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Feb-mar 2000
In Conversation with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo,
by Damon Krukowski (1300 words) for Classical Pulse
The rock band Sonic Youth is known for its experimentalism, but many of
its fans were undoubtedly surprised when they recently released a double
CD entirely of scored works by classical New Music composers. "Goodbye
20th Century" (SYR 4) has a tracklist that could be mistaken for the latest
from the Arditti Quartet, with pieces by John Cage, Cornelius Cardew,
Takehisa Kosugi, Steve Reich, Nicolas Slonimsky, James Tenney, Christian
Wolff, and even a new piece written especially for the group by Pauline
Oliveros. Also included are Fluxus works by Yoko Ono (a scream piece performed
by Kim Gordon and Thuston Moore's daughter), and George Maciunas (in which
the band nails down the keys of a piano; a video of the event is included
as a CDRom track). Composers Christian Wolff and Takehisa Kosugi joined
the group on some of the performances, as did musicians Christian Marclay,
Jim O'Rourke, William Winant, and Sonic Youth's studio engineer Wharton
Tiers. I spoke to guitarist Lee Ranaldo about the experience:
-- Did working from scores effect the way you played your instrument on
these recordings? (And did you have to keep your eyes on the page?)
I tried to approach the execution of these pieces as naturally as possible,
that is, trying not to resort to any "new music" posturings. I tried,
and I think we all did, to adapt the pieces to the way we, as individuals,
play. And yes, we did have to keep our eyes on the pages, with some pieces
more than others, but with all of them to some degree. That's what kept
it true and from becoming some sort of free improvisation.
-- Is the type of improvisation these pieces employ different from the
improvisation you are used to from the band's other work?
The type of improvisation is not that different -- we can each of us only
play the way we play, after all. It was following a set of instructions
rather than simply trusting your ears and listening to the other players
that made it different. After playing some of these pieces through multiple
takes, it became very apparent how the framework of the composition affected
the result. There are a good dozen pieces on the record, all with basically
the same players, and yet I feel there is quite a range of things going
on from one piece to the next; it is the "compositions" or scores that
triggered this diversity.
-- Do you think the composers that participated in the recording would
be comfortable participating in a typical Sonic Youth session? Was their
style of working familiar to you, or did you need to adjust to play together?
We all played together pretty naturally, and without any seeming discomfort.
I think there are enough areas of musical language that we share for it
to be pretty easy to just sit down and play. As a matter of fact, we did
do a long improvisation with Kosugi one afternoon, some of which may appear
sometime, and it was very free and natural. What with us being in our
"home" studio, we felt very free to just play as we wished. Had we been,
say, at Christian Wolff's place, maybe we would have been a bit more tentative
or "behaved". But let's face it, everyone involved is an improviser and
thinker about music, so it wasn't very hard to just jump in, all together.
-- How did the composers interact with one another, for example when they
played each other's pieces? Had they worked together previously?
Christian Wolff and Kosugi know each other for quite a long time, and
seemed very familiar with each other’s work. Christian Marclay has been
performing recently (‘improvising’) w Wolff, so they had some basis as
well. And of course Willie was familiar w Wolff’s work, and Jim and Thurston
had recently played w Kosugi for Merce Cunningham concerts.
-- Do you think that your familiarity with one another's playing was a
help or a hindrance in approaching this type of material?
I don't think it mattered that much. Some of the players had never played
together before. It was the focus on the scores that gave us some commonality
or bridge. It helped that we had a solid week of intensive work in which
to feel each other out and get familiar with playing together, but we
were tracking right from the first day.
-- Could you write down Sonic Youth material in a score? (What will the
Hal Leonard Sonic Youth Songbook look like?)
Aside from personal notations when I was younger, the first "scores" I
ever had to write down were when playing with Glenn Branca. His approach
was to let each musician write down their parts in whatever way was most
comfortable to them. So while some people were writing in standard notation,
others were drawing pictures or whatever would help jog their memories.
I consistently notate my parts to SY songs as we develop each batch, using
a combination of verbal cues (e.g.: "the velvets part", etc), chord graphs,
tablature and other notes.
-- Did you find that you enjoyed working from one type of score (graphic,
text, musical) more than others?
Some of the very complex but open-ended scores were really fun to work
with, like Cardew's Treatise, which is completely graphical, and Wolff's
Edges, which has little symbols scattered across a white sheet, and a
key to what the symbols mean on another page -- it was like a board game
of sorts, and would have been much more opaque without his having been
their to explain its basis.
