Trio Mediæval Returns to SFP with New Vocalist

Hildegard of Bingen with nuns, possibly leading them in chant (source unknown, public domain, from a Wikimedia Commons Web page)

Last night Trio Mediæval returned to St. Mark’s Lutheran Church to present their latest program of “early” music. The scare quotes are meant to denote that, while there was a significant emphasis on some of the earliest polyphonic compositions, all composed by Hildegard of Bingen, these were interleaved with seven pieces all composed in the 21st century (between 2002 and 2024). To be fair, I was much more familiar with Hildegard’s repertoire than I was with the more recent selections; but I was glad to have a new encounter with Gavin Bryars, whose “Benedicamus domino” concluded the program.

I must confess that, while my interest in music of the Middle Ages (reinforced by both book and record collections) has been with me since my days at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I was delighted with the Bryars selection. He clearly appreciated the mediaeval repertoire and found just the right way to shine a contemporary light on it.  By the same count, however, I have been listening to the Sequentia recordings of the complete works of Hildegard since 2017; but the experience of listening to last night’s performance was as fresh as ever.

The trio itself has changed since I last heard them in April of 2023. Anna Maria Friman is now the only founding member of the ensemble. Jorunn Lovise Husan was the first replacement of the group, joining in 2018. Last night I heard Ditte Marie Bræin performing with the group for the first time. Nevertheless, the spirit of the repertoire was as fresh as ever.

During that previous performance, Friman accompanied a Swedish love song playing a Hardanger fiddle. Last night instrumentation was provided by Kevin C. Devine, alternating between hurdy-gurdy and organetto. He also gave a duo performance with Friman this time playing a viol.

Taken as a whole, last night’s offering was as engaging as its 2023 predecessor. Among other factors, it reminded me of just how rich the musical repertoire of the Middle Ages was. There are clearly many more aspects to explore, and I hope that the Trio Mediæval vocalists will return soon to facilitate the exploration!

Gavin Bryars’ New Composition for The Crossing

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

This Friday Navona Records will release the latest (24th) commercial album by the choir The Crossing. The album is devoted entirely to Gavin Bryars’ twelve-movement cycle of texts by Wendell Berry entitled A Native Hill. As usual Amazon.com is currently taking pre-orders for this new release. This was The Crossing’s second album of music by Bryars, the first having been The Fifth Century, which won a Best Choral Performance GRAMMY in January of 2018.

Bryars took his title from an essay that Berry wrote in 1968, a major shift from the metaphysical writings of the seventeenth-century English mystic Thomas Traherne that provided the libretto for The Fifth Century. In his program note for the album, Bryars observed that “Berry’s descriptions of the minutiae of his rural existence have a profound metaphysical and even political force.” He could also have observed that Berry wrote the essay at a time when only a handful of writers were committed to raising environmental consciousness. It is thus more than a little disappointing that Berry’s work is as neglected in these more “politically conscious” times than it was when he wrote it.

It is hard to tell from Bryars’ program note whether he appreciated the irony of the circumstances in which he was setting Berry’s words to music. He did, however, note that his score was the product of “a close reading of the text,” an effort that one does not encounter frequently in the composition of vocal music. It should therefore go without saying that Bryars’ essay is followed by a libretto of all twelve of the Berry texts that were set. This is definitely one of those cases in which the “metadata” are as important as the recorded music. Listeners deserve the opportunity to read those texts with the same level of attention that Bryars afforded, and the more curious will probably wish to examine the essay in its entirety.

Since The Fifth Century included a saxophone quartet, this was Bryars’ first a cappella undertaking for The Crossing. His sensitivity to sonorities is as acute as it was when he was working with the interplay between voices and instruments. Nevertheless, as his notes explain, he was still interested in exploring a wider scope of sonorities. Thus the “Animals and Birds” movement, appropriately enough, incorporates a “background” (Bryars’ word choice) of humming and whistling, while in the final movement, “At Peace,” he explores taking a vocal approach to tone clustering.

I fear that there may be those that will criticize A Native Hill for being too “cerebral;” but, things being what they are, the need for more cerebration seems to grow more urgent every day!

Esfahani’s Adventurous Harpsichord Repertoire

Near the end of last month Hyperion Records released its latest solo album of harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani. The title of the album is Musique?; and the title recalls some of the writings of John Cage in which he tried to take on a favorite criticism of his work: “But is it music?” The title also reflects the final composition on the album, “Programme commun ‘Musique socialiste?,’” composed by Luc Ferrari in 1972.

