Influences: Rhys Chatham

COMPOSITIONAL INFLUENCES:

After making music for large forces of 100-200 electric guitars , from an Angel Moves Too Fast to See in 1989, to A Crimson Grail in 2009, I took a bit of distance and asked myself where I wanted to next go. A piece for 1000 electric guitars? It seemed a bit over the top. The point being that organising concerts for large groups of musicians – even “only” 100 – is highly time consuming, and they aren’t concerts that can be mounted every week! In addition to being a composer, I’m a musician. I love to play! So after writing A Crimson Grail, I decided that I would focus on making pieces that I could play myself, as a solo.

I wanted to write the solo in such a way that it would sound as though many musicians were playing. In thinking about this, I remembered Terry Riley’s Poppy Nogood piece. I first saw Terry play this piece live in 1969, when I was still a teenager. It was at a nightclub on St Mark’s Street in Manhattan called the Electric Circus. Terry was playing soprano saxophone and David Rosenboom provided a drone on viola.

Terry played through two Revox tape recorders spaced 10-feet or so apart ,with the left reel of Revox 1 feeding into the right reel of Revox 2. Both of the stereo outputs of Revox 1 and Revox 2 were played back simultaneously, creating a multi-second delay effect. Additionally, the sound from Revox 2 was mixed back into the input of Revox 1, creating a feedback loop, giving the music an eternal kind of feel, featuring layers upon layers of instruments. Robert Fripp was to use the same technique 10 years later, to good effect.

The problem with this technique was that the Revox tape machines were expensive and quite heavy, making them difficult to tour with. Happily, by the 2000s, the looping effect had been digitalised by numerous guitar pedal makers, with a number of the manufacturers offering an effect setting that specifically emulated the one that Terry got with his Revox tape recorders.

This is the effect that I decided to work with in the context of my solos. What I liked about it was that the sound tied in with my overall minimalist aesthetic, having worked with Tony Conrad and Charlemagne Palestine at the start of the seventies, as well as studying with La Monte Young during the same period, and playing in his group, The Theater of Eternal Music. What particularly attracted me to the looper/delay was the impression it gave of that choirs and choirs of instruments were playing, rather than one instrument. This fit in well as a follow-up to my 100-electric guitar idea.

I met Tony Conrad in 1971 not long after I had first come into contact with Terry. I had just started programming music at a place in lower Manhattan called the Kitchen. Tony was one of the first people I had invited to play there. He presented what I believe was the first performance of Outside the Dream Syndicate, this was before the 1972 Faust recording. Tony asked me if I would play a monochord for the Kitchen performance, which I was more than happy to do. It was then I discovered his use of just intonation in his violin playing. He had given me a home-made instrument for me to play, which was basically a Pythagoean monochord and explained what just intonation was. This was my introduction to Pythagorean tuning.

As it happened, at the time I made my living as a harpsichord tuner, tuning in the standard equal-tempered system,, which is the system used today in all Western music genres. I also tuned in mean tone temperment, which first appeared in the late fifteenth century and used up to and including Bach’s time.

So what are these different tunings systems, anyway?

In twelve-tone equal temperament, which divides the octave into 12 equal parts, the width of a semitone, i.e. the frequency ratio of the interval between two adjacent notes, is the twelfth root of two: 12?2 = 21/12 ? 1.059463. The relationship between minor or major seconds (C-C sharp, C-D) is always the same. The advantage is that one can modulate from one key to another in all 12 keys of the chromatic scale without anything sounding obviously out of tune. The disadvantage is that virtually all of the intervals are slightly out of tune, except the octave.

Meantone temperament is an earlier system of musical tuning. In general, a meantone is constructed the same way as Pythagorean tuning, as a stack of perfect fifths, but in meantone, each fifth is narrow compared to the ratio 27/12:1 used in 12 equal temperament. As I mentioned earlier, it was used from the 15th century to Bach’s time. It’s advantage was that one could modulate up to three keys (e.g. C to F to G) within a composition without having to re-tune the instrument. the intervals when playing in these three keys would be almost perfect, i.e. completely in tune. Outside of these keys, is was badly out of tune, producing what were called “wolf tones”, which meant REALLY out of tune intervals, yuk!

