The Theatre of Eternal Music
Most of the score development of The Four Dreams of China took place during the many rehearsals and performances of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer and The First Blossom of Spring. As a result, of The Four Dreams of China, the most evolved scores are those of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer and The First Blossom of Spring. These works are models of algorithmic scores where written instructions and rules describe means for players to realise, in real time, unique versions of the work, and the score for The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s Second Dream of The First Blossom of Spring from The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China evolves from this tradition. This contrasts with the convention of Western classical music where a score prescribes an idealised, temporally fixed sequence of events. My approach to composition for my group, The Theatre of Eternal Music, has been to structure pieces with precisely described sets of pitches and rules for their articulation, creating a distinctive, yet potentially infinite macrocosm.
The Theatre of Eternal Music evolved through my relationships to musicians with whom I worked individually as early as 1953 and, although it has been used to refer to everything that the group did from 1962 onward, the name “The Theatre of Eternal Music” did not appear in print until February 1965. In naming the group The Theatre of Eternal Music I imagined that these musicians would become the nucleus for the group that would eventually play continuous music in a Dream House. In works such as Dorian Blues, Sunday Morning Blues, Early Tuesday Morning Blues, and E♭DEAD (based on a Dream Chord of that spelling with an octave doubling of the D), I played sopranino saxophone over vocal and instrumental drones accompanied by hand drums. I played extremely fast permutations and combinations of sets of specific tones as a way of creating the impression of a sustained chord. By February 1964 I was notating the ratios for the melody and all of the possible harmonic combinations for the first work that we played in just intonation. I labeled the harmonic combinations according to which ones should be played and which should not, and one of the “permitted” harmonic combinations was a totally new presentation of the Dream Chord of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, modulated to the key of the 7th partial as the quadrad 63/62/56/42. Note the interesting divisor 62 (2 x the prime 31) of the 9/8 interval 63/56. I played the characteristic melodic patterns on the saxophone, and the entire group sustained the harmonic combinations. We taped this new work in April that same year, and I later titled it Pre-Tortoise Dream Music. After June 1964, I switched to voice and embarked on The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1964–), a large work involving improvisation within strict predetermined guidelines. In 1967, I began a major new section of The Tortoise entitled Map of 49’s Dream The Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery.
Listed chronologically from 1962 through 1975, Terry Jennings, Dennis Johnson, Terry Riley, Angus MacLise, Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad, John Cale, Jon Gibson, Simone Forti, David Rosenboom, Jon Hassell, Garrett List, Lee Konitz, Katrina Krimsky, and Alex Dea are among those who worked with me in this group. We recorded, performed in galleries and museums, toured Europe and in 1974, released Dream House 78’17” on Shandar Disques, Paris.
From 1975 I focused primarily on solo performances of The WellTuned Piano until, in 1984, I formed The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble led by Ben Neill as an extension of The Theatre of Eternal Music, in order to concentrate on realisations of my works for brass instruments. The Brass Ensemble has performed for Brass and Composition 1960 #7, as well as The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer.
In 1989 I formed the Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble led by Charles Curtis, to focus on realisations of my works and related works for string instruments. Charles Curtis led The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble in a performance of the Terry Jennings String Quartet (1960) at the MELA Foundation 1989 Terry Jennings Memorial Concert. At this concert, Curtis and I also performed Jennings's Piece for Cello and Saxophone (1960). Through the Berlin performance of The First Blossom of Spring and the Hamburg performance of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, the cello quartet of Andreas Bleyer, Thomas Grossenbacher, and Christof Groth, led by Charles Curtis is, in spirit, continuing the tradition of The Theatre of Eternal Music.