Esfahani may be familiar to many local readers, particularly those that follow the concerts produced by San Francisco Performances (SFP). Esfahani was the very first recital artist to appear in a new concert series entitled PIVOT: New Adventures in the Performing Arts. The recital took place on October 8, 2016. He then returned to San Francisco this past January for another PIVOT recital, this time sharing the stage with violinist Stefan Jackiw.

What had particularly piqued my curiosity at his 2016 debut was Esfahani’s decision to include Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase” on his program. This was a bold move on his part. “Piano Phase” is now over 50 years old; but, for many (if not most) listeners, it remains as provocative as it was when it was first performed. Indeed, when Esfahani had previously played the piece in Germany, it sparked a riot. Nevertheless, in his San Francisco performance it was clear that he appreciated Reich’s “phase” technique; and I am pretty sure that I was not the only one in the audience that was drawn into his command of the composition.

Two of the other pieces on that 2016 program have been included on the new Musique? recording: Toru Takemitsu’s “Rain Dreaming” and Kaija Saariaho’s “Le Jardin Secret II,” both composed in 1986. The former was definitely a surprise, since I had not previously known that Takemitsu composed for harpsichord. Nevertheless, his approach to thematic units was familiar; and the harpsichord sonorities emerged as well-suited to the two connotations of the title, rain and dreaming.

The Saariaho composition, on the other hand, supplemented the harpsichord part with tape accompaniment. At the San Francisco performance the tape was given quadrophonic projection with the loudspeakers at the four corners of the audience area. (“Le Jardin Secret I” was strictly electronic.) My own impression was that the synthesized sonorities could be taken as suggesting orgasm, but the booklet notes by John Fallas never mention that perspective. More important was Esfahani’s ability to interleave the harpsichord part with the electronics without one side overwhelming the other. That said, I suspect that the spatial qualities of this music will always be better appreciated in performance, rather than on recording.

Anahita Abbasi and Mahan Esfahani working on “Intertwined distances” in San Diego (screen shot from a video by Tony Minaskanian posted on Facebook by the International Contemporary Ensemble)

The Saariaho selection is one of three on the album involving electronics. The most recent of these, “Intertwined distances,” was composed by Anahita Abbasi and completed in 2018. Abbasi wrote the following about the use of synthesized sounds:

The electronic component comes out of a close collaboration between Mahan Esfahani and the composer. The sounds are solely harpsichord sounds, specially recorded for this piece. In association with various filters and processes, the material developed further and gained other colours and qualities.

What is interesting is the way in which Abbasi begins with a passage for solo harpsichord, almost as if she decided to establish a palette of “natural” sonorities before bringing her electronics into the mix. Nevertheless, the quarter-hour duration of this composition tends to overstay its welcome. This is one of those pieces in which the listener is likely to “get the point” long before the conclusion is “in sight.”

The remaining electronic selection is the Ferrari composition that inspired the title of the album. Ferrari was one of the founding members of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, working with resources provided by Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, the national French network for both television and radio. The composition’s title suggests that it is the most “political” offering on the album. However, it is difficult to grasp either connotations or denotations of political ideologies over the course of the work’s twenty-minute duration. (If there is anything political about the piece, it is the tendency to take too long to make a point.) Those interested in a synthesis of music and politics would probably do better to explore the music of Cornelius Cardew, but I do not think that Cardew ever composed for harpsichord.

The other two pieces on the album are harpsichord solo compositions. Gavin Bryars’ “After Handel’s ‘Vesper’” runs the risk of having a back-story (which can be found in the accompanying booklet) that is more interesting than the music itself. Henry Cowell’s Set of four is more likely to engage. This is a suite that was commissioned in 1960 by the American harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick, who was just as interested in building a repertoire of new compositions as he was in performing pre-Classical compositions.

Cowell is better known for his solo piano compositions, particularly those in which he explored the percussive qualities of tone clusters. Such tone clusters are also encountered in Set of four; but, as Monty Python liked to put it, they are “something completely different.” The difference probably involves the lack of sustained resonance provided by the very structure of a grand piano, meaning that there are decidedly sharper edges to the harpsichord clusters, which are likely both to provoke and to fascinate at the same time.

