Memory and Immorality in Musical Composition
John Zorn is the most visible jazz composer and instrumentalist to have emerged from the Lower East Side in the 1970s. In influential early works such as Hockey, Locus Solus, The Classic Guide to Strategy, and Cobra, he employed techniques of spontaneous choice, improvisation, and constraint, often with collaborators, that led to new genres of multiauthored composition that went beyond free improvisation. In this essay, Zorn argues for radical compositional approaches that maximize musical possibility. His approach is grounded in the principle of distribution rather than composition, in the sense that his pieces are built through the distribution of their musical elements (motifs, timbres, sounds). In making art this way, Zorn’s goals are both aesthetic and social: hierarchies are dissolved and continually reorganized, and the tradition of the master soloist is questioned. Zorn distinguishes his decentering approach from the chance-composed works of John Cage in order to ground aesthetic practice in performative difficulty. In his work, each compositional and performative decision is contextualized by layers of alternative possibility; their complexity gives every work, every performance a unique musical meaning and social resonance. Zorn has gone on to edit three volumes of writings by musicians on their art practices.
My personal creative activity is concerned with accumulating and processing information. Day-to-day experiences creep into my work and in some ways are at the center of it. All of my activities, all of my experiences become logged somewhere in my mind or imagination—sometimes toward the front and sometimes toward the back. Sometimes they go out the back door and are never thought of again. Maybe most of them go out the back door. But plenty of experiences are left. Any idea or experience that touches me might be transformed into a musical idea. It may be a scene from a film, from a book, from a conversation, from looking at art or even something on the street. When something sparks my imagination it is remembered or written down on a slip of paper or into a notebook, and then gets transformed into a sound, musical gesture or instrumentation. When enough sufficiently different ideas have been accumulated, then begins the process of fitting the different ideas—or even scraps of ideas—together. Everything in the selection and compositional process is very much about decision making—about trying to make it all as conscious as I possibly can, instead of unconscious. I think this—this determination to be conscious—is what one is talking about when one discusses “the person.”
For example, what John Cage has done seems to me very easy—perhaps too easy. He can produce reams of paper covered with black dots because he doesn’t have to make any kinds of decisions about them. He has surrendered the decision-making process to the chance process, throwing coins or sticks or using star charts as the basis for putting his dots on paper. One decision determining the process functions for all. This rarely produces compelling work. The music and artworks that have consistently interested me the most are those in which the decisions have been the hardest to reach—Beethoven, Van Gogh, James Joyce, Artaud, Celan. The work of these artists inherently acknowledges the vast amount of information out there from which one has to choose one’s little scraps. Of course, once you have your scraps you then have to decide how to put them together, what form it will take, which ones to eliminate—you labor, sweat, and bleed over each separate little decision. That to me is the essence of creating from experience—the essence of art.
On the surface, my basic working method seems very simple—an ordered set of blocks, one following another. It’s the ordering process that people seem to be the most obsessed about. Why should this follow that, and why should that then be followed by this? Although I spend an enormous amount of time determining the order of these moments, both at my desk and then later in the recording studio, on another level, once the elements have been selected it almost doesn’t matter what the order actually is. Of course, personal taste can determine this—one needs a certain number of contrasts, tension and release, the piece needs to flow, and not get bogged down. Pacing is critical. But on a higher level one could almost say that once you find the space that a piece resides in, its being in time, the moments will actually order themselves. Decisions are not only obvious, they become inevitable, inescapable. Some people make the mistake of thinking of music as being strictly temporal rather than potentially spatial. Musical blocks are in some sense like elements spread out on a board—their arrangement in time gives birth to form, but if listeners can keep them in their minds, it should be possible to rearrange them. Memory can recompose any piece.
Much of my work relates more closely to the film and performance scene in New York than it does to strictly musical examples. I’ve done a lot of musical study, but it’s important to understand the correlation between contemporary performance theater pieces and a composition like Spillane or Torture Garden (the short hardcore pieces written for Naked City).1 Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, Jack Smith, Ken Jacobs, Stuart Sherman were all seminal influences. In theater, arranging elements can be more a spatial than a temporal activity, even though the chronology—the narrative—is crucial. It is crucial in my work too. There’s a certain number of elements involved, depending on the length of the piece—but is time a linear progression of these events? Or is it an energy, an energy field, that acts upon everything simultaneously? If time is a form of energy, or if energy is a form of time—then the “narrative” can be built vertically. My work can often build vertically. In fact, some thinkers are more comfortable thinking of my work in that way. When I put ideas together, one listens to them across time—but it doesn’t always make musical sense. Memory informs what you’re listening to at any time. It’s a building process, in this sense. One hears the present and remembers the past, and as information and emotions build up vertically, questions arise.
One of my interests is in devising new methods for making music—for letting music happen. Spillane is a composition of idea blocks (musical moments) with the “story” intact. But in a work like Cobra, what is accumulated from my life experiences and ideas aren’t chords, notes or genres, but dynamics, relationships—both personal and musical. The actual sound of the music that’s played onstage depends entirely on who happens to be in the band at a particular performance—what instruments each musician plays and what proclivities and background they have individually. In a piece like Cobra, I cannot control, nor do I wish to control, every detail of what a musician plays. What I’m concerned with is the rate of change, the changing of densities, the flux, how the flux itself can go through flux, so it isn’t even constant in its change. The best way to accomplish this with a group of improvisers who have each created a highly idiosyncratic language which is inherently unnotatable is through a democratic system which lets everybody do as they like—or gives them that impression—within a precise set of parameters and rules. In Cobra the players are making the decisions, and as a part of the ensemble, I make decisions too, but my main role is in transmitting information, assuring clarity, inspiring the players and keeping the energy flowing. It’s a misunderstanding to view me as a conductor in the traditional sense. Audiences are so used to the notion of an autonomous musical mind, a leader who’s in control of everything, that they’re often blind to the reality of Cobra. The fact is, everyone in the group is involved in making decisions—even musicians who make no decisions are making decisions. That’s the essence of the game pieces—to create a situation in which the decision-making process is predominant and persistent. It forces musicians to choose. It creates its own momentum, and it is the responsibility of the prompter to prevent breakdown, and to know when the danger is there in advance to circumvent it. Everyone, no matter what the particular configuration of any performance, is excited when that momentum becomes musical, but in the best performances the decisions are seemingly making themselves, as we work as a collective mind.