The largest Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble to appear in concert to date is The Theatre of Eternal Music Big Band which includes four voices, five trumpets in Harmon mutes, three French horns, two tenor trombones, two bass trombones, three tubas, two sustained electric guitars and two sustained electric basses. This 23-strong chamber orchestra performed the five world premiere concerts of The Lower Map of The Eleven’s Division in The Romantic Symmetry (over a 60 cycle base) from The Symmetries in Prime Time from 112 to 144 with 119 in a Dream House sound and light environment in New York in March 1990, and a live recording of the last concert is planned as a forthcoming CD release. This composition applies the dynamics of large-scale group improvisation according to predetermined rules, articulating a unique symmetrical 7 1/2-octave constellation of precisely notated frequency ratios derived from the range 144 to 112 of the harmonic series. The intervallic complexity requires extremes of perceptual acuity and results in a work of many intricately related dimensionalities, reflecting a recognisable development of ideas that first appeared in The Four Dreams of China.
The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass and String Ensemble, which appeared in Krems in November 1992, was the largest Theatre of Eternal Music Ensemble to perform since The Theatre of Eternal Music Big Band. Each of the two subgroups—the eight trumpets from The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble led by Ben Neill and the four cellists from the NDR Symphony Orchestra led by Charles Curtis—had specialised in concert presentations of The Four Dreams of China; Ben Neill and Charles Curtis had worked together in The Theatre of Eternal Music Big Band. Under my musical direction, each of the two groups had developed their own approach to performance realisations of The Four Dreams of China, shaped by the characteristics of their respective instruments and interfaced with the collective imaginations of the individual leaders and collaborating musicians. This combination of forces brought not only a unique blending of the instruments but, as well, a merging of energies which together produced performances of the works ranging beyond the horizons of the imagination that each group had already pioneered. Similarly, the appearance of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer and The First Blossom of Spring on consecutive evenings in one concert series allowed a new understanding of the differences and interrelationships between The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer and The First Blossom of Spring from The Four Dreams of China.
The April 1993 Interpretations/WNYC New Sounds Live at Merkin Concert Hall performance by The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble led by Ben Neill in the transparent acoustical environment of Merkin Concert Hall represented a highlyevolved phase in the nine-year performance practice tradition for The Melodic Versions of The Four Dreams of China, the culmination of countless rehearsals—the cumulative knowledge and devotion of The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble applied to the life of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer.
The 29 June 1993 world premiere by the Ensemble Modern Hessischer Rundfunk of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s Second Dream of The First Blossom of Spring from The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China was performed by an even larger ensemble than the The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass and String Ensemble that performed in Krems. The eighteen-member Ensemble Modern, led by Ben Neill and Charles Curtis, consisted of eight strings, five trumpets in Harmon mutes, and five bass flutes. Never before had any of The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China been performed, and since The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China employ eight pitches instead of four (effectively introducing a new fifth pitch in the case of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s Second Dream of The First Blossom of Spring) and combine the rules for two of The Four Dreams of China, which in turn requires new, more comprehensive rules, a new, more complex level of rule-based improvisational process has evolved in my music.
For the 4 February 1996 North German Radio Hamburg world premiere of The Melodic Version of The First Dream of China, and for the 25 February 1996 Hessischer Rundfunk performance at the Städelschule Frankfurt of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, Michael Tiepold, contrabass, replaced Thomas Grossenbacher in The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble led by Charles Curtis. Tiepold had been a member of the Ensemble Modern and performed in the 1993 Hessischer Rundfunk world premiere of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s Second Dream of The First Blossom of Spring from The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China.
The 3 June 1996 performance at Berlin’s Podewil of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer in the Klangwände (Wall of Sound) series curated by Ulrich Krieger was unique in that it was presented for the first time by a Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble consisting of sustaining electric guitars utilising e-bows. Indeed, the sound of sustained electric guitars further reinforces the imagery of the sound of the high-tension line stepdown transformer evoked in the title.
Every performance of The Melodic Versions of The Four Dreams of China has featured the performing musicians located around the perimeter of the audience. The sustained electric guitars concert was a breakthrough because, for the first time, the performing musicians were seated in the center of the audience with their guitar amplifiers placed in the four corners of the auditorium surrounding the listeners. Thus the performers were able to experience the surround sound as they played, much as I, the composer, sitting in the center of the room, have been at each performance immersed in the sound from the perimeters of the concert space. In addition, the performance with four guitars presented Charles Curtis as a performer in a new light in that all of his many previous performances of the Dreams had been with bowed string ensembles in which he was the lead cellist.
