Fred Frith - Music for Prepared Guitar

Recorded at "Mózg" in Bydgoszcz (Poland) on 24.06.2006





Fred Frith (born 17 February 1949) is an English multi-instrumentalist, composer and improvisor.


Probably best-known for his guitar work, Frith first came to attention as one of the founding members of the English avant-rock group Henry Cow. Frith was also a member of Art Bears, Massacre and Skeleton Crew. He has collaborated with a number of prominent musicians, including Robert Wyatt, Brian Eno, Lars Hollmer, The Residents, Lol Coxhill, John Zorn, Bill Laswell, Derek Bailey, Iva Bittová and Bob Ostertag. He has also composed several long works, including Traffic Continues (1996, performed 1998 by Frith and Ensemble Modern) and Freedom in Fragments (1993, performed 1999 by Rova Saxophone Quartet).


Frith is the subject of Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel's award-winning 1990 documentary film Step Across the Border. He has contributed to a number of music publications, including New Musical Express and Trouser Press, and has conducted improvising workshops across the world. Frith's career spans over three decades and he appears on over 400 albums. He still performs actively throughout the world.


Frith is also one of the subjects of the Canadian documentary Act of God, from the director of the award winning Manufactured Landscapes. The film is about the metaphysical effects of being struck by lightning.


Currently Frith is Professor of Composition in the Music Department at Mills College in Oakland, California. He lives in the United States with his wife, German photographer Heike Liss, and their children, Finn Liss (born 1991) and Lucia Liss (born 1994).


Frith was awarded the 2008 Demetrio Stratos Prize for his career achievements in experimental music. The prize was established in 2005 in honour of experimental vocalist Demetrio Stratos, of the Italian group Area, who died in 1979.


Frith is the brother of Simon Frith, a well-known music critic and sociologist, and Chris Frith, a psychologist working at University College London.

Carl Ruggles - Angels (original version for trumpets)

From Presser Online:

Carl (Charles Sprague) Ruggles was born in East Marion, Massachusetts, on March 11, 1876. Trained as a violinist, he also studied theory and composition in Boston with Josef Claus and John Knowles Paine. (Plans to study composition with Dvorák in Prague were put off when a financial sponsor died).

In 1907, Ruggles moved to Winona, Minnesota. In this small city on the banks of the Mississippi he founded, and for a decade conducted, the Winona Symphony. He also gave lessons, composed, and began painting during this time.

Ruggles moved to New York City in 1917 and, supported by teaching and private patronage, became associated with Ives, Varèse, Cowell, Slonimsky, and Seeger. Most of his major works were begun and first performed during the years in New York (1917-37).

After a period (1938-43) during which he taught composition at the University of Miami, Ruggles settled in a converted schoolhouse in Vermont, where he had been spending his summers since the ‘20s. His musical activities during this time consisted mostly of ruthless and painstaking revision of his earlier works. (He started few new works; the only one completed is the short hymn tune Exaltation, written in 1958 as a memorial to his wife). He turned mostly to his painting - which grew increasingly abstract - during the Vermont years of his life.

A crusty, cigar-smoking, classically independent Yankee, Ruggles was described by Henry Cowell as "irascible, lovable, honest, sturdy, original, slow-thinking, deeply emotional, self-assure, and intelligent," and by Charles Seeger as "the most delightful character in contemporary American life."

Ruggles’ unique music - atonal but not serial, and filled with shifting lines and rhythms - is difficult to describe. The New Grove’s Dictionary sees his music characteristically moving in "mounting declamations of heroic striving" varied with sparser, more settled textures, and finds "his aim was the clearest and boldest presentation of the features that were most important to him: line and polyphony." Ives called it simply "strong masculine music."

Carl Ruggles died in Bennington, Vermont, on October 24, 1971.

Ruth Crawford Seeger - String quartet (1931) Terzo e quarto Movimento

Ruth Crawford Seeger (July 3, 1901 - November 18, 1953), born Ruth Porter Crawford, was a modernist composer and an American folk music specialist.


In the twenties and early thirties, Crawford Seeger wrote atonal works influenced by Alexander Scriabin. These works favored dissonance and post-tonal harmonies; they also utilized irregular rhythms and meters. Her technique may have been influenced by the music of Schoenberg, although they met only briefly during her studies in Germany. She was encouraged and guided by her teacher-then-husband Charles Seeger's dissonant counterpoint, as well—and also developed her own methods of composing.


