictatorial or oppressive every note has its own performing nuance its own expressive nuance so in order to prepare a performance of the score like that you would have to practice for hours and hours and hours however um your music most experimental music was written in free notation using graphs pictures chants procedures sometimes just written instructions with no notes at all [Music] well this was a very refreshing thing that instead of the score telling one rather forbidding sort of way set the metronome to one hundred and eighty two point five and play properly instead of that there were these much more liberating kind of graphic scores and instructions they're like blue touch paper here kind of pieces that was expressly there to inspire the performer rather than to limit in the actual physical concrete aspect of sound is is is not there at all and just references to [Music] these freedoms included in some cases more graphical notation so it was impossible to play the score the same twice over because there wasn't a written down sequence of precise notes each time the pieces played depending on the circumstances depending on the who who's playing it the identity of the piece changes so it's a kind of Perpetual identity crisis for for indeterminate for indeterminate piece of music [Music] [Applause] [Music] the godfather of the experimental music movement was John Cage experimental music is for me it's the music that follows on from from John Cage definitely Beulah's went in one direction and Cage went in the other direction while Europeans like Beulah's were seeking ever greater control over the music Cage was fascinated by chance and encouraged the random juxtaposition of events in his music he often composed pieces by tossing coins and consulting the I Ching and regarded even the act of listening to a record as a potential performance if as you have the record playing in your room your attention goes to something other than it then the superimposition of those two things may produce an activity which has the character of originality yeah the cage he was trying to get away from the material itself he didn't want his ego or his taste or any part of him to be reflected in the music he believed that sounds were sounds were sounds they had a life of their own cage took this philosophy to its logical conclusion in his most famous piece the completely silent four minutes 33 seconds originally not played on piano but not played here by a full orchestra the silent peace came about not because he wanted to write a silent piece that that's four minutes 33 seconds but because he cast the i-ching and the eye Turing instructed him to write a piece that had no music in it John Cage [Applause] becoming a doctor makes you feel better already that playful approach can be seen in his creation of the prepared piano which he invented while trying to make the grand piano sound more percussive and African and so I went into the kitchen and I got a pie plate and I put it down the strings and I saw I was going in the right direction but the pie plate bounced around so then I got a nail and it slipped then finally I got a wood spoon inaudible girl huh and it stayed in position and I was able to repeat from one moment to the next the sound as it is transformed by that insertion of wood screw and then I put nuts that were larger than the screws itself said they were rattled then I thought of putting weatherstripping under the first string over the middle and under the third and that have made a nice correspondence to the first sound which was Marbella for some reason I knew that it was better not to have a collection that was entirely beautiful but that it was nice to have some things in the collection that are distinctly not as beautiful as the others and that gave a kind of breaths [Music] by the start of the 1960s the work of cage and other experimentalist like Lamont Young had begun to influence young American composers who were tired of serialism and wanted to make a free music really went away because it is a fact of nature and Rick did bye-bye God that was another thing although to keep tonality calling it according this kind of music that keeps tonality as being experimental seems a bit of a misnomer it is more like traditional but there you go the problem of definition [Music] in 1964 on experimental musician in California compose one of the simplest pieces ever written and in doing so hit upon a new form of music minimalism when I showed it to the first few friends I showed it to they everybody kind of laughed and thought it was really a silly idea but just a little bit later than that a few weeks later Morden zavattini called me up and asked me to do a solo concert and I'd never been thinking about doing a concert of my own music and so community I thought well this will be a place to try the try the NC idea out so I called all my friends have played any kind of instrument anybody I knew at all in San Francisco we put together about 20 musicians and gave the first performance and I think was November 4th 1964 at the Jade Music Center with with with minimalism you got that the idea of open-endedness I mean in theory the music can go on forever I take a piece like teri writers in C in theory can go on and on forever in see consists of a series of simple repeating patterns and each musician moves gradually through the score of their own speed from bar one to bar 53 the result is a continually shifting kaleidoscope of sound with every performance being unique [Music] [Music] one of the players in the first performance of NC was Steve rice who soon developed his own form of minimalism inspired by his work with tape loops come out to show them come out to shoot and come out to show them come out to show they'd come out to show them to come out to show them come out to show you come out as a tape piece it uses the voice of a black kid who was arrested for murder I was approached by man the name of Truman Nelson who