Alienation strategies are the stock shots of the avant garde; to move an audiences’ expectations and lift them on to new planes of perception. Cage’s silent piece 4’ 33†is perhaps the ultimate example - although LaMonte Young’s Piano Piece for David Tudor No.1 , in which the piano is offered a bale of hay and a bucket of water, might run it a close second.
The effect of alienating is to surprise - to make an aesthetic mismatch. But alienation strategies need not be confined to single pieces; they might equally be conveyed by more substantial aesthetic shifts of practice. I remember Frederic Rzewski suggesting that Cornelius Cardew’s move from the musical avant garde to communism was itself ‘a piece’. This may seem a cynical interpretation of his late friend’s motives but maybe the theme of alienation ran through Cardew’s work more deeply that the other artists with whom he was associated.
Much of contemporary improvising music might seem to owe its development via similar alienating strategies. Dispensing with composition. Using traditional instruments in unconventional ways. Not using traditional instruments at all. Audiences and musicians alike were fascinated/repelled by new techniques and the development of ‘performance’ within the music which at times transcended even sound production. But all alienation strategies and all avant gardes become exhausted. The effect is weakened by repeated applications. And the fragility of the alienating method is that it is inherently reactive. It exists by virtue of negating a negative.
Many progressives in established music use improvisation as a medium of refreshment. It is not seen as a novel experience in which musicians take music apart and construct it anew. The classical tradition remains intact and improvisation and experimentalism are subservient; minor appendages to the main current of musical life. And, in terms of their use as alienating methods they are certainly less potent than they were. This argument is difficult to counter if we accept the terms in which it is ultimately couched; that of alienation and the act of negating.
There are, of course, varying degrees of alienation. A musician with a western heritage of Beethoven and company on his back may feel the tradition alienating, especially if he has a more radical cultural/political perspective than the tradition allows. Such a tradition is likely to be weightier than the more informal and tenuous connection a British musician could possibly have with American jazz. The alienating methods employed by the musical avant garde (c. 1960/70) often reduced composition to a comical parody and offered ultra democratic ideals - making all players no matter their abilities equal in the music making process. In some sense of course this ideal made for expansive and creative opportunities. It is interesting to note however that many of the advocates of this ‘leveling’ have scuttled back to the protective skirts of the music establishment, leaving their unschooled associates high and dry, now that the experimentalism is (for them) exhausted.
Alongside these alienating methods, entwined with them,was another ethos - the improvisational. It may have taken lessons from jazz and the new musical activities of the western avant garde; it may well have been attracted by the general spirit of rebellion. But it was never imbued with such a severe sense of alienation. If alienation existed in the improvising community it was never perceived in the same cultural/artistic context as projected by the more formal elements in the avant garde.
Twenty years on what remains and has developed from those tentative steps of free improvisation is a whole range of techniques and an open-ended aesthetic of enquiry propelled by a dialogical mode. The musicians, such as these on this album, are at ease in this medium, even though they may be ever striving for some elusive sense of musical fulfillment. They are not driven by an alienation strategy, they do not seek to ‘demonstrate’ an alternative form. They are content to perform in a mode which has become the simple and natural means of musical expression. Any sense of negating the negative is weak, because the musicians are not ideologically trapped by musical/cultural forms from they might feel alienated. Having no firm musical tradition they have made their own. They have superseded other other ways of making music; couching their objectives and methods in relation to the desired expression of hitherto unrealized cultural ideals.
Eddie Prévost - August 1988
Eddie Prévost is not only a highly articulate percussionist but also a stimulating writer, writing for example his occasional contributions to The Write Place or his examnation and critical reactions to The Ganelin Trio in Wire 7. This CD release from Prévost's own label comes with a thought-provoking essay on alienation strategies in music. He contrasts these methods with the approach of the participants in this concert recording, who "do not seek to 'demonstrate' an alternative form. They are content to perform in a mode which has become the simple and natural means of musical expression."
I supose that this is 'difficult' music, but these exponents inhabit the unfamiliar places of this sound world as if they were the most natural of habitats, which for them they are. This is a hermetic environment in which the four elements interwine, merge, discourse, shape-swop and shift. It may be self-contained but it is not unwelcoming to audiences prepared to give something of themselves, to melt into passages of hushed, eery beauty, to be sucked into vortices of thunderous turbulence or to particpate, albeit vicariously through their responses and imagination, in the creation of unremembered sounds.
The rapport between the musicians and the unconventional noises they produce from their instruments challenge the listeners' powers o fidentifying and distinguishing the voices of the individual players. Enjoyable though this game is it is hardly the most fruitful approach. Details of timbres, component sound relationships, transmutations of constituent parts of the music and, flipping the telescope over, the overal effect of the tapestry matter more than individual credits.
A supersession for sure, music-making of formidable integrity (in all senses of the word) which offers seemingly infinite and inexhaustible prospects.
Barry Witherden
The Wire July 1989