Charles Curtis has written about the sustained electric guitar realisation: “In my judgment this is probably the ideal instrumentation for the Dreams. Possibly the next best thing to sticking a high-tension line stepdown transformer in a concert hall and listening to it. My interpretation of the Dreams, which stresses both the sinuous linear voice-leading motion tendencies as well as the motionless environment-like standing wave tendencies of the old Harmonic Version, has been newly defined by the electric guitars. The Dreams are set in a radically new light. The spectrum of composite tones that is unveiled transforms any idea anyone has ever had regarding what a single tone is, or what a dyad is. Not to mention a four-note chord. The first time my colleagues and I played the full quadrad 18/17/16/12 was greeted by stunned silence.”
© La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, 1991, 2011, 2015
Dream Light
©Marian Zazeela
Dream Light is created specifically for concert performances of La Monte Young’s The Four Dreams of China, and continues the exploration of ideas set forth in my work Light. Where possible, each installation of Dream Light is realised in response to the specific characteristics of the environmental or theatrical space and the placement of the musicians within it. Dream Light is related to Light in that both works utilise the inherent properties of colored light mixtures as a medium for the projection of colored shadows in large-scale environments.
In installations of Light, precisely positioned pairs of colored lights are focused on symmetrically arrayed pairs of white aluminum mobile sculptures to cause the projection of colored shadows on the ceiling or walls of a room. In Dream Light, however, the musicians and the ornamental architectural features of the performance space function in the role of the sculptural forms as the elements upon which colored light sources are focused to create colored shadows.
An environment of Dream Light was created for a performance of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer at St. Ann’s Center for the Arts, Brooklyn in 1988. Other concert presentations in which colored light sources were focused on architectural features of the performance space to create colored shadows in an environmental setting include the Union Chapel, London, for the 1989 La Monte Young Almeida Festival concert, and Pandit Pran Nath’s annual Raga Cycle concerts at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in 1988, 1989, 1990, and 1991.
Performance Practice as Social Sculpture
in The Four Dreams of China and
The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China
Throughout history, composers have chosen a variety of approaches to the control of the performance of their music. La Monte Young insists on having his music performed in situations where he can personally interact with the musicians extensively during the rehearsal process, thereby asserting greater influence over the evolution of his music’s performance practice than most composers. Since the beginning of my work with La Monte Young in 1984 as a student and performer, I have made some observations about the unique performance techniques required in his music, particularly in The Four Dreams of China and The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China, which may not be fully apparent to the listener.
The artist Joseph Beuys frequently used the term “social sculpture” to refer to his concept of art as an “evolutionary–revolutionary power capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system.”1 Beuys classified art into two categories: “traditional art, which is unable to change anything in society or in the ability and the joy for life; and another kind of art, which is related to everybody’s needs and the problems existing in society. This kind of art has to be worked out from the beginning; it has to start from the molding power of thought as a sculptural means.”2
The Four Dreams of China and The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China are brilliant examples of the second type of art that Beuys described. In this work a set of rules, which might be likened to the laws or constitution of a society, govern the interaction of the musicians. In The Melodic Versions of each of the four Dreams and The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China there are three levels on which the rules function for the performers. First, each performer is guided by a rule that governs the sequence in which his/ her individual pitches may be played. Second, the performers must listen to and shape the overall harmonic structure, and third, the overall melodic structure. These parameters are similarly governed by sets of rules. The nature of the rules is such that each performer, in addition to his/her individual responsibility to a melodic progression, must always know what every other performer is playing at all times and be ready to adjust accordingly to prevent proscribed combinations or progressions of pitches in the overall unfolding of the work.