Yet having these three keys to play in was an improvement for composers of the middle ages who wanted to modulate keys. Music prior to the middle ages, such as plainchant or Gregorian chant, tended to stay in one key and used perfect intervals. The system of tuning that was used is called a Pythagorean tuning, or “just intonation”, which refers to the same thing.

Pythagorean tuning is a tuning in which all intervals found in the harmonic series are based on the ratio 3:2. This ratio, also known as the “pure” perfect fifth, is chosen because it is one of the most consonant and easiest to tune by ear and because of importance attributed to the integer 3.

The system had been mainly attributed to Pythagoras (sixth century BC) by modern authors of music theory, while Ptolemy, and later Boethius, ascribed the division of the tetrachord by only two intervals, called “semitonium”, “tonus”, “tonus” in Latin (256:243 x 9:8 x 9:8), to Eratosthenes. The so-called “Pythagorean tuning” was used by musicians up to the beginning of the 16th century.

I fell in love with the Pythagorean scale because it is so beautiful. In equal temperment, the scale we use today, all the intervals are out of tune except the octave. One gets used to hearing this and the ear accepts it after a while, but when one hears a chord or scale played where all the intervals are in tune, as happens with the Pythagorean scale, one doesn’t want to go back and would rather fight than switch! The only problem with this scale is that one has to always relate to the same pedal point, or drone frequency. But as a minimalist composer, I obviously have never had a problem with doing this!

In my 100 guitar pieces I have always used special tunings, but kept them neutral in the sense of only using octave tunings to allow maximum melodic possibilities while simultaneously maintaining the unison string sound that an octave tuning promotes. In the context of the solo that I play on the Foom label release, since I was only playing one electric guitar in the context of the solo, I decided to put it a Pythagorean tuning. The tuning I used was a low D, A, D octave, A octave, just intonation C, and high D. The open C on the guitar is significantly flatter than the normal equal-tempered C used in Western music and in serious hard rock. It is both haunting and beautiful, perfectly matched to the 7th overtone generated by the low D string of the tuning.

Pandit Pran Nath was a Hindustani classical singer and teacher of the Kirana Gharana school. In 1970, Pran Nath travelled to New York to visit La Monte Young and visual artist Marian Zazeela, In 1972, he established his Kirana Center for Indian Classical Music in New York City and stayed in the U.S. off and on for the rest of his life. He taught at several universities and attracted a strong following among American minimalist composers. I had met Pran Nath before I met Tony and before I started studying composition with La Monte. I think it might have been Charlemagne Palestine who turned me on to Pran Nath. Charlemagne was taking lessons with him. And so was my friend Jon Hassell. So I started studying with Pran Nath also, only to discover that La Monte Young was Pran Nath’s tamboura player! Small world…

I was heavily influenced by Pran Nath in my raga-like approach to form, as well as the way my melodic lines develop, relating, as they do, to the pedal point of my pieces the way Pran Nath’s voice related to a tamboura.

I met Charlemagne when I was maybe 19 and he was 23. I met him at NYU’s electronic music studio, which Morton Subotnick let us use. He became a big brother figure to me and it was largely Charlemagne who got me into composing music of long duration. I was profoundly influenced – even to this day – by his piece Strumming Music, which I first heard in 1971 or ’72.

My training was as a classical musician. My father was a harpsichord player and taught me to play. I could read music before I could read words! But by the time I had finished conservatory, I was enslaved to the written page of sheet music. I didn’t know how to improvise. But then, in the early seventies, Frederic Rzewski showed up in New York. He organised a New York version of MEV. Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) was begun one evening in the spring of 1966 by Allan Bryant, Alvin Curran, Jon Phetteplace, Carol Plantamura, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum and Ivan Vandor in a room in Rome overlooking the Pantheon. MEV’s music right from the start was totally open, allowing all and everything to come in and seeking in every way to get out beyond the heartless conventions of contemporary music.

Frederic started a New York version of MEV and invited all his conservatory friends to come play. For many of us, it was our first time playing without sheet music in front of us! Then Frederic eventually realised that there was already another well-established tradition of improvised music in the USA, namely African-American art music! So pretty soon he had folks like Anthony Braxton and Karl Berger joining us for our MEV NY rehearsals. It was an exciting time, we felt as though we were breaking down the boundaries between conservatory music and jazz. Anyway, it was thanks to Frederic that I started taking an interest in improvisation.