Ruth Crawford was born in East Liverpool, Ohio, and began her music education at age 6 with her first piano lesson. Later she studied with her mother. She studied with Madame Valborg Collett later on, who was a student of Agathe Grøndahl. Later, she continued at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago with Heniot Levy and Louise Robyn. She learned composition from Adolf Weidig, whose instruction accelerated her skill. But her study under Djane Lavoie Herz, a disciple of Scriabin, was important for the social and intellectual world it opened for her. During this time, she met Cowell, Rudhya, and the leading Chicago poet Carl Sandburg whose writings she eventually set to music.


Later that year she became the first woman to receive the Guggenheim Fellowship and went to Berlin. (Hisama 2001, p. 3). Despite being in the heart of German modernism, she chose to study and compose alone. Yet, through letters, Seeger’s ideas were crucial to the development of her style and selections. She and Seeger married in 1932 after her second Guggenheim award and subsequent trip to Paris. Notably, at the ISCM Festival in Amsterdam (1933) her Three Songs for voice, oboe, percussion and strings was the only piece by an American performed that year.


The family, including Mike Seeger, Peggy Seeger, Barbara, Penny, and stepson Pete Seeger, moved to Washington D.C. in 1936 after Charles’ appointment to the music division of the Resettlement Administration. While in Washington D.C. Crawford Seeger worked closely with John and Alan Lomax at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress to preserve and teach American folk music. Her arrangements and interpretations of American Traditional folk songs are among the most respected including transcriptions for: American Folk Songs for Children, Animal Folksongs for Children (1950) and American Folk Songs for Christmas (1953) Our Singing Country and Folk Song USA by John and Alan Lomax. However she is most well known for Our Singing Country (1941.) She also composed Rissolty Rossolty, an ‘American Fantasia for Orchestra’ based on folk tunes, for the CBS radio series American School of the Air.


She briefly returned to her modernist roots in early 1952 with Suite for Wind Quintet. She died the following year, from intestinal cancer, in Chevy Chase, Maryland.


Crawford began her career as an experimental composer, but the label only truly applies to her early works. Her work in traditional music preservation may have come from her interest in Eastern mysticism and the musical complexities of Native American music. Her conceptual palette was affected by American literary transcendentalism as well. As a composer, she may be thought of as the musical bridge between the modern and transcendental movements.

Carlos Chavez - Xochipilli (An Imagined Aztec Music)

There is no certainty of the style or aesthetic nature of the music of pre-Columbian civilizations. We deal with hypotheses, though these can be based on somewhat sensible considerations. At least two main genres can be distinguished: music for sacred festivities and that which accompanied poetical expressions of a deep lyrical or religious character. The latter were sung and must have corresponded to the same poetic expression of the lyrics, which fortunately have been transmitted to us, and which we admire for their deep poetic content. Being vocal music, we must surmise that it corresponded to a continuous melodic line more or less varied, although undoubtedly based on the repetition of simply musical phrases. In contrast to this lyrical expression, the music of the great sacred festivities was preponderantly rhythmical and active, meant to accompany enormous ensembles of dancers. It must have been rather tremendous music, implacable in its rhythm, strong and obstinate.


In the first and last parts of this three-part work, percussion and flutes suggest the great sacred festivities in the large squares of the teocalli, full of fervor and dread. The middle part could very well confirm the melodies of inner concentration which parallel the deep lyrical poetry.


Authentic musical quotes being impossible, Xochipilli is the result of my thoughts on topics of Mexican antiquity and of my unlimited admiration for pre-Cortesian sculpture and painting. Although referring to different arts, there is a common denominator in the various expressions of a given culture so that it is not impossible to derive from plastic arts a sensitivity that can be transcribed to music. Also, many times during my childhood I heard in the country Indian ensembles deeply rooted in the old traditions, something that is now lost, which made it possible for me to delve in the aesthetics of those cultures: sobriety, conciseness, purity and vigor.


--Carlos Chavez

Igor Stravinsky - Zvezdoliki

Image via Wikipedia

The Russian title of Stravinsky's cantata King of the Stars (1911-1912) is Zvezdoliki, literally "Starface." The work is scored for male chorus and full orchestra (including celesta and two harps). The text, by symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont, is in Russian; Stravinsky, as was often the case, was more interested in the text on a purely sonic level than for its content or semantic sense. "Its words are good," Stravinsky noted, "and words were what I needed, not meanings."


King of the Stars was composed at roughly the same time that Stravinsky worked on the score of his ballet masterpiece The Rite of Spring (1911-1913). The choral writing, predominantly in four parts, is characterized by close spacing and triad-based harmonies with the addition of sevenths, ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths. At times, Stravinsky sets phrases in unison to accentuate certain parts of the text.


