Dancing about Architecture

“Clapping Music” (1972), performed by Russ Hartenberger and Steve Reich.

This is a piece for two people clapping. The clapping goes out of phase, but by discrete time units, rather than gradually, as with “Piano Phase”.

I think this is the weakest of the four Early Works. I’m not exactly sure why—maybe it’s because the timbre of clapping is not that interesting; it doesn’t have the richness of the human voice that makes “Come Out” and “It’s Gonna Rain” so good. Also, it doesn’t have the rich interplay between the parts that arises from gradual phase shifting, such as in “Piano Phase”.

“Piano Phase” (1967), performed by Double Edge: Nurit Tilles and Edmund Niemann.

This is a work for two pianos that play the same thing but gradually go out of phase.

This is a really interesting piece to listen to and I’m sure it’s devilishly hard to play. (Although I guess all the first pianist has to do is play everything at the same tempo and try his best to ignore the second pianist—it’s the second pianist, the one that’s going out of phase, who has it tough.) At least, it sounds to me like it would be devilishly hard to play. But, according to Steve Reich’s writings, it isn’t that hard once you get the hang of it. He talks about how you can get absorbed in listening to the sound of it while playing. I would think you would almost have to ignore the overall sound and just concentrate on the technical matter of going slightly out of phase with the other pianist, but I’ve never tried playing it. Maybe I should.

What you hear when you listen to this isn’t two pianos playing the same thing. Sometimes you do hear two pianos playing the same thing, but often you hear two pianos playing two different things, or two pianos playing the same thing and another piano playing something completely different. But, of course, that’s just an illusion, you’re always just hearing two pianos playing the same thing, and the complexity that arises from the phase shifting is what makes the piece. Some parts of it sound like a whirling calliope, and then other parts have a weird syncopation, even though the original phrases are not syncopated.

Sometimes it reminds me of that black and white optical illusion where, if you concentrate on the white part, you see a young woman, but, if you concentrate on the black part, you see an old hag. In “Piano Phase”, if you start concentrating on one part of the sound, it will start sounding different than it did when it was only at the periphery of your hearing.

This work is process music where the process acts on a short phrase. The phrase is run on two loops that slowly go out of synch and this causes phasing. One loop is in the left field and the other is in the right field of the stereo spectrum. Because of this, it’s easy to hear the loops go out of synch, at least initially. But it sounds like there is more going on than just the initial phase shifting. After awhile the verbal phrase (if you can call still call it that, at this point) starts to reverberate or echo, and then it sounds like maybe this process is fed into itself. After a while, the sound (it’s definitely no longer a verbal phrase (well, of course, it is, but you can’t tell that anymore)) starts to break up. Near the end of the piece it sounds like a combination of maybe a swarm of angry insects and the chanting, “Got one, got one, everybody’s got one” part of “I Am the Walrus”. But it doesn’t really sound quite like that. It just sounds like what it is, which you have to hear.

People have commented on this being a political work because the initial recording is of an African-American teenager describing being brutalized by the police, but I don’t really hear that. I wouldn’t have been able to guess that was what the phrase was about, if I hadn’t read it. I think it turns out to be a good piece, because the person’s voice has a nice, interesting timbre and the phrase is interesting (it’s sort of surreal, in a way) regardless of its political or historical context. Like Bob Dylan’s early songs, it’s more artistic than it is topical.

As heard on my back porch in Rochester, Minnesota one cold Sunday November evening at around 5 o’clock.

I can hear the cars going by on Highway 52 to the West. But I can also hear cars to the South and I don’t know what road they’re on. My kitten’s ID tags are jingling as she walks around. They make a different sound when they hit the tiles. At first I thought I was hearing the wind, but I think it’s just the cars and the fact that it’s so cold out here that makes me think part of the cars’ sound is the wind. The phone’s ringing but I won’t answer it. Cat’s tags jingling as she runs to the phone. I hear my voice (on the message on the answering machine). I hear my sister’s voice (through the answering machine).

[I jumped up and got it. I thought it might be an emergency or something, but it wasn’t. So, I talked to her for a while and now I’m going to start 4’33” again.]

