Liner Notes

Articulate noises – AMM and MEV, separate and together

"Even inarticulate noises do indeed reveal something" – Aristotle

How to begin writing about a music that might begin anywhere? Perhaps by saying so.

I am. We are.
That is enough. Now we have to begin.

And if that is how Ernst Bloch begins The Spirit of Utopia, a book containing, suggestively, a lengthy essay on ‘The Philosophy of Music’, it can only be almost as worrying to encounter, in an essay by Adorno on the same topic, the dispiriting suggestion that "music gazes at its listener with empty eyes".

Fortunately the music of AMM or MEV is by no means empty; though it might seem an empty gesture to be yoking the two groups together. They seem at first glance to share little beyond longevity, each having a history extending for four decades; that, and the fact that they were once on opposite sides of a long-vanished vinyl LP. Both their histories and the consequent musics are very different. AMM’s membership has been by and large stable; it has had the same line-up as is on these CDs for a quarter of a century. It has been rare for more than a year or two to pass without some aural documentation of what they’re up to (albeit in some cases issued decidedly retrospectively). Musica Elettronica Viva, to give them their full name, have not merely had many personnel – given their solicitation of audience participation, their full playing complement would be unlistable thousands – but there have been different versions of MEV operating in different countries, even continents, producing albums with markedly different, even incompatible, aesthetics. Their music, as far as one can gauge it from the scant half-dozen available recordings - and decades have passed with no licit releases – is more expansive (as one would expect, given their broader performance practice) and with, particularly recently, a markedly hospitable approach to musics from other places and times; AMM, in contrast, might be thought, particularly in the last 25 years or so, to be more introspective, with the music immediate, self-generated, even autotelic. (The use Keith Rowe makes of the radio during performances neatly skewers this over-easy generalisation.) It is a delight, then, that what might have been over-enthusiastic festival programming has produced music of substance and excellence; ‘live electronic music, improvised’, which both has a kinship with their shared album of that title, now nearly forty years old, and is also unlike anything else either group has recorded previously. This is both the music that existed, unheard, between the opposed sides of that old Mainstream album, and a music that is utterly without precedent.

One reason for the ‘newness’ of both AMM and MEV in the mid-60s was the speed of their take-up of new technologies - if that term isn’t too hi-falutin’, given the levels of bricolage involved. AMM were pioneers of the use of the radio as an instrument (for which the now-deceased composer-improviser, Cornelius Cardew, an early member of the group, found a precedent in Cage’s 1951 Imaginary Landscape No. 4.) More important for both groups, however, was the example of the pianist-turned-live-electronics pioneer, David Tudor. His conviction that the circuit diagrams and wiring layouts constituted scores was something of a blow to a compositional aesthetic, particularly given his renown as a pianist-interpreter. Frederic Rzewski apparently spent some time in Buffalo, NY, during which he heard Tudor perform, even stayed with him. In spring 1966 Rzewski came back to Rome (where MEV was founded and based) with some cheap contact mikes and mixers and some discarded circuitry formerly the property of the inventor/performer/composer David Behrman; these were hooked up with bed-springs, glass plates, rubber bands, tin cans, toy pianos, sex vibrators, assorted metal junk, et the obligatory cetera…. Cardew tells us that around 1968 AMM were exploring the range of small sounds made available by contact microphones on all kinds of material – glass, metal, wood, etc. – and a variety of gadgets from drumsticks to battery-operated cocktail mixers. In a time when live electronic improvisation is so common that it not only has sub-genres but even an ‘original instruments’ tendency, it is worth recollecting just how original this was – for MEV in particular. Their undersung founder member Allan Bryant heavily rewired a cheap electric organ, adding switchable resistors and capacitors to the outside of the instrument. As well as working with the first ‘R.A. Moog music synthesizer’ in Europe, Richard Teitelbaum pioneered techniques of manipulating its signals using heart-beat, brain-waves and variations in skin resistance. All of which echoes Adorno’s contention that the correct way to think of a composer’s musical material – even an instant composer’s – is as the technical productive forces of an age, concretised. This is material not as inert lump, but stuff that has not yet become something; or is still in the process of doing so. Although a period’s technology need not drive its music, it cannot but shape it, often in ways which are far from evident. Bloch observed that the ancient Greeks would not have understood calculus, as, lacking microscopy, they could not have conceived of the subdividability of basic units and elements. (An observation with more relevance to the music on these CDs than might at first be apparent.)