said he understood that I did something with tape and would I be willing to edit this pile of tapes he had of the boys police mothers and so on and so forth for a benefit and out of this stack of audio tape lasting maybe ten hours I heard this one phrase coming out to show them PETA but Adam was just sort of grabbed my ear and said that's the one the first and I would say probably the most important bridging that happened was in a piece called piano phase where in 1967 I in in really desperation the desperation of let us say a mad scientist trapped in the laboratory was I felt this tape thing can't be done by people somebody can't get in unison with another repeating pattern and gradually increases speed to least one beat ahead of it that's indigenous to tape recorders people can't do that but on the other hand I thought this is a fantastic process this is a very interesting way to make music rush began a series of experimental pieces based on shifting and repeated rhythmic patterns culminating in his famous clapping music I certainly think there's a very strong relationship between men and ilysm and experimentalism because there's the same desire to make music clearer and less complex and certainly in works like in seeing a lot of Steve Rogers music you can really hear the music unfolding you can hear every every system thats in it is very very clear what people don't realize I think again about the 60s they're actually a lot of the sixties were very much like the fifties it was extremely conservative people forget that the the Lady Chatterley like the lady shut his lovers court case was actually in the six he was in 61 wasn't it strolling one of thinks of it perhaps rebellious young British composers and art students were becoming increasingly anti-establishment in their outlook rejecting the rigidity of serial composition in favor of experimental music [Music] it seems to me that the best definition I can manage is it's quite political I think and quite anti-establishment and I can understand very much why the group of composers would feel the need to stop being anti-establishment because I still find that the world of particularly classical music in England is extremely conservative much as they try not to be it still is [Music] [Music] an unlikely source of inspiration for British experimentalists was Yoko Ono in the early 1960s she lived in New York where she belonged to the experimental music group Fluxus known as the High Priestess of the happening she composed pieces that didn't contain notes just general instructions to performers like listen to the sound of the earth turning when she came to London in the mid sixties she influenced not only pop music but also a young composer who soon became the leading figure in British experimental music Cornelius Cardew I think he was a bit influenced by performance art in the way the scratch orchestra was very early performance met people like Yoko Ono grapefruit and I expect he'd met other people of that kind and then when he went to New York in 1965 he joined the free improvisation group AMM [Music] [Music] I got involved with experiment music in the early 60s I was a jazz bass player and free improvising bass player and then I got interested in work of cage and others and started to compose and became interested in that way of working I got in touch in England with people in the experimental music world well I worked with Cornelius on all sorts of projects from about the middle 60s onwards first of all because I was a tuba player and Cornelius is really looking for people who played traditional instruments but who had interest in an experimental approach to music like some people like of my generation inquiring Restless young souls that we were we were we got interested in there in the new trends new new tendencies and so forth and so I almost didn't ever typically found myself consorting with people like car do you [Music] [Applause] [Music] with cardio and his colleagues a new way to composing began to emerge completely unlike any traditional British approach [Music] [Music] in the late 1960s Cardew founded his most important experimental music group a mixture of musicians and non-musicians called the scratch orchestra [Music] [Applause] [Music] well I think that it came from the scratch orchestra it's got together on an ad-hoc situation for an emergency there is a terming music isn't there if you look at the scratch orchestra there were people who were visual artists people who were trained composers trained performers you have bank clerks you had shop assistants you had students and young people and even children in the schedules so we always seem to have a large audience because we were a large orchestra so when we would bring along friends and to boost the that the numbers with Cardew and the scratch orchestra mean we know we made music with with with tax inspectors traffic wardens students the unemployed the these were our our musical colleagues so I think the mindset was simply an openness and an excitement because some cardio was just allowing people to be creative he was sort of creating a forum where people could have creative input which isn't that easily come by actually so I think people valued that very much [Music] [Applause] [Applause] these experimental musicians shunned the musical establishment at him returned the musical establishments shunned them while he works by avant-garde composers like Stockhausen and Beulah's were treated with respect the experimentalists of the sixties were largely ignored [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] in the 60 know we had audiences of about 30 2010 sometimes sometimes there were more people in the performing group than the audience so it's not the sort of thing that was disturbing the public very much we had a sort of poor audience [Applause] audiences were pretty baffled by a lot of it I think but there was a sort of quite healthy spirit I mean we were not kind of high