This unique way of controlling the interaction of a group of musicians can be thought of not only as a model for music-making but also as a concept for general social organisation. Individual and communal responsibilities are balanced in a way that produces an equilibrium which differs according to the personalities involved, but which always functions, forcing the players to give up any egocentric notions of performance practice. This distinguishes The Four Dreams of China and The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China from free improvisation where the results depend solely on the individual performers. Young has described his outlook on this unique method of control:
At one time [ca. 1959–61] I fell under the influence of John Cage and experimented with the use of chance in my works. I had also been doing a lot of improvisation in jazz [since ca. 1950]. However, I found that if I left things to chance or to the imaginations of other improvisers, I didn’t always get the most imaginative, radical and far-reaching results. I found that I was best able to go beyond the outer realms of all imagination and discover what creativity could be when I exercised control over certain parameters.3
The control Young chose to exercise over the parameters certainly produces results that are imaginative, far-reaching and radical in their scope, and the performance of this work ultimately becomes a transcendent, mystical experience for the performers— always different, always profound. The Gramavision 77-minute CD recording of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China and any other performance of one of The Four Dreams of China or The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China is but one combination of the infinite possibilities for a piece which has no beginning, no end, and no boundaries to its implications for music and for humanity.
© Ben Neill, 1991
Certain Aspects of Interpretation
The act of tuning to beats surprises one at first with its palpability. One doubts for a moment whether it is even the ear that is registering the phenomenon—or even to what extent one is personally in charge of the curious alterations taking place. At times one feels one is subject to something like air pressure changes, such as when taking off in an airplane. One can forget that one is playing at all, one is for brief instants more like a participant or even a witness at an event beyond oneself, a particularly intense change in the weather, for instance, which one senses palpably more than one sees it or hears it.
Likewise one observes with astonishment that when an interval is being played perfectly in tune, one does not hear oneself playing at all. Again, when the pitch is a little bit off, the result might be some beating all the way over on the other side of the room.
We endeavor to play together not as a group of twelve instruments but as a single instrument with twelve separate resonating bodies. If we could act too as a single interpreter, as an interpretive unity, all musicians being as one says “of one mind,” this would be nice. Certainly this is not easy to achieve and even after long practice one cannot count on this occurring. It is something that just happens now and then, also between friends, for instance, when they discover that they were just having the same thought.
But indeed, the individual too thinks in multiplicities; as one says, “I was of three minds” or “I was of twelve minds.”
Curiously, one has to be good at making beats in order to be good at playing perfectly in tune. Ultimately the biggest intonation problems are the pitch changes that come from bow pressure changes. For instance, every upbow has a slightly different pitch from the preceding downbow.
A specific interpretive problem arises in relation to silences. It is without irony that I say: the silences are the most difficult element of the piece to perform well! Of course, the intonation is very difficult, the articulation too, and by all means the highly detailed voice leading rules; yet even when these aspects are more or less mastered the difficulty of silences remains. To introduce them in a logical fashion, to let them emerge from an inner logic, to render them in such a way that they do not seem to be lapses or interruptions or in any way incongruous or arbitrary—these are the difficulties. And they reflect exactly the difficulties involved in the self-generating structure as a whole.
The difficulty has also to do with the very strong effect that silences have on gatherings of people. Dare one say, they have a strong expressive character? I am made to think of Quaker meetings, in which long silences intensify the receptivity to inspiration. Indeed, the best way to perform the silences is to listen to them just as intently as one listens to the tones: as though to a kind of discernible nothingness.
Rules: the interpreter easily becomes intimidated by the complex voice leading rules, afraid of breaking them and annoyed that they seem to stand in the way of self-expression. Sports-oriented players tend to think in terms of fouls and of being penalised. Properly seen, the rules are less restrictions than they are a model or a blueprint for the structure—they serve to mark the contours of a particular beauty—they enunciate the conditions which lead to a kind of musical geometry, a shape, indeed a nearly palpable, a sculptural or architectural shape.
And it is well-built: the rules guide one to build up the abstract intervals in ways that serve the security of intonation. One could almost say, the rules make it possible to play the difficult intervals in tune. Certainly Renaissance voice leading rules have their source too in the practice of choral singing.
© Charles Curtis, 1993
1 Joseph Beuys, “I am searching for field character,” in Carin Kuoni, ed., Energy Plan for the Western Man (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990), 21.
2 Beuys, “Interview with Kate Horsefield,” ibid., 75.
