Not Necessarily "English Music" (review)

Not Necessarily "English Music" is an admirable two-CD archival collection of a little documented chapter in English experimental music from the 1960s and 1970s. Composer, improviser, and percussionist Chris Cutler has called it "an invaluable window on a good part of the fringe music that enlivened the UK music community 30 years ago."

The set includes pieces by well-known composers such as Cornelius Cardew and Michael Nyman, and improvisers including Derek Bailey and Evan Parker. David Toop (a Visiting Research Fellow at the London Media School), curator of this collection, is a musician, composer, and writer. He also performs on several tracks and is cited as a collaborator on several others. Having been a part of the English experimental music scene since his teenage years, Mr. Toop was well placed to provide recordings and contacts from this important time in English experimental music.

In his introduction to the Leonardo Music Journal CD Series Volume 11, "Not Necessarily 'English Music': Britain's Second Golden Age," Leonardo Music Journal editor Nicolas Collins writes:

The British experimental music that emerged in the mid-1960s owed as much to . . . Pop sensibility as to the dominant European modernist style. . . . Composers got on stage to play, rejecting the classical distinction between creator and interpreter; they drew on musical material outside the high-art canon, including Pop and World music; they appealed to ears raised on Pop because they made use of Pop instruments and Pop sounds. . . . [T]heir rhythms were often closer to Bo Diddley than to Boulez.

It seems to me that Mr. Collins's comments underscore certain contemporary myths often found in discourse about experimental music and improvisation. The first is that experimental composition or improvisation owes a great debt to pop music. For example, it might be said that experimental musicians employ pop rhythms (i.e., "more Bo Diddley than Boulez"). Second, experimental composers or improvisers are thought to have collapsed the artificial boundary between high art and pop. And third, experimental performance is often assumed to be non-virtuosic.

Many pieces on Not Necessarily "English Music" profoundly contradict these assumptions. It seems obvious to the ear that the composers and improvisers from this collection owe a great debt to John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown, but also to European high modernists such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Iannis Xenakis. Yes, they use electronic instruments that are also used in pop music. But equating the instruments with the genre is like saying that the saxophone is solely a "jazz" instrument. Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett once said that he was influenced by Keith Rowe's approach to guitar playing. It is fairly easy to locate experimental moments in early Pink Floyd, but difficult (if not impossible) to hear Pink Floyd riffs or rhythms in an AMM performance. The experimental composers and improvisers on Not Necessarily "English Music" owe much more to the avant-garde, modernist tradition than to the postmodern pop tradition.

It is also telling that some of the recordings from this collection took place at British universities, and that several important contributions were organized by professors at these universities. Also, some of the performers on this collection met each other while attending classes as university students. This brings up another myth about experimental music (in both the UK and the USA), that it is hostile to academia. The recordings on Not Necessarily "English Music" seem to...