Only One Agreement at the 60th GRAMMY Awards

courtesy of the Universal Music Group

I see that the winners of the 60th annual GRAMMY awards have just been announced. Readers may recall that, at the end of last November, I wrote a piece about the nominations. I had been somewhat heartened that I had devoted my listening attention to items in eight categories, which was two more than when I had written about the 59th annual awards. Now that the awards have been announced, I find that I agreed with the judges over exactly one award, the same number of points of agreement that arose over the 59th annual awards.

At least I can take comfort that the one point of agreement was a particularly good one. I have been following the work of Gavin Bryars with great interest every since Brian Eno released a vinyl album that had “The Sinking of the Titanic” on one side and “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” on the other. I have come a long was as a listener since then, and I take comfort in how Bryars has come an equally long way as a composer. The award-winning album was The Fifth Century, an ECM New Series release. When I wrote about that album, I declared Bryars to be a composer of “once and future madrigals;” so, to some extent, my enthusiasm was an extrapolation of my interest of earlier madrigalists, such as Orlande de Lassus and Claudio Monteverdi. Nevertheless, Bryars remains very much a composer of the immediate present; and I just hope that such a quality had something to do with The Fifth Century winning the Best Choral Performance GRAMMY!

Visiting the Cold Blue Music Vault

It took this past summer’s John Luther Adams Festival organized by SFJAZZ to get Jim Fox’ Cold Blue Music label on my radar. The label provided me with a generous sampling of Adams’ compositions that served my writing a background article about the composer. Since that time I have sampled recent releases more sporadically than I would have wished without giving much thought to the aesthetic compass that has guided Fox’ production values in his choice of repertoire. Fortunately, Fox was kind enough to provide me with two of his earlier anthology releases. To some extent these now serve a bit like a time machine; but I should begin with the disclaimer that they take me to a past that I enjoyed very much back when it was the present.

According to background material that Fox provided, most of the works that show up on these anthology recordings collect compositions that were composed specifically for the CD being released. The earlier of the recordings I have now encountered is basically a collection of six pieces featuring the talents of clarinetist Marty Walker, who plays bass clarinet as well as B-flat clarinet. The disc is structured around four pieces, each by a different composer, with two very short “Interlude” pieces (which may well have been improvisations) inserted into the sequence.

I should begin with my one issue of discontent with this album, which is the absence of any useful background material about the pieces being performed. That includes instrumentation, with the qualifier that most listeners will be able to figure that out for themselves. The very first track is Adams’ “Dark Wind,” which seems to have been scored for bass clarinet, piano (Bryan Pezzone), and a percussionist (Amy Knoles) playing both vibraphone and marimba. The “Interlude” pieces are solos; and the remaining compositions are for clarinet and string quartet, the performers being the members of the Amelite Consortium Strings. They include violinists Maria Newman and Peter Kent and violist Valerie Dimond. Greg Gottlieb plays cello for Fox’ own contribution to the album, “Between the Wheels.” The cellist for the other two pieces, “Thread of Summer” by Michael Jon Fink and “When April May” by Rick Cox, is Dan Smith.

The overall rhetoric across the entire album is one of quietude. Listening to these tracks will be served best by a setting with as little interference as possible. This contrasts significantly with pieces like Adams’ “Inuksuit,” which is supposed to be performed in an setting in which the music that is performed is enhanced by the natural sounds of the physical environment. “Dark Wind,” on the other hand, requires the listener to be keenly aware of the work’s subtle textures. The recording was made in 2001, meaning that the piece is, in many respects, a predecessor of “Dark Waves,” based on a similar approach and composed in 2007. (As was previously observed, “Dark Waves” can be taken as “preparatory material for “Become Ocean.”) One might almost say that the Adams composition orients the attentive listener in preparation for the pieces by Fink, Cox, and Fox that follow it on the album.

The later anthology, which is entitled simply Cold Blue Two, is based on recording sessions that took place between 2008 and 2012; and the album itself was released in November of 2012. Each of the fourteen tracks is by a different composer; and the four composers that contributed to Walker’s clarinet album are all included, as is Daniel Lentz, whose single-composition album River of 1,000 Streams was discussed on this site about a month ago. This, too, is an album that deserves attentive listening in the absence of any external interference.