On another hand, the Cage scores were really fun because they took various
elements normally associated with playing this music away from the musicians
(in an open-ended sort of way!): when to play and when not to play is
specified in the score. Also, the particular sounds each person was to
use—for instance, a set of 12 sounds each in Four6"— were to be defined
before playing began. Although this might sound restrictive, it actually
made the pieces more easy to listen to (as a whole) as they developed,
rather than getting caught up focusing on one's own part.
-- Was your studio used differently for these pieces than in your other
work? Were all the performances taped live (it sounds like they were),
or did you use overdubs?
For the most part all pieces were taped live -- which is how we usually
do our basic tracks anyway. But the marimba used on the Slonimsky piece
(originally written for piano) was played by Willie in two separate takes
due to the difficulty of the transcription. I later did some processing
to the tape, slowing down the performance to give it another quality;
Slonimsky, whom I met a couple years before he died, when he was 102 (!),
was the grandfather of a friend of ours, and the "51 Minitudes for Piano"
from which the "Piece Enfantine" was taken were in some ways audio riddles,
so it seemed appropriate to manipulate the work further after the performance.
It is heard twice through, first quite slowed down, and then at normal
speed.
The vocals on the Oliveros piece were added later, and the Kosugi, Cardew,
Maciunas and Oliveros piece all had some after-the-fact editing done to
them, mostly to tighten them up and make them shorter, but in the Maciunas
piece also to "activate" it more -- when we performed it we did so one
hammer at a time, so to speak, and for the final tape we layered the blows
so it gets more and more active as it builds. What I especially liked
about his characterization of the piece was the notion of "adding one
more hammer to the piano"!
-- Did the experience of working with scores change how you listen to
classical music?
Having used scores before and being familiar with them, I’d say not. But
it did give me a further appreciation of the range of things being done
with scored music this century, and a desire to seek out more of it.
LR
2/2000
In a message dated 4.4.00, exact@world.std.com writes:
Dear Lee,
Pulse has asked me to add a few words about the new SY album, to run in
a sidebar next to the feature we already completed on SYR 4 -- would you
mind answering a few questions/making a few statements about it? Some
words from you would help tie it together to the other interview.
I was sent a cassette (and I am enjoying it a lot) but I don't have any
info other than the song titles and production credit, so let me know
if there's anything else you think I should know. Here are my queries:
-- I was wondering if recording in your own studio has led to a different
way of working; some of the record has the feel to me of improvisations
that you taped and then shaped into songs. I remember that you often used
to perform material live before recording; has your process changed?
We are far more relaxed in our own studio, not watching the clock, in
some ways not always as 'prepared'--often we just 'go'--but this only
means we can be free enough to tape whenever we want and later sort out
the good stuff. We've always had great r'sal sessions which in the past
have evaporated into the walls due to lack of serious recording equipment,
now we can hold on to some of these.
Having said that, all the material here was worked out in advance, no
improvs later shaped... But... We worked quickly and things were perhaps
slightly less 'fully formed' than they have been in other instances. This
allowed us to be a bit freer with them when overdubbing and 'concieving'
the finished versions--i'm sure many of these songs will change lots and
evolve as we play them live (this is often the case for us)...
-- Is this the first record since the band lost its instruments on the
road? Do you think it effected the recording?
Yes, we are using diff stuff and obtaining/exploring diff sounds now--in
some ways the theft, however traumatic and awful--has been a blessing
in disguise, forcing us down avenues of sound that we might not have approached
right now. I mean, it's still we 4, bottom line, but it has shaken up
the mix a bit...
-- I hear blips and bleeps that sound like computer-generated or sampled
sounds; have you worked with those before? Is it something Jim O'Rourke
brought into the mix?
Jim brought some of that stuff to the mix, whether processing some of
our shit or doing somme of his own/ but of course we've been bleeping
and blipping for ages on our own too...
-- There seems to be a lot of focus on the words as poetry; did you feel
a shift in attention toward the lyrics?
Well, all i can say is early on in the lyric process it seemed to me that
this was our 'beat' album, no concious decision but the words just came
out like that, reflecting current interests all around/we don't conceive
this stuff or consult ea other much on words, although obviously interests
are often shared.
--Do you feel that your experiments with scored music effected this album
in any particular way? I had the sense of an even more open than usual
song structure, though that's certainly something you have worked with
for a long time.>>
Yes, i'm sure the experiences on syr4 have had an effect, although hard
to say what exactly. Possible the sense of structure on this album, where
there are not many repeated sections as in pop music, most songs are more
linear in structure and process forwards and not often backwards...
Damon, hope this is good
Lr
--Hope this is ok with you -- of course feel free to comment on anything
else you'd like, as I said this is intended to run next to the long piece
we've already done, so you can imagine the context.
Thanks and best --
Damon
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