Jon Hassell and I played in La Monte Young’s band, the Theatre of Eternal Music, in the early seventies, which is where I got to know Jon. Later I produced concerts of Jon’s at the Kitchen. Jon was a fellow student of Pandit Pran Nath, and Pran Nath told Jon something that I always remembered; he advised Jon not to become a professional singer of Indian raga music, but to take the techniques the he (Pran Nath) was teaching Jon, and put them through a kind of personal filter and incorporate it in his own music. And Jon did exactly that. We can here it in the trumpet playing of his collaborative album with Brian Eno, Possible Musics. In this album and in Jon’s trumpet playing in general, we can hear the influence of “Guruji” (as we affectionately called Pran Nath), while simultaneously having articulated a definitive voice and sound in trumpet playing. It was Jon who taught me the importance of finding one’s own voice.

TRUMPET INFLUENCES:

I had always wanted to play as fast as Tony Iommi. I tried to do so on electric guitar, I even took lessons, but somehow, I never could do it. I realised much later that perhaps this was because I’m basically a wind player! So when I took up trumpet, I found that I could play really fast on it. As fast as Tony Iommi—awright! So this is the main reason I took up trumpet after electric guitar, so that I could play as fast as Tony Iommi.

My training as a flute player was exclusively in the classical tradition. I had been playing in this tradition from the age of 8-years old. I didn’t pick up trumpet until much later. When it came time to take lessons on trumpet, I decided that since I had already done the classical thing, I wanted my training as a trumpet player to come completely out of the jazz tradition. So I started learned how to play of iim7, V7, I changes and to be able to play blues in any key at any speed. In short, I wanted wanted to learn and play all the things that a jazz trumpet player is supposed to know how to play. It took me ten years to learn how to play the gol-durned thing!!!

When I was studying trumpet, of course I had listened and studied all of the records and all the tapes of Miles. But it was always Don that I was attracted to in terms of his early trumpet sound. The sound he got when he was playing with Ornette Coleman was a sound that I was eventually able to emulate, and turn into something that was uniquely my own voice.

I was turned on to Bill Dixon by one of his chief students, Stephen Haynes, who played in a brass band I had organised during the mid-eighties. I had just started to learn to play trumpet then, so Stephen advised me to play pedal tones, which are very low tones about three octaves lower than the usual range for trumpet. It’s very good for the lips to play pedal tones, doing so relaxes them. Anyway, the use of these pedal tones and other alternative ways of playing trumpet was something that Stephen’s teacher Bill Dixon often did in his compositions for trumpet and in his personal playing. I adopted some of these techniques, and we can hear them in the trumpet playing at the start of Pythagorean Dream.

ELECTRIC GUITAR INFLUENCES:

Everybody knows that I was influenced by the Ramones. I first heard them at CBGB in May 1976, their first album had just come out. I thought, “jeez, this band is only playing three chords”. I was only playing one chord in my music, but I realised that I had a lot in common with this music, so I decided to play electric guitar, too. I played in bona fide punk groups for a time, and then about a year later I made my first “piece” for electric guitar, entitled Guitar Trio (1977), which used the overtone series of the low E string of the electric guitar as its melodic material, over a driving backbeat.

I was never into e-bow until I started playing with David Daniell ‘round about 2009. Maybe even earlier. We had a group together called Essentialist, and in one of the tunes he and guitarist Adam Wills (Bear in Heaven) were playing a duet consisting entirely of long tones on E-Bow. I really liked it and decided to make use of this technique in Pythagorean Dream.

FINGERPICKING INFLUENCES:

I picked up acoustic guitar in my early twenties and learned how to fingerpick. A big inspiration at the time was John Fahey, I was hypnotised by his music. After playing acoustic guitar for a time, I got bored and started playing tenor saxophone instead. But then Patti Smith and the Ramones hit NY, and I got an electric guitar and learned how to play guitar chords and forgot all about fingerpicking.

Around about 2010, I noticed that people were starting to put acoustic guitars into their sets in the context of the rock concerts that I went to. Also, I kept running into acoustic guitarists Steve Gunn and William Tyler on tour, listening to their sets. Steve and I even ended up working together on a number of projects.

Hearing both Tyler & Gunn play made me wonder if I could still do fingerpicking. It had been a long time; I wasn’t sure that I could. So I let the fingernails of my right had grow and started practising. I tried it, and I liked it! So thanks to that there’s a fingerpicking section in Pythagorean Dream.