I get the impression that your trajectory as an artist took quite an important turn around the time of your Cologne residency. I’m curious what you were doing even before then.
I mean going to the roots, I was born and grew up Memphis. My father had a cornet lying around the house from a band that he had played in and so in grade school, when music was offered that was what I played. In high school I was really into Stan Kenton. I loved this big band atmosphere and the fact that he was so into the tropics, you know, and Cuba and all these exotic rhythms and things like that. Then I went to Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York which is a very conservative, academic place but with good teachers and that’s where I got the university-type training. I was studying composition and I was playing trumpet, I was in the orchestra but I settled in with the radicals there – with the four or five people who were aware of what was going on with Stockhausen and things like that. I got married after that, I had married a pianist, and we lived in Washington D.C. for three or four years. I taught theory for a year and then things were beginning to happen. There was this guy named Bob Moog who came around with his new idea of one Volt equals one octave, which became the Moog synthesizer. We actually collaborated on a sound sculpture later; a tape loop within a box that had a double reflective mirror on the inside, and every time there was a “blip”, a colored light went off. It was like this little fairyland of blips going by and each one had an output to six speakers around the room. Anyway, we moved to New York after that. And that’s when the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst gave me a grant to come and study with Stockhausen and all the gang in Cologne. And that was amazing because I spent basically almost a whole year by myself there, and it was a real eye-opener for what living conditions were like. This was the mid 1960s and it was still cold water flats [apartments without central heating], schaschlik and bratwurst… no fusion cuisine yet. So it was harsh beginning there but it was a great boiling pot for all the Die Reihe gang. Stockhausen has us doing these little exercises which had us trying to notate bursts of short wave radio. At the time, he was deep into doing this kind of graphical notation, gestural notation as opposed to using only standard notation of notes on a staff. I mean that was in there too, but it was a way of breaking up the texture, so that a brief passage of shortwave radio where one station is drifting into another station, when you notate it, out of that would come a melody… and that was a really interesting technique to think about. You could use it as sort of a graph almost but it also encouraged you to make pictures and to use them in the score. So I spent three years there and I did a piece there called “Scan” that I guess would have been sort of a graduation piece, if you will. For that I had the technician at the studio at WDR make these little mixers that were just basically on/off switches, and I made these little keyboards of maybe five of these switches each. “Scan” used part of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra [Fünf Orchesterstücke] called “Sommermorgen am See” which is basically one chord which is morphing, going imperceptibly between a sustained flute to a viola to this or that. I had the strings of the orchestras there play the excerpt from “Sommermorgen am See” and they played it all super pianissimo [very quiet] and they all had contact microphones on their instruments. And I’d made this graph score just by chance, you know, throwing dice and everything, and there was a score for the parts that were playing pianissimo to be brought forward and then muted at certain moments, which gave it this little structure. Unfortunately, I don’t have a recording of that.
What happened after Cologne?
So after that I came back to New York and started playing with La Monte Young and the Theater of Eternal Music doing these long Dream House things, the ones with the hashish milkshakes and the tuning up to 60 cycles. [Drone music pioneer La Monte Young tuned his instruments to the frequency of 60 Hz to ensure that the residual hum of electrical current – 60 cycles per second in the US – did not interfere with his music] When we did a show in Europe it would be 50 cycles so there would be no other stray frequencies in the atmosphere, so that was pretty amazing, that was where I kind of learned, or connected to the idea of vertical music. I did a piece called Solid State, that was an outgrowth of that experience. Solid State was a stack of eight perfect fifths creating a dense harmonic block which was time-sculpted with voltage-controlled filters. The concept was like beginning with a piece of paper that was all black with pencil lead and then making shapes on it by erasing. That was with using some early Moog equipment. The ploy at that time was that it was a much easier to get a gig as an artist than as a musician, so I would present Solid State as a sound sculpture, which really it is, and so it would be done in museums with mats on the floor and that kind of thing. And that sort of came from La Monte Young too – that was the way a La Monte concert would be, people drifting in and out and all that kind of thing. Solid State was kind of a proto-electronica piece which, by the way, is going to be released on Warp. And then came Vernal Equinox in 1978, the first record which actually incorporated a lot of the Fourth World ideas. That was the result of putting things together that were getting sifted down. I mean you’re starting off and you still have other people in mind, you still have some La Monte in there, you still have Riley in you. Terry Riley was a big, big influence, absolutely – I actually played on the first recording of In C in 1968. I loved him and we had a kind of family thing going on too, with my wife and his wife and all that. The distinction I made in the vertical / horizontal thing was 99.9 percent of the world listens in the horizontal way, which is: “Oh what’s next, I like this, boom, oh no, what’s that, then comes this other event” So, the vertical idea is going into a kind of eternal presence by learning how to kind of phase that out. And that’s La Monte’s whole thing, although that’s not confined to him at all, but it was of a piece with Terry Riley’s aesthetic and is based upon these intricate, interlocking patterns, which then everybody picked up on, you know, Glass and Reich. But I feel lucky to have been connected with the progenitors rather than the people who were the spinoffs, let’s say.