As with many of Stravinsky's early "Russian" works, King of the Stars has a fundamentally bitonal harmonic structure, often employing the choral and instrumental bodies as distinct harmonic entities superimposed upon one another; the final sonority, for example, consists of two distinct chords, a C major dominant ninth chord in the orchestra and a G major seventh chord in the chorus. Debussy, to whom the work is dedicated, was among the many who deemed the work essentially unperformable, targeting its bitonality as a likely cause of serious intonation problems in performance. The work was first performed in 1939, more than a quarter century after its composition.

Charles Ives - The Unanswered Question

A Question is Better than an Answer




In Charles Ives's most famous work The Unanswered Question, a miniature he called a "cosmic drama," one finds distilled his revolutionary means, and more importantly the ends of his singular art. The piece is a kind of collage in three distinct layers, roughly coordinated. In the background a quiet and hauntingly beautiful chorale of strings represents, said Ives, "the silence of the Druids." Over that silence a solo trumpet proclaims, again and again, an enigmatic phrase representing "the perennial question of existence." In response to each question, a quartet of winds Ives called the "fighting answerers" runs around in search of a reply, becoming more and more frustrated until they reach a scream of rage. Then the trumpet proclaims the question once more, to be answered by silence.


From the beginnings of his public career, Ives was proclaimed a prophet in discovering on his own, before anyone else, most of the devices associated with musical Modernism: polytonality, polyrhythm, free dissonance, chance and collage effects, spatial music, and on and on-most of them already on display in The Unanswered Question, written in the first decade of the 20th century. It was a long time before people began to ask whether Ives was innovating for the sake of innovation or getting at something deeper.


He was indeed getting at something, and that too is part of The Unanswered Question. Entirely with tones and a simple dramatic program, Ives makes a philosophical point: a question is better than an answer, in the immensity of creation. And those determined to force the answers are apt to look foolish in the face of that immensity. In all his work Ives was getting at something, always in his singular way. In The Unanswered Question we see the elements of his art in a nutshell: a work at once timeless and revolutionary, spiritual and concrete, comic and cosmic.


On a larger canvas one finds the same kind of point in the grand pandemonium of the second movement, called Comedy, of Ives's masterpiece the Fourth Symphony. In the vertiginous climax of the movement he stacks up a brass-band march, Yankee Doodle, bits of The Irish Washerwoman, snatches of ragtime, atonal fistfuls of piano, and an assortment of other freelance manifestations. In the concert hall, those masses of sound tumbling and crashing in air are sui generis and jaw-dropping. The whole movement feels rather like being transported into the moil of Manhattan in a particularly riotous rush hour. Such a cityscape, as a matter of fact, is the picture Ives the long-time Manhattanite intended to paint. It is a memorable specimen of his singular Impressionism. Debussy's Impressionism is about nature, wind and waves; much of Ives's music, busy or simple, wild or sentimental, is about scenes in the life of families, communities, and nations: cityscapes, holiday parades, barn dances, camp meetings, football games, the polyrhythmic patter of feet passing on the street. Ives composed all those and a good deal more-including a number of sweet songs right out of the Victorian parlor.


In the Fourth Symphony's Comedy, the astute listener will notice something remarkable about this apparent bedlam: in its outlandish fashion, with sometimes a dozen and more separate parts roaring along together each on its own path, all this grand and glorious noise is somehow going somewhere, moreover going somewhere together, in the same direction. It's an epic pandemonic chorus of individual voices in an unaccountable but unmistakable march toward the same transcendent somewhere. Each part marches in its own way, own style, own tempo, own key, and maintains that individuality in the climax – here The Irish Washerwoman, there a brass band, in the distance a ragtimer, and Yankee Doodle in the middle.


In the mystical finale of the Fourth, just before the coda's evocation of an old tune, myriad murmuring voices coalesce around a chord progression such as an organist would use to introduce a hymn. Then a chorus enters on "Nearer, My God, to Thee" in a cloudy D major, that key and hymn the foundation of the symphony, those words its essential goal – to bring us Nearer. The chorus is wordless, because Ives wanted us to recall the words in our own hearts and minds, to complete his thought. At the end the music seems to evaporate into the stars, still searching.


In his personal life Ives was a churchgoer, and he had unbounded faith in the redemptive power of art. Ultimately he was aiming, he wrote, for a "conception unlimited by the narrow names of Christian, Pagan, Jew, or Angel. A vision higher and deeper than art itself!" Though like The Unanswered Question some of the Fourth Symphony is wonderfully comic, the whole is nonetheless one of the most serious and ambitious works of the twentieth century, offered as a step toward the universal religion Ives conceived.