In this case I have to confess that I have some personal favorites among the contributing composers, particularly Gavin Bryars and Larry Polansky, both of whom I have been following in a variety of different settings. Bryars’ “It Never Rains” is scored for electric guitar (Cox) and low strings (Alma Lisa Fernandez on viola, Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick on cello, and James Bergman on bass). Bryars does not waste any time prioritizing the bass part, which will be clear to anyone who knows that the bass is his own instrument. Polansky, on the other hand, also has a Cold Blue album of his own, freeHorn, which was released this past August and provides some excellent examples of his technique in working with natural harmonics. His “Eskimo Lullaby” is performed by John Schneider playing a National Steel guitar specifically designed for just-intonation tuning. In a similar vein it is worth observing that Polansky’s track is preceded by James Tenney’s “Mallets in the Air,” which requires a string quartet (violinists Andrew McIntosh and Andrew Tholl, violist Mark Menzies, and cellist Ashley Waters) to play with a just-intonation instrument, the diamond marimba designed by Harry Partch (played by Erin Barnes).

The Once and Future Madrigals of Gavin Bryars

Today ECM New Series released a new album consisting entirely of the music of Gavin Bryars, the first since Vita Nova was released in 1994 (which was their third all-Bryars album). The title of the album is The Fifth Century, which is also the title of the major work performed, a cycle of seven part-songs performed by the mixed choir The Crossing with instrumental accompaniment provided by the PRISM saxophone quartet. The texts for these songs all come from the metaphysical writings of the seventeenth-century English mystic Thomas Traherne. The remaining two tracks are given the title Two Love Songs, both of which are a cappella settings of sonnets by Petrarch, both from his collection Rime sparse (scattered rhymes), two of the poems supposedly inspired by “Laura.”

Bryars began as a jazz bass player but moved into composition under the influence of the New York School. If one were to identify a single composer from this group as an influence, it would probably be Morton Feldman, whose career involved longer and longer scales of duration usually involving less and less instrumental activity. However, while Feldman’s music can be seen as a musical reaction to the abstract expressionist painters, Bryars’ development seems to approach duration as facilitating factor for dwelling upon philosophical ideas. He titled his cello concerto “Farewell to Philosophy;” but it seemed not so much a rejection of philosophical thinking as it was of the debilitating approaches to philosophy taken in too many university classrooms.

In that respect The Fifth Century may be regarded as a quietly meditative philosophical experience. His interest in sustained tones seems to reflect on the use of suspensions that Traherne would have encountered in his own time (had he been a serious music listener); but, at the same time, the endurance of tones also seems to connote their being sustained through reverberations in a highly resonant acoustic space. To be fair, however, the resulting superpositions of sonorities tend to obscure Traherne’s texts, which can pose a problem when any single sentence has the power to elicit sustained reflection. As a result this is one of those recordings in which having the texts in the accompanying booklet is significant, if not downright essential. It might almost be preferable to set aside the time to read all seven Traherne passages in silence, allowing his ideas to plant their seeds in one’s consciousness. Having established that familiarity, the listener will then gain much from following the texts while listening to the serenity of Bryars settings. (That familiarity will also facilitate paying more attention to the accompanying saxophones than one might if one were encountering the text for the first time.)

In many ways The Fifth Century amounts to a continuation of Bryars’ interest in madrigals, even if these part-songs are setting of prose. Following up on sixteenth-century practice, Bryars has already written six books of madrigals and is currently working on two more. His decision to set Petrarch falls right in with these past accomplishments. Nevertheless, his approach seems to have less to do with the Italian madrigalists and more with English traditions, perhaps even those being practiced during Traherne’s lifetime. Nevertheless, while it would be unfair to call Bryars’ rhetoric dispassionate, there is still a sense that he is more interested in the idea of love than he is in the feeling itself. Taken on those terms, however, his approach to Petrarch is as absorbing as what one might encounter in much earlier settings, such as those of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina or Orlande de Lassus.

Remembering the Titanic without Leaving Dry Land

Last week it seemed as if BBC News broadcasts had become obsessed with the centennial anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.  Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that they had a reporter on the vessel that was going to duplicate the path of the ship’s voyage all the way up to the point at which it had its fatal encounter with an iceberg.  The intention appeared to be to allow those connected with this tragedy in some substantive way to participate in a memorial ceremony.

