Download John Zorn: Autonomy and The Avant

John Zorn: Autonomy and The Avant-Garde
Ted Gordon
Advisor: Seth Brodsky
Senior Essay: Humanities
Spring 2008
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"I just wish I could remember it all. Being in the middle of the desert completely parched.
There was a scene flying in the air and seeing the moon really close. It was a wild
dream[…]"1 —John Zorn
Inside the Outside; or, Trying to Find John Zorn
“That’s it.” From my car, I am staring at a black, unmarked door on the corner of
Avenue C and 2nd Street in New York City. My friend can’t seem to make it out; all he
notices is the gas station across the street. I try to point it out again; my friend has agreed
to spend an evening (and $20) to see what he expects to be experimental, avant-garde jazz;
behind this unmarked door is The Stone, a non-profit, artist-run performance space owned
and curated by the saxophonist John Zorn. My friend has heard of Zorn, and is a fan of
Naked City, Zorn’s old band that was famous for jump-cutting musical genres from
schlock-jazz to Italian film music to hardcore punk. But he has never seen him play, never
been to his music venue, never experienced a purely improvised concert. He’s anxious to
get in the door, but for the time being is left surveying the housing projects and empty lots
of the last remnants of the Lower East Side, listening to Zorn’s Naked City, trying to get an
idea of what he’s in for.
I have been here before; I have listened to Zorn’s aggressive, frenzied
improvisatory style; I have purchased his CDs, even volunteered at his venue for a month
over the summer. I have experienced Zorn’s outspoken, intense personality; I have seen
him walk off the stage when he doesn’t like the music. I can only wonder what my friend
is expecting. When we finally step inside, I sense he is crestfallen. The Stone’s interior
isn’t much: a bare concrete room with black curtains to dampen the acoustic harshness,
1
Edward Strickland, American Composers: Dialogues on Contemporary Music
(Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1991) 140.
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dozens of folding chairs from IKEA, a baby grand Yamaha in the corner, and another old
upright hidden behind a curtain that probably isn’t in great tune. The whole place can seat
maybe 60 people, and adding to the clutter is an oddly-built wooden box next to the stage
area—a bare-bones bathroom. All this is offered for $10 per set, $20 on “Stone Benefit
Nights,” when Zorn and a constantly changing collective of fellow improvisers take the
stage and play.
On nights like tonight, “play” might not be a good word for what they do; instead,
the almost archaic jazz term “blow” would be fitting, despite the lack of traditional jazz
instruments among players. For this particular set there is Elliott Sharp, bald with an
earring and a funny guitar he slaps and rattles; Wu Fei, who plays a guzheng (a large
Chinese zither) through tons of effects and distortion; Lukas Ligeti with his balafon, a
West African idiophone made with gourds; two bass players; and a capped, bearded young
man with a modified lap steel. The percussionist Cyro Baptista, with both a bag and a
toolbox of instruments and tricks, bangs out polyrhythms and compound triplets over any
hint of rhythm he can hear. Altogether, the musicians, some of whom had never met
before, seem to communicate on some kind of fundamental level, each with their own
unique, personal language (and meta-language). Many seem to beat the sound out of their
instruments, frenzied with the music and the spectacle of extended technique and the new
sounds they’ve invented. Though some play traditional instruments, all have invented new
vocabularies and new palates to work with; one of the bass players whacks his strings with
a child’s violin bow, the guitar is totally altered, and John Zorn, presiding over it all, aims
his sax’s bell right into his orange camo-clad thigh, emitting a frenzied bout of sucking,
percussive tones. They blow, we listen, and when it’s over, the musicians receive a
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standing ovation. We go home and my friend remarks that the set was something he had
never experienced before.
This is the scene at Zorn’s venue, The Stone, on March 8th, 2008, almost three
years after it opened, and over twenty years since Zorn has risen to prominence as a cultfigure, ring-leader, social entrepreneur, and overall godfather of a certain community of
musicians in New York who both self-identify and are labeled as “Downtown.” It is also
one year after Zorn won a MacArthur “genius” fellowship for $500,000. Calling Zorn a
Downtown musician has plenty of connotations: the label has been applied to hundreds of
composers, performers, performance spaces, and artists, spanning both genres and decades.