At each new step new immediacy emerges. That, more or less, is Hegel, paraphrased by Adorno. And, arguably, it also describes non-idiomatic free improvisation, whose ‘past’, as it passes, is accidental, contingent, no matter how intentional, or unavoidable, hindsight or successful resolution might make it seem. To remake anew every instant in this manner must involve risk. The poet Douglas Oliver explored this notion contemplating a poem by J.H. Prynne, and suggested that "What there is in potential, if we could only place ourselves without fear and in full emotional risk at the total disposal of the next instant when we shall act, is the possibility of true, real action, that will get the actions right". (It might be observed that such a prospect alone is sufficient to make this music social, even political.) Though this is a music of the moment, it is not held in that moment. If we grant the contention on the sleeve of the first AMM album that "every noise has a note", it is also true, as Adorno maintains, that notes don’t exist, they function: "In music nothing has the right to follow anything else unless it has been determined by what precedes it or, conversely, unless it reveals ex post facto that what has preceded it was, in reality, its own precondition". The point of a note, or a noise, in a shaped sonic environment is that it leads from; and leads to. There is relationship, there are perhaps even systems of relationship; and there should be reciprocity. Despite the surface appropriateness of Evan Parker’s description of AMM’s music as ‘laminar’, there is always progression within these layers, always a forward unfolding in time.

N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, my source for Douglas Oliver’s remarks on instantaneity, open their discussion of the poetry of Prynne by considering ‘Questions of Scale’. It is their contention that poetry, perhaps more than the other arts, has found it hard to represent events beyond the scale of direct, individual perception – events too large and slow to be observed – such as geological processes of formation and dissolution, or too small and quick, such as the movement of molecules or the immediate reaction of nerve-cells. Even to call these things ‘events’ is to suggest that they can be seen clearly and whole, delineated against their surroundings, whereas, in relation to the ‘events’ which can be witnessed by individual narrators, they are processes without beginning or end. These processes constitute ourselves, and the things we see. They are going on ‘inside’ things, as if beneath the earth’s surface. They are the movement of what to us seems ‘static’.

I would hope that the reference to the relationship of movement and stasis, and the consideration of long durations, would show why I find this passage important (we might note in passing that this planet’s annual attainment of apogee is something lived through but scarcely grasped). But it is worth looking at the fuller context, not least because of the implicit move beyond the immediately (and traducibly) human, as Reeve and Kerridge go on to assert:

individual lives may be subsumed in these processes, if the processes are large-scale, and broken down into them, if they are small-scale. Such processes constitute the organic world from which
the human subject […] emerges, and from which ‘events’ on the human scale emerge. But if the
processes themselves are to emerge […] they will displace the human subject…

While I was thinking about the writing of these notes, someone else’s radio came on:

Trying to find the magic
Trying to write a classic
Don’t you know, don’t you know, don’t you know?
Wastebin full of paper
Clever rhymes, see you later

These words are my own
From my heart flown
I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you

Even the language of inarticulate authenticity can be articulated and made inauthentic; for a truly human music it has apparently become necessary, as for Prynne in poetry, to move beyond the usual models of scale. To listen not to the heart, but to the amplified heart-beat. To hear not "these words", but their scarcely audible rumble from a radio not quite on station, taking us to other worlds. With the development of digital sampling, scraps of sound can be held, magnified, extended, pitch-shifted; permitting, as Reeve and Kerridge’s example posits, "studying intently, and opening out indefinitely, the space between two millimetre marks on a ruler". We are in the domain of Blake’s (or Prévost’s!) "minute particulars" which is where art exists, rather than in "generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power", the power of the marketplace which has so thoroughly colonised the ‘middle ground’ with commodified and administered music. Outside, the way is left open for macro-processes and micro-processors to tell us more about the world we’re in, the world that’s within us, and the world we might (re-) make with one another. As I said earlier, this music is social and ethical; heard aright, it could
subvert that "unwritten musical score" which Pierre Bourdieu thought organized all our actions, however much we believe we are improvising our own melodies.

Of course, this music is made by human beings for human beings; and so it is not inhuman. Indeed, it can be almost banally everyday. Adorno says "you need only turn the knobs on the dial of a radio at random"; and any time Keith Rowe moves his finger, as he did at around twenty past two on the afternoon of May the First 2004 in the Conway Hall in London, we might get, as we did, pulsing with increasing intensity through the continuing wash of sound, an insistent, mechanized beat; an emotive voice repeating insistently a far-from-special phrase; and the sudden irruption of a DJ reading out a message from a listener: "I’m so bored I’m revising for my SATS". (Standard Assessment Tests are taken at rather too frequent intervals by UK school pupils.) Rowe’s cut-off returns us to the interior of the Conway Hall, but reminds us that outside it are a wider group of listeners to music, a wider range of music, and a wider range of reasons – not all of them good - for listening. This epiphany (if that’s what it is) offers neither consolation nor confirmation, accommodates a critique and proffers one, equally. Prynne is apposite: "Rubbish is / pertinent; essential; the / most intricate presence in / our entire culture".