As one who has no personal connection to the Titanic other than an aversion to James Cameron’s film, my only association with this tragic event has always been that composition by Gavin Bryars, which he entitled “The Sinking of the Titanic.”  I used to have Brian Eno’s Obscure vinyl, on which this music filled one side.  The other side was “Jesus’ Blood never failed me yet;”  and I was not surprised when I learned that both of these were ongoing projects.  Thus, each has now seen a new release, through which both of them now endure for the length of a full CD recording.  Both amount to extended variations on a theme arising from adding new layers of content, rather than simply embellishing the theme.  Presumably longer versions will emerge for media that can accommodate longer durations.

The idea behind “Titanic” was the hypothesis that the sounds of the ship going down were still, in some way or another, vibrating in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.  The theme for Bryars’ composition is the Episcopal hymn “Autumn.”  According to an account by Harold Bode, a junior wireless officer, this was the music being played during the last five minutes of the ship’s life (rather than “Nearer my God to Thee,” which is what was played at the centennial memorial service).  I was thus somewhat comforted to read in a piece by Richard Fairman for the Financial Times that a new performance of “Titanic” was given by the Gavin Bryars Ensemble as an “alternative” commemoration of the ship’s sinking.  I cannot imagine that this would have offended any of those on the memorial voyage, and it provided a different perspective from which the rest of us could reflect on this historic occasion.

A Bit of Early John Adams History

In covering the first stage of this season’s Project San Francisco concerts at Davies Symphony Hall, organized by the San Francisco Symphony, for which John Adams was composer-in-residence, I gave considerable attention to the Inside Music Talk that former SF Classical Music Examiner Scott Foglesong gave for the Symphony performances of Adams’ “Harmonielehre.”  Foglesong seems to share my conviction that experiences are much more memorable when they are personalized.  Indeed, I myself took that personalized approach  in my Examiner.com review of the performance of Adams’ chamber music.  I felt that the scope of his repertoire could be examined in the context of his mindset;  and I offered the premise that, because I was almost exactly six months older than Adams, I could claim some appreciation of that mindset.  Similarly, Foglesong could establish a context for discussing Adams’ work by virtue of his having been Adams’ student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music back when Adams was first finding his voice as a composer.

Foglesong’s approach reminded me that I actually had an audio document from that period, and it came from a rather unlikely source.  Indeed, the only reason I have that document is because it came from a time when I was voraciously trying to get hold of any recording of the music of Gavin Bryars that existed.  This was before Bryars made his first appearance on a recording in the ECM New Series, when the only sources of his music were in Brian Eno’s Obscure series;  and I shall always be grateful to the Downtown Music Gallery for making it possible for me to find the CDs that replaced those Obscure vinyls that had been so hard to obtain.

Most of them had only a single Bryars selection, which meant that they provided the opportunity to learn about other composers previously unknown to me.  One of the records had the title Ensemble Pieces.  Bryars’ “1, 2, 1-2-3-4” was the last track in an album that included two pieces by Christopher Hobbs, “Aran” and “McCrimmon will Never Return.”  The remaining tracks were devoted to a three-movement suite by John Adams (whose name I barely recognized at the time) entitled American Standard.  Reviewing that CD I now see that those tracks were taken from a live performance by The New Music Ensemble of The San Francisco Conservatory of Music, which took place in March 23rd, 1973!

I know of no other recording of American Standard in its entirety.  The middle movement has become relatively well known since it was recorded by the San Francisco Symphony when Edo de Waart was the conductor.  The notes for the Obscure recording stated that a conductor is “not necessary.”  The impression I get from those notes is that the suite was originally conceived to be as much a theater piece as a musical one.  Now I find myself wondering whether or not anyone might work up the motivation to revive American Standard in its entirety with a bit more of an effort to restore the spirit in which it was first created.

Misclassifying Werner Pirchner

The Grove Music Online entry for Werner Pirchner by Sigrid Wiesmann cites the print source for information about him to be the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. Oddly enough, this entry fails to mention that Pirchner died on August 10, 2001, which is one of the few useful pieces of information in his Wikipedia entry. A more extensive account (for those who can read German) may be found in his German Wikipedia entry. However, Wiesmann probably establishes the best context for listening to his compositions:

Self-taught as a composer and vibraphone player, he followed the latest trends in jazz music as a youth. Later influences included the theories of Schoenberg, and the music of composers from Bach, Schubert and Bartók to Thelonious Monk and John Cage.

