New Music, New York

NEW MUSIC, NEW YORK B6r6nice Reynaud The New Music, New York festival organized by The Kitchen Center June 8-19, 1979, was valuable in reconsidering the problems raised by the definition of what is called "New Music." Judging from the pieces offered during the event, three main tendencies within the diversity of practices emerged, even though the work of a single composer sometimes reflected more than one tendency . The tendencies break down as follows: -Musicians whose work is based on indeterminacy or at least on a controlled drift of the material during live performance, such as Robert Ashley, David Behrman and Pauline Oliveros. -Minimalists who, according to Michael Nyman in Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, have created their music in reaction to indeterminacy, such as Philip Corner, Philip Glass, Jon Gibson, and William Hellermann . DAVID BEHRMAN -"Collage" musicians, to be found mainly in the younger generation, who wish to integrate in their compositions "impure" musical environments-e.g., jazz (Garret List), pop (Laurie Anderson), rock (Rhys Chatham). Beyond these divisions, however, the most interesting musical form displayed at the Festival was "performance music." This notion is ambiguous in music for, in the same way that one can say that all music is "repetitive," all music is "performance" as well. Unlike painting and cinema, music is nothing but the live realization of a preexisting score. If in theatre the relationship between "score" and performance is rather ambiguously defined in western culture, with theatre often viewed as text, the ambiguity does not exist in music. In music it is generally understood that a piece does not exist before its performance: its history is that of 32 its interpretations. This very notion of interpretation underlines the position that a traditional musical performance is hermeneutic, and the purpose of each different rendering is to reveal the hidden meaning of the text (the score). This understanding of the score as text can be related to the Judeo-Christian view of text exemplified by the Kabbalists and the Church Fathers: truth is nothing but the infinite rediscovery of the hidden meanings of the text. It also displays a Borges-like vision of eternity as an absolute potentiality (the score) experienced sensually only through the theoretically infinite number of its nearly identical repetitions. In contrast, performance music is based on these two concepts: (1) the refusal of a meaning transcending the physical properties of the performance and (2) the emphasis on the uniqueness of the present moment. Improvisation technique, as in jazz, was the first blow struck against the classical conception of the score, and the indeterminacy principle brought by Cage and Fluxus was another. The traditional conception of the score implied-albeit less precisely-a certain relationship to space. If space is conceived as a field open to human activity, and music as expression of subjectivity and interiority, then music is denied any spatial property; it only passes through space, and eventually fills it. This is, within "New Music," the conception of such composers as Glass and Steve Reich. Conversely, "performance music" is concerned with the rediscovery of the spatial characteristics of music, reflecting the influence of visual arts. For Corner, for example, music is a bridge between subjectivity and external space because "you have in a score the three dimensions of space: width, depth, plus the fourth dimension of time." The rediscovery of space can be performed through purely musical means (as In the thick resonances of Corner's music, or the superimposed layers of Phil Niblock's), but it is often connected to a rediscovery of the dramatic role of the instruments and the relationDAVID ; VAN - TIEGHEM ship of instruments to musicians. This is in contrast to the classical tradition which views the instrument mostly as a tool, to serve another text, whose rendering must be completely mastered. Here also one can see the influence of improvised jazz pieces in which the subject is the relationship of the composeriperformer to his trumpet or piano. Numerous performance pieces emphasize the dramatic value and visual aspect of the instruments used. This is more obvious when these instruments are non-conventional, such as the rocking chair that Hellerman rocks in Squeek, or the multiple toys and gadgets...