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Glorious Noise Returns
Commentary: In the spirit of the '70s,
the conceptual sound blend of rock
with classical makes a new splash in Sonic Youth.
By MARK SWED
Sunday, December 12, 1999

Around 20 years ago, at a festival of new music in downtown New York, Brian Eno characterized experimental classical music as a laboratory for pop. And there was no question that the late '70s in SoHo and TriBeCa were a rare time and place. A shared avant-garde sensibility made boundaries between classical and pop more porous than ever.

Noise was noise, and everyone at the time wanted to make some. Serious composers with conservatory training erected walls of loudly amplified guitar sounds in alternative concert spaces. Serious composers with art-school backgrounds erected walls of loudly amplified guitar sounds in loft spaces. Art rockers with art-school backgrounds did much the same thing, if less formally and with fewer guitars, in "no-wave" dance clubs. Interaction between popular music and art music was, of course, not new--there has always been pop music that has drawn on classical music, and classical music that has drawn on pop music. But this was a unique moment when experimental pop musicians and experimental classical composers spoke the same language, whatever their training or background. Glenn Branca's symphonies made with deafening banks of electric guitars could be called art rock or rocking art.

The artistic fling didn't last long, but out of that post-punk environment came a band with a particular devotion to exploring the riches of noise. It was Sonic Youth, which went on to have something of a mainstream career for a while (and proved to be a significant influence on the next big rock trend, grunge), but it never completely lost its indie experimental roots.

Now Sonic Youth, in the fourth volume of a series of recordings waving goodbye to the 20th century, has decided to explore those roots in a new two-CD set the band has produced on its own label, SYR. Those roots happen to be the classic high-modernist avant-garde of John Cage and the school that developed around him, and this recording of conceptual pieces from the past 40 years is startling. I have never known pop musicians to play classical music--be it new or old--so convincingly, without either pretense or trepidation but simply as if it were their own.

Pop musicians have many different motivations for turning to classical music and different ways of doing it. There is the occasional seasoned rocker who, finding that middle age quells rebellion, loses an enthusiasm for extending the party indefinitely and seeks more refined means of expression. But often that desire, genuine as it might be, will only serve to point up the rocker's musical limitations.

* * * For instance, Paul McCartney has released his third classical CD, "Working Classical" (EMI Classics). These short, agreeable pieces of chamber and orchestral music, cobbled together with the help of a noted composer, Richard Rodney Bennett, and Broadway orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, suit the former Beatle's lyric gifts more gracefully than did his lumbering "Liverpool Oratorio" or monumental orchestral score, "Standing Stone." Still, the nostalgic pieces (some in memory of his late wife, Linda) are so blatantly sentimental that classical music comes to seem a vehicle for indulging McCartney's mushy soft side.

Joe Jackson, who has just produced a major 45-minute symphony on Sony Classical, is another veteran British rock star (though a generation younger than McCartney) looking for musical substance. Jackson had a traditional, if uneasy, musical training, studying composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. But he indicates in his newly published coming-of-age memoir, "A Cure for Gravity," that he felt the academic new music of the early '70s neither satisfied his rebellious spirit nor his communicative urge the way popular song did.

Unlike McCartney, a now older and wiser Jackson has attempted in his Symphony No. 1 to apply symphonic form to pop music materials. He uses an excellent band of 10 players--which includes jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard, new music violinist Mary Rowell and Jackson on keyboards--to develop song-like ideas in traditionally symphonic ways. But he seldom reveals the invention needed to successfully control large structures. Simple and direct phrases may be engaging in themselves but are dull on expansion. Worse, he hasn't produced the depth of sonic interest that characterizes good modern symphonic music--Jackson's electronic samples, in particular, are trite and dated. Even the catchy finale is ultimately as corny as McCartney.

Corny Sonic Youth is not. Vast is its aural imagination, and, ironically, it is these younger (but no longer young) musicians (the band was formed in 1981) who have the most to say about the rebellious '60s and '70s. Here the four-member band has turned to some of the leading sonic adventurers of our time (and recent past). The discs contain performances of two important pieces, "Edges" and "Burdocks," by Christian Wolff, perhaps the most successful of post-Cagean conceptualists, with Wolff joining in. Pauline Oliveros, a pioneer in a kind of meditative, intuitive improvisation, has written a new piece for the album. Takehisa Kosugi, the music director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, makes a guest appearance in his "+ -" and makes a lot of characteristically fascinating amplified racket. The band tackles one of John Cage's last pieces, "Four6 " aided by outstanding Bay Area percussionist William Winant, who participated in the work's premiere and who helped produce the recording.

Included, too, are examples from Fluxus, the art movement developed in the 1960s by such plucky Cageans as Nam June Paik and Yoko Ono. Ono's 1961 "Voice Piece for Soprano," a 12-second scream, is here. So is Piano Piece #13, by Fluxus "chairman" George Maciunas, in which the band members hammer nails onto the keys of a piano, creating music that is festive and disturbing at the same time. Uncategorizable is a witty percussion piece by the late L.A. musicologist and composer Nicolas Slonimsky, along with a mesmerizing percussion piece by James Tenney (who joins the CalArts faculty in the fall). Steve Reich's "Pendulum Music" from 1968 gets a riotous workout.

There is, in fact, no better single anthology representation of conceptual American music (along with one brief British example by Cornelius Cardew) currently available.

* * * But what really distinguishes these CDs is Sonic Youth's musical and timbral insight. Much of this music is written as a set of instructions and requires creativity, seriousness and skill to realize in an interesting fashion. Cage's "Four6 " asks the players to come up with 12 sounds of their own choosing as the raw material of the piece. Wolff's "Burdocks" instructs the ensemble to interact with soft sounds in various communal ways.

A rock band is not a natural for music in which activities are proposed for producing new sounds and combinations of sounds not otherwise dreamt of. The musicians tend to know one another too well and interact in predictable ways. Their guitars, percussion and untrained voices, along with relentless same-level dynamics, further limit variety. Yet Sonic Youth sounds as if it has made a science of exploring the unsuspected possibilities of their musical instruments and electronic devices. Its use of feedback alone is miraculous, revealing unsuspected richness and color in its exotic sonic depths.

There is also no doubt that the players take this music very seriously. But being the kind of rockers they are, they're not about to actually tell us what they are up to. The packaging is minimal and contains no notes, no explanations. One CD does have an embedded video, watchable on a computer, of the band driving nails into a piano in the Maciunas, but otherwise an innocent listener will have no idea of how the music is produced and what is intended by it. And once again, that's a revolutionary first.

Conceptual music (like conceptual art) begs explanation by its very nature, and usually gets it. But the ear can be so influenced (positively or negatively) by the intellectual arguments that the musical experience is compromised. Sonic Youth bravely says, no, it is the music that is interesting, just listen.

These works are part of a difficult and mostly misunderstood aspect of American music. You can regularly encounter conceptual art at the Museum of Contemporary Art but rarely if ever can you hear analogous conceptual music up the block at the Performing Arts Center. So the fact that a rock band has managed to serve it so well is nothing less than a watershed in the peculiar dance between high art and low that popular music now and then attempts.
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Mark Swed Is The Times' Music Critic