This raises the question of, notwithstanding the influences of youth and the presence of Monk in that list, why the Grove editors choose to classify him as jazz.

My only encounter with Pirchner was in the mid-Eighties. This was a time when I was willing to take a chance on almost anything released through the ECM New Series collection. ECM had put out my first purchase of the music of Gavin Bryars on CD (at a time when I thought the only sources of his music were in Brian Eno's Obscure series); and they were responsible for my "discovery" of Arvo Pärt, after having heard his name dropped by Steve Reich. I suppose I had as much trust in any production decision that Manfred Eicher made as jazz buffs of an earlier generation had in the tastes of Alfred Lion's Blue Note releases.

ECM's Pirchner release was a 2-CD set entitled EU, which was not so much an integrated suite as a representative sample from Pirchner's "PWV" catalog. (His use of that label, which appears only in the German Wikipedia entry, immediately identifies his sense of humor. Perhaps the primary influence from Cage was Cage's famous "sunny disposition.") The title presumably referred to the European Union, which was still far from the reality that would be established by the Maastricht Treaty but was on every "right-thinking" European's mind. On the other hand, when one listens to the music in this collection, one is easily convinced that Pirchner also chose this title for its diphthong, which, depending on the national speaker, could sound like a wail of indigestion or an expletive of disgust. Pirchner was that kind of guy. the sort who could easily come up with the title (translated into English) "String Quartet for Wind Quintet" but still had enough respect for convention to actually score the work for wind quintet (rather than, for example, brass quintet, thus covering all bases).

This is clearly not the sort of work we associate with the jazz category. On the other hand it is the sort of thing that probably makes too many serious listeners cringe, even if the members of the wind quintet on the ECM recording all came from the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Having just written an Examiner.com piece on how challenging comedy can be, my personal feeling is that we just do not show enough respect to the truly skilled clowns. The problem is that those who insist on categories do not know what to make of Spike Jones, Hoffnung Festival Concerts, and P. D. Q. Bach; and yet, as has been the case since Aristophanes, the clowns often tell us more about the more serious aspects of our behavior than the more "acceptable" composers do.

I did not know until I started to work on this piece that Pirchner was dead and that it will not be long before we come up on the tenth anniversary of his death. Since he was born in 1940, his death came early (and not even the German Wikipedia entry says anything about its circumstances). The good news is that EU is apparently still available; and, according to Amazon.com, it is available on CD, vinyl, and through MP3 download. More interesting is that the Quintett Wien has released a recording (again both CD and MP3 download) of Streichquartett für Bläserquintett, which also includes Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 388 serenade. This should be enough to convince the Grove editors that they have tried to cram Pirchner into the wrong box!

Recovering Ambience

Thanks to the good graces of the Downtown Music Gallery, I have been recovering several instances of favorite material that I had given up when I got rid of all of my vinyls. Many of those recordings were produced by Brian Eno as part of his Ambient and Obscure series, and some of them are real gems. For example it was from the Obscure series that I first discovered the music of Gavin Bryars; and, when I finally had an opportunity to talk about this with Bryars himself, I learned that he was the only person who had written to me directly to request a copy of my doctoral thesis (which I provided)!

There is a tendency to associate the "ambient movement" (to the extent that it was a movement) with Windham Hill Records, which, in turn, came to be viewed as the standard bearer for New Age music at its most vacuous. The first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for New Age music nicely captures this perspective:

New Age music is music of various styles, which is intended to create inspiration, relaxation, and positive feelings, often used by listeners for yoga, massage, inspiration, relaxation, meditation,^[1] and reading as a method of stress management^[2] or to create a peaceful atmosphere in their home or other environments often
associated with environmentalism and New Age spirituality.^[1]

From my own point of view, however, Eno had far less to do with New Age thinking and far more to do with advancing the philosophy of John Cage, who believed that, since there was no such thing as absolute silence, we could find things to listen to where we least expected to find them. Eno had a way of finding such listening experiences in places that even Cage had not considered looking. This emerged through his own compositions, through his collaborations with others (such as Harold Budd), and through his support of those who worked independently of his own activities. While Gavin Bryars was my prime example of this latter category, I discovered that one of the Obscure releases that included a Bryars composition also included the entirety of John Adams' three-movement American Standard suite (only one movement of which, "Christian Zeal and Activity," has ever been available through any other source). Now that I have settled in San Francisco and become a champion of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I take delight in the fact that Eno's release of Adams' music consists of a recording of a live performance by The New Music Ensemble of the Conservatory made on March 23, 1973.