Anyway, like I was saying, it’s weird how you can think something like the sound of cars is the sound of the wind until you listen closer. (I guess the wind doesn’t really have a sound of its own, now that I think about it.) I think Zappa just closed and opened the piano lid or something. My neighbor called his dog in. I can hear my tinnitus. It sounds like you can distinguish between cars and trucks and even which way they’re going, but that might be an illusion because the highway is not that close. I hear my neighbor’s wind chimes. So now I am hearing the wind! No one’s honking. No, I take that back. Someone is uptight and just honked their horn—maybe they just want to get home, but still. I can hear a car right on my street now. I heard myself cough. Damn, it’s cold out. I heard Zappa close the piano lid again. I hear a garage door opening or closing. The piece just ended and a John Cale recording came on. One thing you can’t hear out here is the cold.

This work consists mainly of many multitracked keyboard (electric organ, electric harpsichord, and ‘rocksichord’) parts played by Riley. Although the keyboards differ in timbre, the piece has a sort of homogenous sound. But it’s a nice homogenous sound, a sort of nice, warm bath of ostinati, whirligig keyboard sounds taking off into outer space or wherever, and brilliant solos, which appear to be improvised.

It has a certain formal overall structure I’m sure, but it’s hard, at least for me, to discern it. For example, there’s a lovely part in the middle where everything goes quiet and then something sounding like a beautiful Bach line is played on the electric organ (which sounds more like a beautiful cathedral pipe organ than a B-3). This piece sounds as much like fusion jazz as it does classical music (and it sounds as much like classical music as it does fusion jazz). It’s sort of halfway between Joe Zawinul and Switched-On Bach.

This is a piece for an indeterminate number and type of instruments. It’s at a moderate tempo and the dynamics are fairly constant throughout.

I like this work a lot. It’s mesmerizing. I’ve listened to it quite few times already, and am listening to it again, while I type these thoughts, but it’s hard, because the piece keeps drawing me in.

A weird thing about this piece is that it sounds like there are some improvised bits in the middle. Of course, there aren’t any improvised notes—the notes are written out, even though when to switch from pattern to pattern is improvised—but there is something that sounds like a recorder in the middle that seems to have made a break for it and gone over the wall. I wonder whether this sort of thing surprised Riley. Riley could have recorded this as a one-man band (by multitracking), but maybe this is the sort of (what to me sounds unexpected) thing that made him record it with other musicians.

This piece is really a sort of ‘cloud’ of possibilities that only ‘settles down’ or becomes well defined in a particular performance. It’s too bad that the CD captures just one realization of this piece. Even the same band, on the same afternoon, I’m sure, would have recorded a much different version of it. I wonder whether this (the fact that there is one ‘definitive’ version of this piece) disappoints Riley sometimes. The ideal ‘recording’ of this piece (in my opinion) would be a computer program that generates different interpretations.

In fact, Riley is sort of a computer programmer, as much as a composer, in the writing of this piece. . (IBM pays me good money, thank you, to write computer programs, so I hope (for IBM’s sake, at least) that I’m not being completely naïve in these observations.) In computer programming, you have to think carefully about every possible sequence of events (permitted by your program) that a user might come up with. This is not easy. The first thought that comes to mind when a programmer looks at many bugs is, “I never thought anyone would do that.” Now, what Riley is doing here is something much more complicated than your run-of-the-mill computer programming. What he is doing here is what is known in the industry as “multi-threaded programming”. In multi-threaded programming, there are several paths of execution happening simultaneously. One thread might be responding to the user’s input through the graphical user interface (for example, dealing with button clicks and so on), while another thread might be doing some background processing (such as checking spelling in a document). And this only is a simple example. But, believe me, even simple multi-threaded programming can be hard. It can be very hard. One of the main difficulties is with conflicts between different threads (which I guess corresponds to dissonance or something in this perhaps tenuous analogy). “In C” is a multi-threaded program—each musician is an independent thread. However, Riley has managed to walk a very thin line in writing this multithreaded program. Not only do all the threads interact harmoniously (this would be easy—simply have each of the musicians play either a C, E, or G at their discretion), but also the music that results is interesting, not discordant. That is, it walks the fine line between homogeneity (or simple repetition) and chaos. (“It’s a fine line between chaos and creation,” as the Man said.)

Also, with this work, I would say that Riley pretty much invented the idea of loops. [I found out later that they were in use in the late ’40s and ’50s in classical electronic music.] The idea of tape loops had been around for a while. For example, the Beatles had used them as far back as 1966 in “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and even they had gotten the idea from Stockhausen. But, the short musical phrases that make up “In C” are more like the loops used in musical software programs (such as Apple Computer’s GarageBand). That is, each is an atomic musical phrase, whereas tape loops tend to be a bit more free form and not necessarily atomic.

