Musical Indeterminacy as Critical and Affirmative play

Musical Indeterminacy as Critical and Affirmative play1 Kirsten L. Speyer Carithers (bio) "Dialed Music, or Whatever, Offers Stiff Test of Nerves," proclaimed a headline in the Buffalo Evening News in December 1966. The article's author, music critic JOHN DWYER, further argued that the evening's concert was more challenging for the audience than Russian roulette or "Dead Man's Curve at 120 in the rain."2 What was so demanding about this event? The recently formed Sonic Arts Union, visiting the University at Buffalo's Baird Hall as part of the Slee Music Lecture series, incorporated strange new techniques into their performance, disrupting norms and unsettling audience members. Musicians ROBERT ASHLEY, GORDON MUMMA, DAVID BEHRMAN, and ALVIN LUCIER presented new compositions that evening, many of which incorporated experimental technology. By that point, MUMMA and ASHLEY had developed the ONCE Festival (in Ann Arbor, Michigan) into an important site for new music, and they brought that [End Page 119] energy to the Buffalo concert, performing works that altered typical conventions of vocalization and instrumental performance. The Sonic Arts Union's work coincides temporally with the rise of the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos within certain forms of popular music, which has been an important aspect of several musical subcultures, and experiments like Mumma and Ashley's suggest a similar fascination with sonic technology.3 As explained by Dwyer, Mumma "played a wired-up French horn, though used more as a modifying long-tube for the whispering or growling voice, and his colleagues made amplified vocal sounds through throat mikes."4 It seems likely that an early version of Mumma's composition Hornpipe was presented that evening in 1966. In the composer's own description, "Hornpipe is a live electronic work for French horn with cybersonic console," in reference to "a small metal box worn by the performer" that "contains electronic circuits of my own design which respond to the sounds of the Horn and to the acoustical resonances of the performance space" (Fig. 1).5 In other words, the artist modified his instrument—a practice that, as I will demonstrate, predicts similar actions in electronic and digital games. The group also presented Ashley's now-(in)famous piece The Wolfman (1964), which is "essentially a work about feedback—a microphone is positioned so close to the performer's mouth that changes in the size of the oral cavity bring about great changes in the feedback sound."6 While the performer must actually produce the sounds extremely quietly, the amplification and feedback are arranged in such a way that the resulting sound can be painfully loud for the audience. In fact, Renée Levine Packer, the longtime program coordinator in the School of Music at UB, recalls the Buffalo performance as "fierce amplified growls and yells emanating from the hall" near her office.7 Like so many of the events presented by the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts (CCPA, also known as the Creative Associates) at Buffalo, which was active from 1964 to 1980, the artists in this concert incorporated strange new techniques into their performance, disrupting norms and unsettling audience members. At a recital held in 1970, for example, Petr Kotík and his group effectively rewrote the conventions of classical concert attendance. By placing musicians in three separate rooms, the audience had to actively participate by moving through the space, or limit themselves to only one set (or, as suggested in the program, "take a break from listening and go to the basement for some [End Page 120] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Gordon Mumma performing Hornpipe with cybersonic console and horn at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 19, 1972. Gordon Mumma, Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American New Music ed. Michelle Fillion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 56. refreshment, to play ping-pong or "bowl").8 Performers in the 1972 concert called S.E.M. Gives a Lecture turned the lecture-recital on its ear by eating dinner onstage, then sharing dessert with their bemused audience before playing a little music, including Julius Eastman's Eine kleine Nachtmusik—almost certainly a riff on W. A. Mozart's well...