In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

159 British Experimental Music after Nyman Virginia Anderson In the last twenty years or so, the features that constitute an understanding of “experimental music” have been shifted from those delineated by Michael Nyman in Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond to include the work of continental avant-garde composers.1 Nyman had primarily defined experimental music in opposition to “the music of such avant-garde composers as Boulez, Kagel, Xenakis, Birtwistle, Berio, Stockhausen, Bussotti, which is conceived and executed along the well-trodden but sanctified path of the post-Renaissance tradition.”2 Yet Bjorn Heile calls Nyman’s definition “anti-European”;3 Christopher Fox castigates the book for “[its] central thesis, that a music called ‘experimental’ existed in a directly oppositional relationship to another music called ‘avant-garde’”;4 David Ryan calls Nyman’s separation of the experimental and avant-garde movements a “segregation”;5 and James Saunders claims that “the distinctions made by Nyman between experimental and avant-garde music seem less clear with time.”6 This shift in understanding complicates what was already a muddle of multiple, contradictory definitions of what “experimental music” is. In the early 1950s, experimental referred both to the (mostly acoustic) indeterminacy of the Cage group and to the (mostly avant-garde, even serial) work of the early European electronic studios. More recently examples have become so varied in social context and compositional technique that Joanna Demers could only define experimental music as “anything that has departed significantly from the norms of the time,”7 and the term lacks an entry in the present Grove dictionary. By now Experimental Music is not only a history of the experimental movement but also a historical document in that same movement; in other words, we can read Nyman’s text as evidence of how experimentalists in the 160 • tomorrow is the question 1960s and 1970s conceptualized their practice.Although his taxonomy emphasized the “purely musical issues” of indeterminacy, notation, and musical structure, he also defined experimental music on more social grounds: “[I]t would be foolish to try and separate sound from the aesthetic, conceptual , philosophical and ethical considerations that the music enshrines.”8 The more recent trend toward conceiving a larger European “experimentalism ” concentrates only on technical elements based in an “avant-garde” canonic lineage and thus seems to cast aside important evidence of how experimentalism took shape historically.9 In the following essay, I shall examine aspects of Nyman’s taxonomy as it reflected the attitudes of Cornelius Cardew and other musicians in the English experimental movement, focusing in particular on the work of four “Leicester School” composers. The name Leicester School is the jocular invention of the composer John White, ironic because it confers associations of “lineage” on four composers (White, Christopher Hobbs, Gavin Bryars, and Dave Smith) who question the whole idea of traditional lineage to begin with. Even though they now write music that may sound to some ears as “unexperimental” as possible—perhaps indicating to these more recent writers that they no longer belong in conversations about experimental music—I will show that the Leicester School composers continue and extend many of the traits and tendencies that Nyman and his contemporaries used to define experimentalism in the first place. These composers’ indeterminate music in the 1960s and early 1970s was, in a social and philosophical sense, recognizably “experimental”; their more consonant music after 1975 is also “experimental ” on the same grounds. In taking this approach, I follow the example of recent writers on experimentalism who understand elements of musical style to be part of a larger ensemble of social associations forged by historical actors. David Nicholls, for example, calls attention to the economic institutionalization of different networks: “[V]ery generally, avant-garde music can be viewed as occupying an extreme position within the tradition, while experimental music lies outside it. The distinction may appear slight, but when applied to such areas as institutional support,‘official’ recognition, and financial reward , the avant-garde’s links with tradition—however tenuous—can carry enormous weight.”10 More recently Benjamin Piekut adapted Bruno Latour ’s actor network theory (ANT) to the New York experimental scene in 1964.11 Latour proposed a “sociology of associations,” cautioning that “it is no longer enough to limit actors to the role of informers offering cases of some well-known types. . . . Using a slogan from ANT, you have ‘to follow the actors themselves,’ that is try to catch up with their often wild innova- [3.145.191.214] Project MUSE (2024...

Share