I won’t discuss further here what is implicit in Rowe’s use of the radio, not least as he has already done so incisively himself. I want instead to consider the use made of sampling, which might well seem paradoxical in a music usually conceived of as made-in-the-moment and unprecedented, also as non-idiomatic and non-referential. Alvin Curran, in an interview a day or two before these recordings, explained..

"there's another area where I've carried my electronics over directly out of the MEV period.
And that's been reduced now to the almost exclusive use of an 88 note MIDI keyboard, a sampler and using thousands of samples of music from all over the world and I keep changing it and refreshing it. […] It's a solo performance machine exactly. And that is completely unpredictable music. Wherever you put your finger you don't know whether
you're going to get a market in Bombay or James Brown or whatever. Anything can come up.

And ‘anything’ did; the Tchaikovsky violin concerto; Frank Sinatra singing "I’ve got the world on a string"; some operatic vocal ululations; south-east Asian folk zither; Harry Partch’s The Letter…. " The technique of putting things together comes to determine the form", as Adorno wrote of his proposed musique informelle. As we might expect, given the oppositions of micro- and macro- , there are (perhaps irreconcilable) oppositions here too; as Curran put it in 1995, "All music starts anew each time, as if there had never been any music before it", but "Musical remembering and musical amnesia are of equal value - in short one could build on past or conditioned experience or try to forget everything ever known". I’m not particularly interested in trying to decide whether this is theoretically acceptable; much of the debate about the legitimacy of the use of samples is beset with entrenched prior positions and frankly too tedious to rehearse here. More intriguing, on an analogy with Prévost’s postulated ‘meta-musicians’, is what one might term ‘meta-sampling’, the citation of other or previous modes of playing. When – or if – this happens is of course open to debate; in the absence of specific confirmation from the musician/s, it remains unprovably conjectural. There may or may not be a lineage leading back from Eddie Prévost’s tam-tam work to Microphonie 1; it may or may not be the case, as has been asserted, that the Stockhausen piece is a weak aestheticisation of La Monte Young’s earlier Studies in The Bowed Disc; it is self-evident that any cause-and-effect linking, though it might give some intellectual pleasure, is not logically necessary. (Whatever one’s stance on this, Prévost’s tam-tam playing on the studio double-trio is ceaselesly inventive, and only a fool would get distracted by arguments over origins.) Yet despite this caveat, I believe I’m right to locate meta-sampling in both ensembles; and not to fret about it. Let me offer examples. It has become a listeners’ cliché to hear Morton Feldman in John Tilbury’s playing with AMM. Of course, only a lazy ear would find repetitions or hear borrowings. Tilbury’s improvisatory playing is if anything richer; his immensely meticulous and ever-varied voicing of chords, different at every turn, would be almost impossible to notate without generating score-pages of unwieldy complexity. What we are perhaps right to hear is allusion to a shared sensibility, an evident feel for mood, tempo, the right right notes placed where they belong, with due finesse. In a parallel manner I hear referentiality in Rzewski’s playing; not to pieces for the piano, but to pianism. What he alludes to is not the standard piano repertoire, its fossilized (or petrifying) ‘standards’, but the inherited traditions of piano playing. One can (arguably) hear a ‘Frenchness’, refracted through the American conservatoire teaching tradition which, historically speaking, drew upon French models. Although this audible heritage might, to some, carry the stamp of ‘high’ culture, in fact it represents something that can’t be commodified; it is transmitted orally - indeed literally digitally. Rzewski dances among styles of piano-playing as nimbly as Curran among genres. They could not stand more wholly in opposition to postmodern pastiche (as identified by Fredric Jameson):

Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter".

Tilbury or Rzewski’s allusions to physical modes of playing have in common with Curran’s and Rowe’s transumptions or bringings-across of the soundworlds of other (sub-) cultures a context of re-shaping; a shaping which re-contextualises. Somewhere between these two zones we might encounter Teitelbaum invoking 50s-style studio electronics, or Sun Ra, or even fairground Wurlitzer, brashly yet delicately parrying with the more pristine sound of the organ as played by Tilbury in the studio double-trio.