“Barstow” is composed for string quartet, a male narrator/singer, and a percussionist. The singer/narrator speaks and then sings each of the eight inscriptions in turn. The piece is in just intonation, with many notes that are between the 12 conventional notes used in equal-tempered tuning.

I somehow got interested in just intonation (I like the abstract purity of it), and so I was particularly interested in hearing pieces by Harry Partch (the only time I’ve heard him before was as part of the San Francisco Symphony’s American Mavericks project). The tuning in this piece takes some getting used to—at first, it just sounds like there a lot of out-of-tune notes being played—but after you get used to it, it’s very interesting (in a good way). I’ve been to Barstow (my sister and I stopped there for gas and to get something to eat once, while driving through), and somehow this piece does evoke that American West, desert, weird, edge-of-the-civilized-world, hopeless atmosphere. It’s lonely and sad, like an Edward Hopper painting.

“Poème èlectronique” consists of electronic sounds (blips, bleeps, etc.) and conventional instruments or sounds (a church bell, drumming, and the human voice) that are electronically altered.

Again, as with “Ionisation”, I can’t hear any real structure in this piece (although some parts sound like call-and-response between the left and right stereo speakers). It has a kind of nice “gee whiz” effect, and I’m sure it had even more of such an effect when it was originally composed. But I’m not sure I’d want to listen to this piece repeatedly (other than the 6 or 8 times I’ve listened to it already). If this is a “poème”, then it’s definitely in free verse and I’m not sure that it rhymes. This piece reminds me a little of Frank Zappa’s “Pedro’s Dowry” and maybe some of Zappa’s other stuff, but, frankly, I’d rather hear Zappa, because it’s more dense and often has a good beat. I hope I’m not being too critical, but I like “Poème èlectronique” in the same sense that I like the Beatles’ “Revolution 9”: I’m glad it was recorded and I enjoy listening to it when I’m in the mood for it, but I’m not in the mood for it all that often.

This is a piece for percussion ensemble.

It has a siren in it, and I like any piece with a good siren in it, whether it’s George Antheil’s Ballet Mècanique or Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61”. It starts out quite foreboding, quiets down, and then has loud bits interspersed with quiet bits (although not many of those). If the piece has some kind of structure, then I can’t discern it. I like it just for its sound and maybe that’s all that Varèse intended.

One weekend last fall I was visiting my nieces and nephew and we were recording some stuff for fun on an 8-track portable studio I had just bought. On one piece, which I called “The Crazy Song” (and it was just that), my 4-year old nephew wanted to overdub his toy drum machine on every single track. Of course, I didn’t let him do that, because we wanted to use most of the tracks for other weird, mostly vocal things that my nieces (6- and 8-years old) were thinking up. Anyway, I think maybe my nephew was feeling a close artistic kinship with Varèse last weekend, which I, with my more conservative views on music, thwarted. I felt kind of bad about that when I thought about it later and the next time I visit I’m going to let him do his own recording with 8 tracks of only drums.

This piece is for solo piano. It is mostly played ‘within’ the piano, by strumming the strings directly, rather than using the keyboard as is usually done. I think I’ve read that Cowell wrote this piece to be played completely within the piano on the strings directly, but there are little 3- and 4-note phrases that sound to me like they’re played using the keys.

The sound of the piano in this piece is ghostly and can sound eerily human at times. (The theremin can sound this way too; you could probably write a neat piece like this for both piano (strumming the strings) and theremin. Actually, I happen to own both a piano and a theremin, so maybe I should try this.)

I would like to see how the piece is notated. I listened to two different versions of this. The “notes” played don’t seem to be identical (even the few that seem to be played on the keyboard), so I imagine the notation is not exact and many details are left to the performer. (Though I suppose the piece could be notated exactly, if you were to do it as harp music is notated. Although, on the other hand, that might not work, since (I think) the way strings are arranged—the way they cross over each other and so on—might differ from piano to piano (it definitely differs between grand pianos and upright pianos)).

I can’t make up my mind which of these two versions is the spookiest (and, therefore, the best). Version 1 is louder and has one part that sounds like a goblin gibbering and parts that sound like a child crying. Version 2 is quieter (although it has quite a few loud bits, too) and I think this makes it more eerie than Version 1 by just a tad (maybe). Also, Version 2 has some weird sounds that sound like leather creaking. I can’t imagine what it is, whether it’s just an accidental artifact of the recording or was intentional. Version 2 also has a part that sounds like a bunch of demons laughing.