I continue to listen to Eno's projects, particularly since they provide me with useful data points in my efforts to gain a better understanding of the nature of listening to music. I find that Eno found his own path from Cage by beginning with Cage's philosophy to take sounds just as we hear them and instead holding the acoustic equivalent of a magnifying glass to those sounds. This may involve repeated motifs in the spirit of Philip Glass (or, as I have observed, Ludwig van Beethoven); but it can also involve sounds that emerge of their own accord by nature of the audio equipment being used (an approach that can also be found in the music of composers such as Alvin Lucier). In either case the result, for me at least, has less to do with creating any kind of New Age "spiritual aura" and far more to do with focusing the mind on listening with a concentration that may well exceed the level of attention we give to Beethoven. What more can we ask of a composer?

Collaborating Composers

Earlier this week I found myself reviewing the Gavin Bryars discs in my CD collection. I first became seriously aware of Bryars during my time at Schlumberger, when I used to listen regularly to John Schaefer's New Sounds program on WNYC. (I say "seriously" because my first actual contact with Bryars was in late 1971, since he was the only person who had written to me requesting a copy of my doctoral dissertation! At that time, however, I had absolutely no idea who he was, let alone what he was actually doing.) One of Schaefer's programs featured "Jesus' Blood never failed me yet" in its original recording, which filled one side of a vinyl LP issued as part of Brian Eno's Obscure series. The work absolutely fascinated both my wife-to-be and me. In a sort of parody of Maurice Ravel's "Bolero," the composition was based on a tape loop of a British tramp singing this hymn on the text that Bryars assumed as his title, accompanied by a "live" chamber ensemble playing providing the tramp with more elaborate background on each iteration. It took me forever to find a copy of the recording, which I finally got when a British friend sent me a package of several of the major Obscure releases. By then I had also been exposed to the other side of the vinyl, "The Sinking of the Titanic," which offered a different (but equally fascinating) take on variation-through-repetition.

With the advent of compact discs, it became easier to collect Bryars' music; and I started learning more about him. I learned, for example, that the overall architectures of both "Jesus' Blood" and "Titanic" had been determined by the duration of music that would fit on a single LP side. Thus, when they were released on CD, they were no longer coupled; each work now pretty much filled the capacity of a single CD. More interesting, however, was my discovery of how many of Bryars' compositions seemed to grow out of musicians with whom he came to work; and those musicians made for an interesting mix of the genres they usually performed. For example "After the Requiem," composed in 1990 added Bill Frisell's approach to jazz on an electric guitar to three of the members of the Balanescu Quartet with an alluringly moody result. Similarly, in 1987 Bryars, himself a double bass player, composed "By the Vaar" for Charlie Hayden, who has performed bass in some of the most experimental jazz groups.

There is, of course, nothing new about composers working directly with performers. It is a practice that can probably be found in every era of music history. What is more interesting is the emergence of genre-crossing in what we tend to call "serious music;" and Bryars is far from alone in this practice. Each of Steve Reich's "Counterpoint" works was composed with a specific soloist in mind; and in "Electric Counterpoint" the soloist was Pat Metheny (who has experimented with collaborations of his own involving composers as radically different from his own style as Ornette Coleman, who, just to illustrate the complexity of the social network, frequently performed with Charlie Hayden as his bass).

We may have the Sixties to thank for at least part of this kind of cross-fertilization. After all, Frank Zappa's early fascination with Edgard Varèse (because the guy behind the counter in a record shop could not imagine why anyone would want to listen to that kind of music) eventually led to his collaborative work with Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble InterContemporain; and we should probably take at face value claims from The Beatles about the influence of Karlheinz Stockhausen (even if, as I have suggested, Stockhausen was more reticent about his own influences). More important, however, is the way in which this trend provides us with yet another reminder that the music is all about the performance, rather than about a composer wrestling with filling up the pages of blank sheets of manuscript paper. As a corollary we have come to recognize that each genre engenders a different approach to listening. So the crossing of genres is an opportunity for the synthesis of new listening strategies, which will then engender new approaches to composition and performance that will elicit their own new approaches to listening. Has music ever before be so alive with so many avenues for creativity?