Ives believed it is a divine law that the human spirit evolves along with the rest of nature, toward perfection. Each of us is engaged in a heroic individual journey of growth and discovery that is part of the upward journey of all humanity. And music, Ives believed, plays an essential role in those journeys large and small. Whether the music is coming from a symphony orchestra or a band on the march or a ragtime piano or a stonemason bawling a hymn, the essence is the same, if it is earnest and authentic. "The Music of the Ages," Ives called them all, because an external sound is the imperfect manifestation of the eternal inward spirit. "Music," he wrote, "is life." Ives determined to echo that music of the ages. Thus his unique and irreplaceable merging of high European tradition with the everyday voices of everyday Americans.


Perhaps some of Ives's ideals appear outmoded. But so much of Ives's vision remains prescient and vital. And in a time when in the West many seem to resist the idea that music ought to have depth and substance, it's worth recalling how much Ives believed in its moral and spiritual importance. Meanwhile if he wrote some works of Wagnerian ambition, Ives rejected the Wagnerian model of the artist as high priest in the religion of art. He simply played his part in the parade.


One finds the same modesty and the same boundless democratic faith in Ives's day job, the life insurance business. A founding partner of Ives & Myrick, the dominating insurance agency of its time, he was no ordinary boss. His employees remembered Ives as an unforgettable figure who somehow, in his shy and retiring way, was able to galvanize them with his ideals. "When [Ives] talked with someone," recalled one employee, "he elevated them.… It's very hard to describe, but he made everyone feel important." He preached to his employees that "There was not a service that I could render to my fellow man that was more important than the business of life insurance, because it instilled in the soul and mind of my fellow man the responsibility of meeting his obligations."


Community for Ives began with family and ascended from there to towns, countries, the insured, the globe, the universe. Many of his artistic and spiritual ideals started in business, especially as he studied actuarial science and began to see human life in large terms, in masses of people from the cradle to the grave. In famous paragraphs he wrote,


"My business experience revealed life to me in many aspects that I might otherwise have missed.
In it one sees tragedy, nobility, meanness, high aims, low aims, brave hopes, faint hopes, great ideals, no ideals... And it has seemed to me that the finer sides of these traits were not only in the majority but in the ascendancy.
The fabric of existence weaves itself whole. You cannot set an art off in the corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality and substance. There can be nothing exclusive about a substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of experience of life and thinking about life and living life.
My work in music helped my business and work in business helped my music."
The latter paragraph in particular deserves to inspire generations of artists. In all his works large and small, complex and simple, radical and traditional, Ives pursued that ideal. We have been describing here a paradoxical man, and paradoxical is a word long attached to Charles Ives. In paradox, he found more than simple contradiction. Paradox is a dialectic of opposites. You can get somewhere with paradox. A simple apparent truth is narrowing, encourages you to sit down and stop searching.


So Ives thought and composed in paradoxes, all founded on those in his own life: a young organ prodigy who practiced hard but would rather be out playing baseball, a socialistically inclined businessman who got rich in the insurance industry, an individualist who exalted community, a fierce democrat who sometimes wrote fiercely challenging music, a Romantic idealist who conceived a music of the future. As has been written, the best description of Ives is Ivesian.


And yet nowhere but in America could somebody like Ives have turned up and made such a splendid go of it. We are a paradoxical people with paradoxical ideals. In his ideals, in his business and his art, Ives was the quintessential American-only more so.


He is the ultimate democrat, the musical Whitman embracing any and all as long as they're real, a model of pluralism, a prophet not only of Modernism but of Postmodernism. And in all those respects Ives is still himself, still forging beyond any ideology, still ahead of us-but looking back to encourage us all with a shout or a laugh to find our own way.


Even if we've forgotten what community used to mean in an era of small towns, forgotten many of the words to the tunes Ives quotes in his music, we can still catch, if we're open-eared and open-minded, the gist of what he is getting at. And even if he created his greatest work in isolation, it is impossible to imagine contemporary music without him. Composers all over the world draw from Ives's vision and his courage. He took on the mantle of the European tradition went after the ambitions of Beethoven and the others, but did it, as he liked to say, by finding his own path up the mountain. He is the great maverick of Western music. In that, Ives is American to the core. We admire our mavericks, and we need them.


-Jan Swafford


Jan Swafford's books include Charles Ives: A Life With Music (W.W. Norton and Company, 1996) and Johannes Brahms: A Biography (Vintage Books, 1999).