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Anthony Braxton: “Open Aspect #4”

From the album Open Aspects (Duo) (1982)

In a prolific career in which he has collaborated with innumerable musicians and released over 100 recordings, Anthony Braxton has staked out a unique stylistic position between the post-bebop/free jazz tradition and the experimental and improvisatory approaches to music associated with the Euro-American avant-garde. His work is representative of the collapse of conventional boundaries of musical genre in the second half of the twentieth century, but it also testifies to the enduring power of these boundaries: avant-garde listeners are unlikely to encounter Braxton in standard texts or class syllabi, while many jazz musicians and aficionados disown his work as beyond the pale.

In addition to being a composer and multi-instrumentalist, Braxton is also an intrepid writer and theorist.  His understanding of his role in the musical macrosystem is expressed in the three categories of “tri-vibrational dynamics”: traditionalism, stylism, and restructuralism.  Traditionalism is based on the maintenance of old cultural forms, as exemplified by most museums and symphony orchestras.  Stylism is the attempt to “perfect” past experimental tendencies, making them palatable for mainstream cultural consumption.  (Braxton compares “stylists” to technocrats.)  Finally, restructuralism is the effort to fundamentally reshape and evolve the artistic medium.  Although Braxton aligns his own music with the last of these categories— “My music, my life’s work, will ultimately challenge the very foundations of Western value systems, that’s what’s dangerous about it”— he believes that a balance of all three is necessary for a well-ordered cultural ecosystem.

Open Aspects is a set of pieces in collaboration with composer Richard Teitelbaum, formerly of the free improvisation collective Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV), with whom Braxton played briefly in 1970.  On this album, Braxton plays alto and sopranino saxophone, accompanied by Teitelbaum on Moog synthesizer and microcomputer.  All the pieces are completely improvised. In this example, the relationship between these two sound elements is ambivalent: while Braxton’s playing is undeniably in the foreground, Teitelbaum’s electronics provide a textural dimension that is at once supportive of the solo part and strangely indifferent to it.

September 03, 2010, 10:17am

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Pauline Oliveros: “Alien Bog” (excerpt, 1967)

From the album Music from Mills

Oliveros’ electronic music from the 60s is often overshadowed by her later work, which is of a more acoustically restrained and meditative nature.  But her early compositions at the San Francisco Tape Music Center are significant in signaling a turn from the carefully spliced productions that characterized electronic music up to that point toward the real-time manipulations of what came to known as “live electronics.”

“Alien Bog” was composed using the Buchla Box, a modular analog synthesizer that was developed by Don Buchla in California in the mid-1960s, at the same time that Robert Moog built his now-famous instrument in New York.  Unlike Moog’s devices, the Buchla had a sequencer, and its sounds were triggered by touch-sensitive pads instead of a conventional keyboard.

The full version of “Alien Bog,” in all its 33-minute glory, is available on disc as well.  It is surely one of the most ambitious and immersive electronic works of its time.

May 28, 2009, 1:45pm