priests for new music we were doing things that are rather kind of gentle and sometimes ironic way very calm and he was very keen on integrity I don't think he was a kind of jokey pub-like person you know it didn't tense joke around with the lads at all yes I think that there was a kind of high gloss on American experimental music there's a feeling of the music being a part of a culture that had produced the Jackson Pollock see rhaskos the people are doing sort of new things on rather kind of big and expansive scale whereas I think that Cornelius card you and those of us who kind of clustered around him had a far more sort of low-flying approach a very English approach as more tea and biscuits in the British approach I think well they're all of these pieces that involved toy robots and blowing up balloons and shaving cream all over the place there's quite a feeling of you know harrods toy shop about the whole thing I think you had to approach it seriously although you know I did one of cause pieces on a balloon because it's a it said hold a long note I was the person who had to hold the long note well other things happened around me so I performed it on a balloon which gave rise to hilarity but the performance of experimental music are dedicated there's a task to be done they perform the music to the best of their ability and they get on with it they're not taking the mickey Gavin Bryars was closely associated with the experimental music movement that free approach to music making can be heard in his 1969 composition the sinking of the Titanic [Music] well the original version of these actually was a little sketch which was actually written for an exhibition at Portsmouth Art College where I was teaching so I had this like wondered about what could be a conceptual piece of music and I made this sketch for the sinking of Titanic which is based on just what would happen to the music when as a band were playing and it goes under the water and and it was based on just the last five minutes of the the ship sinking as a band played as him [Music] the British experimentalists unique blend of seriousness and humor is to be fired by the music of David Bedford such as his extraordinary with a hundred kazoos the deal was that the first hundred members the audience who came in were given a kazoo it was a commission for pierre boulez for a round house prom the actual prescription was have a piece with the audience participation so I did that and there's a graphic score which the players are given the audience are given as they enter and they're various times in the score where the audience are asked to join in with the players you know simple stuff you can do it even if you can't read music there's a picture of a motorbike as a picture of a solar system which the audience are asked to interpret on their kazoos however I'd misinterpreted the deal that the video of audience participation actually was at the concert there was a perforated slip at the bottom of the program where you could write a question for blue there's and pass it to the end of your row and he looked at the minion tool and then answered the ones he wanted to answer at the end and that was the audience participation so withdrawn from the concert and received its premiere in Canada which was very nice obscure and esoteric though it was experimental music had an influence on popular music of the period from the Beatles to Roxy music I don't know things like Roxy Music and briny you know there's a lot of music that Frank Zappa even that has the same sort of irony and eclecticism and electronics that were being used in experimental music so there is certainly an area of crossover there yeah there are some areas of experimental music which affected some musicians Brian Eno for example went to art college and was around experimental music when he was a student and that affected his approach and later he played some kind of homage to that by issuing a series of recordings are called obscure art college people two of the Beatles yeah but I think more importantly things a phenomenon like minimalism undoubtedly had a an influence on techno music and dance music [Laughter] [Music] in America by the early seventies minimalism had proved to be the most successful and durable form of experimental music indeed minimalist composers like Steve Wright and Philip Glass gradually stopped being regarded by the musical establishment is experimental and became part of the mainstream in Brittany to the early 70s was the high point for experimentalists notably with Gavin Bryars most famous composition well Jesus but is slightly later it's 1971 that I mean both those pieces Jesus Madonna Titanic did gruel entirely out to the experimental music world and my approach to making those pieces was entirely consistent with what we did things Jesus blood was a kind of found object in the sense that I came across and quite comfortable accident his voice of an old man singing a friend to religious hymn it's on a piece of tape which is actually gonna be thrown away and happened to listen to it and retained it I made a loop and I added gradually added an accompaniment and that was the piece essentially getting more and more complicated in a way but it's as simple as that in the end the power of the piecewise playing in the power of the old man's voice rather than anything I do with it I just try and treat it respectfully [Music] [Music] [Music] Oh this Garfield Oh [Music] Oh [Music] fishburne please [Music] yes [Music] it essentially zhis but is a kind of a piece which goes out to the experimental music world and certainly that's something which we did at that time in terms of what I observed was 1972 was a really bumper year and for various reasons that was an exception but then the next year we had the beginnings of the oil crisis and funding just got that much less by now many musicians started feel that the movement had run its course and cracks began to appear some led by Cornelius