As Adorno remarks in Aesthetic Theory, what resurfaces through correspondences with the past becomes something qualitatively other; an idea glossed provocatively in his ‘Vers une musique informelle’ when he suggests that abstract forms, internal compositional categories, formally expelled from ‘informal music’, will surface again in the innermost recesses of the particular event and set them alight. Lest this sound like rodomontade, let me offer a concrete example. After the generally low dynamic levels and relatively slow pace of the AMM trio set on 1 May, the MEV trio opened with the blast of Alvin Curran playing the shofar, a trumpet made from a ram’s horn, a ‘defiantly primitive’, prototypical music, fit to leave the walls of the Conway Hall, like some new Jericho, pitched down flat. If I spoke earlier of the way in which AMM might deal, in Reeve and Kerridge’s phrase, with the internal, microscopically-enlarged body surface which becomes a landscape – and the same is true of some of Teitelbaum and Curran’s quieter use of radically pitch-shifted and extended samples – particularly that ululating operatic-theatrical voice, coming to sound almost like something from AMM’s label-mates FURT - then this is the extrovert mode, which refuses any easy accommodations. Which division is inherent; as Bourdieu explains, the culture which unifies via the medium of communication is also the culture which separates via the culture of distinction, and which legitimates distinctions. It may be, as Adorno remarks, that a work of art is great insofar as it registers a failed attempt to reconcile such objective antinomies; failure then being in the highest sense the measure of success. Certainly such terminology is not new to AMM, who, circa 1970, quoted approvingly a journalist on Peace News writing that "Ultimately, however, AMM fails". They went on to concur: "Ultimately AMM will fail. There may be rare moments when we, or others, sense a kind of success, but there can never be ‘ultimate’ success. Nevertheless, with the kind of perversity that really belongs only to nature, AMM continues to play". We can, however, turn this pessimism – if pessimism it be – on its head. The search amounts also to a refusal to sit still; there is for neither AMM nor MEV any sort of metaphysics of the present; nor of presence. For either ensemble what has already been played – by others or themselves – is always new. The already-known, the found or sampled, is, as we have seen, qualitatively other when re-positioned; and it is the distance between these (again incompatible) realities which is, says Bloch, difficult and astonishing. We know what we hear, but we don’t know it; in Aristotle’s or Bloch’s, term, anagnorisis – recognition, rather than recollection – is linked with reality by only a thin thread; it is therefore alarming. And if we do know what’s coming, the same thing happens. In Bloch’s phrase, "what is wished for arrives, it surprises us anyway". What is yet to come, Ernst Bloch’s ‘not–yet’, is also always new. He tells us, "We live surrounded by possibility, not merely by presence. In the prison of mere presence we could not even move, nor even breathe." In the domain of music, this is that musique informelle which Adorno so adroitly skirts round defining, but which will, evidently, be the idea (Vorstellung) of something not yet imagined (vorgestellt).

I began in wondering how one might start writing about a music that might itself start anywhere; and it appears that it might lead anywhere, too. Bloch detected – and valued - something ‘unconcluded’ in music, which answered his preference for the potential, the ‘not-yet’ that is always about to arrive - and which, of course, free improvisation at its best can offer. A site for the non-specific yet highly-specific, for hope as yet not concretised. As, however, you are holding nearly two-and-a-half hours of remarkable music in your hands, this should end this with another site for hope, poetry (once again, that of J.H. Prynne): "music is truly the / sound of our time, since it is how we most / deeply recognise the home we may not / have".

Harry Gilonis

Acknowledgements

I found the Douglas Oliver quotation in N.H. Reeve & Richard Kerridge’s 1995 Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne; the two poems of his I quote briefly from can be found in full in his 1999 Poems, pp. 100 and 162. Fredric Jameson on ‘pastiche’ occurs in the initial, originating chapter of his 1991 Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Discussion of meta-musicianship and the ethics of sampling, plus much else that is pertinent, can be found in Edwin Prévost’s two books (available from Matchless) No Sound is Innocent and Minute Particulars. I’ve drawn, amongst other works by both writers, on Ernst Bloch’s massive Principle of Hope, and both Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and his essay on ‘musique informelle’ in Quasi Una Fantasia.

What I’ve seen of John Tilbury’s work-in-progress on Cornelius Cardew, and Alvin Curran’s Selected Writings (seemingly published only digitally: , clarified some historical details; Keith Rowe’s 1997 ‘Above and Beyond’ appeared in Resonance Vol. 5 no. 2, and is also found at . That, and ‘Mass Ornaments’, a 2004 interview with Alvin Curran made on the occasion of the recordings herein, findable in full at
(the basis of a shorter article in The Wire issue no. 249, Nov. 2004), were informative about current activity. I’ve also listened a lot; mostly to the music of AMM and MEV, but also to Richard Barrett, Clive Graham, Elizabeth James, Paul Obermayer and Ian Pace. These words are for them.