There are many kinds of music that interest me, and it is very rewarding to expose both the audience and the musicians themselves to new sounds, experiences, and formats. The game pieces, with different players involved in almost every performance, provide a unique social situation. Involving musicians with completely and even radically different musical interests, no less personalities, produces new musical and social situations that resonate throughout the band and audience on a variety of levels. Social context is at the center of any musical performance. In my compositional process the reality and intricacies of creating an independent society on stage is intrinsically intertwined with and as important as the actual sounds they perform.
File card compositions like Spillane or Godard, Torture Garden or the New Traditions in East Asian Bar Band pieces all have extra-musical elements to them, and can be seen in a way as theater. Notes on paper produce only music, and just sound like music to me—something crucial is absent. In the tradition of “program” music, many of my compositions have a dramatic narrative, a larger theme or subtext involved that both ties the piece together and takes it out of a “pure” music context: something that resonates for me, the musicians and the audience in a dramatic, political, social or cultural way. It’s got to present a story, or, let’s say, the situation of a story. When I started putting together the Bar Band pieces, the concept was a response to a particular style of music that had cultural resonance beyond the sounds themselves. Jazz, for example, created not only a music, but also a fashion and a spoken language—a parlance, or lingo—that the followers of the music used as signifiers. The musical language was also a shared one. From one little sheet of paper people could play music all night long. Everyone understood immediately what to do with this one little sheet of paper, and actually most times there wasn’t even any paper. The rules were understood within the community itself: the melody was played at the beginning, followed by solos, maybe trades, and a possible collective moment before a return to the melody. There were also ways of relating melodic material to chord changes that had developed over the course of decades—certain ways of playing upper extensions of chords, extended chords, more complex harmonies—that were understood, accepted, challenged. There was both form and content, socially and musically worked out—and within that tight set of rules an incredible amount of creativity, expression and growth took place. Many of my works function in a similar way, as independent societies, temporarily autonomous, but rich in possibilities and invention. For the bar band pieces I created a new improvisational musical context based on an invented sociocultural situation, which brings us back to a relationship with the performance aspect of what I do in each piece—each piece as theater.
I ask myself why I do what I do. Instead of going out on the stage and giving people what they want, I try to spark thinking patterns, to raise questions. One question that persistently comes up pertains to diversity and simultaneity. I am not asking how it is that so many different elements can exist at any one time and place. But I do insist on asking why everything is continually put into convenient boxes. My concern is in finding ways of breaking those boxes apart. This is a cultural, social, musical question that is urgent and broadly resonant. Music critics should be concerned with these questions, but it seems they too have been commodified into boxes—we have jazz critics and classical music critics and pop critics. In our modern world this is counterproductive. Absurd. One does not find film critics who review only one kind of film: only comedy, action, drama or documentary films. Critics cannot experience what is real from inside their boxes. Mixing what is seen as an eclectic variety of different genres—seemingly incompatible—into my compositions defies a critic’s simplistic classifications, compartments, and hierarchies. Decision making is the product of consciousness, and that kind of human activity—a person’s being conscious—is the opposite of escapism. My pieces are opposed to escape.
NOTES
1 All of the works by John Zorn named in this essay are available on Tzadik.
PUBLICATION: The Person (1991), 9:101–5.
KEYWORDS: avant-garde; music; performance; manifesto.
LINKS: Fred Frith, “Helter Skelter” (PJ 9); Carla Harryman, “What in Fact Was Originally Improvised” (PJ 2); Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure” (Guide; PJ 4); “Poets Theater: Two Versions of Collateral” (Guide; PJ 5); Jed Rasula, “What Does This Do with You Reading?” (PJ 1); Andrew Schelling, “Antin’s Tuning” (PJ 5); Andrew Voigt, “Sound on Silence” (PJ 5); Jason Weiss, “Postmodernism and Music: The Reaches” (PJ 7).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY/DISCOGRAPHY: Arcana: Musicians on Music, vols. 1–3 (ed.; New York: Granary, 2000; Hips Road, 2007, 2008); Lacrosse (1977); Pool (1980); Hockey (1980); Archery (1981); The Classic Guide to Strategy, 2 vols. (1983–85); Locus Solus (1983); The Big Gundown (1986); Cobra (1987); with Naked City, Naked City (1989); Elegy (1992); Kristallnacht (1993); with Masada, Alef (1994); Filmworks, 1986–1990 (1997); New Traditions in East Asian Bar Bands (1997); with Painkiller, Guts of a Virgin / Buried Secrets (1998); Godard/Spillane (1999); The String Quartets (1999); with Masada, Live in Sevilla (2000); with Electric Masada, At the Mountains of Madness (2005); with Masada String Trio, Azazel: Book of Angels, vol. 2 (2005); with Bar Kokhba Sextet, Lucifer: Book of Angels, vol. 10 (2008); with Moonchild Trio, The Crucible (2008).