Cardew became intensely political and abandoned what they saw as bourgeois music in favor of writing Socialist Workers songs a group of people that call was connected with and some went away and made efforts to look political some denotes eaten abandoned any idea of them socialist ideals and continued pure sound pure form music experimental and the rest joined core Cornelius Elam well that's when I withdrew from that particular aspect the scratch orchestra I'm not a Maoist and or whatever Cornelius was and I just couldn't go with it you know so I gave up then and I think he did lose a lot of a lot of credibility when when he went into that and I think you know card use idea of opening up scores and opening up performance possibilities to amateur was all to do with almost like a Confucian aesthetic really guiding people by example rather than telling them that you didn't like what they were doing but of course that did split up the scratch orchestra well I jumped ship when politics became a big issue because I'd worked Cornelison had worked in scratch orchestra because of the proliferation of what seemed to me very Sparky ideas and there was something rather sort of dictatorial a new kind of dictatorship that came up regarding the left-wing politics that scratch orchestra embarked on and a few of us judgeship politics did another minor it's right to the end so although we went different ways musically I mean the politics moved it into different direction because clearly the music had to be more accessible and less kind of bizarre if it was going to work in this political way but cage never got to that I think hemming cage was he balked I think that the implications of his musical philosophy card you actually went through it and went into social collective music making with radical consequences but Kate Cage I think both it that he never could never could take that never could take that step other British composers turn to irony such as John White with his drinking and hooting machine oh yes the drinking and hooting machine I left the scratch orchestra because of all sorts of political implications that were blowing up like a dark cloud and I got back into writing a kind of alternative to the American minimalists working for boomers in one of the administrative offices of the time they got the use of several crates of this dietary while trying to think of a good musical use for it suddenly occurred to me about blowing notes across the tops of bottles and how to alter the pitch by taking a small swig or large gulp and so all of this has laid out in a very pedantic sort of way for the performers and we finished the first performance holds high as kites and dietary cider my goodness [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the most famous foray into irony was perhaps the greatest glory of the entire British experimental movement the Portsmouth Sinfonia [Music] the Portsmouth symphonia was real breath of fresh air at the time I mean Gavin Bryars went down there with a brief to lecture the students at the fine arts department and instead of playing their movements from Beethoven's Symphony and pointing out what was the exposition etc etc he are the Malta by instruments and got them to play standard classics the best of their ability [Music] [Applause] [Music] the intention of that that I was never involved in it was to open up music to people who hadn't really mastered an instrument necessarily and then they played the interpretive classical repertoire and the interest of the listener came from all the mistakes and the wrong notes played so it's a way of perverting distorting familiar music that sometimes in other contexts composers would do very seriously [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] that was such a beautiful moment Capital Radio used to wake me up for me to go to my paper round and I had heard the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with their hooked on classics and been disgusted and upset and everything with a clap trap going all the way through it on the offbeat and then I was woken up by Capital Radio and there was this beautiful raucous atonal a thing by the Portsmouth Sinfonia which they called a classical muddly and even better halfway to halfway through the clap goes in order to fit in with the Blue Danube it goes into three four but really awkwardly and wrongly I just fell out of bed and joy so really that's the great moments of music for me [Music] what was the legacy of the experimentalists well they made tonality and simplicity respectable again in classical music that's highly regarded composers like Michael Nyman have proved and without minimalism would techno music ever had developed the phenomenon like minimalism undoubtedly had a an influence on techno music and dance music I remember in the early 1980s I heard a piece a single called T VOD made by a guy called Daniel Miller who went on to to form mute records he's the man behind Depeche Mode and all that eighties cynthy pop and T VOD has the same riff the same line the same phrase repeated over and over and over again and it's the first time I've heard this the same line over and over again nobody done it before as far as I knew the experimentalists showed that there can be beauty in randomness in simplicity and in repetition and that meaningful music can be created even by the chance throw of a dice as Mozart had playfully suggested 200 years earlier and here in all probability is the very very first performance of a newly created Mozart wharfs composed by BBC Four [Music] and here's a piano we prepared earlier [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you can you finish with me does that mean well not an awful lot of lava for even [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

Views: 160,639

Keywords: the history, documentary, greatest, BBC, PBS, full

Id: nKPFggCNt_o

Length: 49min 58sec (2998 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 09 2019