Yet it is the name that is most applicable to Zorn and his constellation of supporters, fans,
fellow musicians, fellow composers, and music distributors. It’s in the name of the record
store—Downtown Music Gallery—that distributes music from his record label; it’s in
virtually all reviews and literature surrounding Zorn; and it’s where he has set up camp, in
an apartment on the Lower East Side, to make a home for his music and the music of his
peers, despite any and all hurdles that he must overcome.
More than just a critical marketing term, use of the term “Downtown” pervades
several aspects of the entire chain of musical production; it is not only a legible category
for record stores and album reviews, but like the catch-phrases “avant-garde” and
“experimental,” it is a touchy term for the musicians it generally describes—especially for
Zorn. Generally, all of these categories signify a paradigm of musical production that lies
outside the mainstream—they all attempt to overcome boundaries, borders, and limitations,
to become autonomous. Yet use of these words by the musicians themselves is both
shibboleth and scourge, for they invoke the ultimate contradiction in the quest to become
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autonomous: autonomy must always contain its own set of rules, its own superstructure, its
own totality. If the mainstream can be represented by economic, critical, and musical
practices, so, necessarily, must any community of outsider musicians.
Zorn is definitely a musician who wants out, and he is definitely a musician who
has surrounded himself with like-minded outsiders. In addition to writing dozens of scores
and pieces for them, he has published two books of writings by his community of “out”
musicians, which he edited and wrote introductions for. These books are titled Arcana I &
II, “arcane” being Latin for both “silent” and “secret.” The first introduction, written in
1997, opens with the following words:
“Rock. Jazz. Punk. Dada. Beat. These words and their longer cousins, the ism
family (surrealism, postmodernism, abstract expressionism, minimalism), are
used to commodify and commercialize an artist’s complex personal vision. This
terminology is not about understanding. It never has been. It’s about money.”2
(1997)
Though Zorn separates himself from the classic musical delineations made by the industry,
the academy, and the critical establishment, he simultaneously wants in to the community
of musicians who he feels represent that “outside:”
JazzTimes: What tradition do you feel close to?
ZORN: The avant-garde. I would like to see the avant-garde, experimental music
being accepted as a genre in and of itself. I would like to see avantgarde/experimental sections in the major conglomerate record stores.3
JazzTimes asked this question of Zorn in 2000—three years after he wrote the introduction
to his first book, and twenty-five years after he dropped out of college and moved back to
2
John Zorn, ed., Arcana: Musicians on Music (New York: Hips Road and Granary Books,
2000) v.
3
Bill Milkowski, "One Future, Two Views: Interview with John Zorn," JazzTimes March
2000: 28-35, 118-121.
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New York to start his career as a performer, composer, director, author, curator, record
producer, and venue manager. Throughout his career, he has been an outspoken advocate
for his own music and the music of his peers, calling it “the true music of our time.”4 He
positions this truth as both against mainstream culture and outside of it: “To survive in this
world of […] adversity, good music has gone underground, becoming more invisible than
ever. It is always here, but to find it one has to make an effort.”5
To even further extend his and his community’s distance from the mainstream, he
claims that his stance does not even look back antagonistically at the mainstream, but
rather “look[s] out, toward a beautiful new world of truth and beauty.”6 Such rhetoric is
idealistic, but it has very real consequences: just as Zorn scorns the mainstream for
financially and commercially exploiting his music, so does he also insist on the economic
component of his utopian dream. He is not a dreamer at all; though he may be on the
“outside looking out,”7 he is always looking in, by necessity. “[People tell me] ‘Man, all I
wanna do is make music, I don’t want to think about the business.’ [These people] are ripe
for getting ripped off. And most people are really like that. They’re honest musicians with
integrity that just don’t want to deal with the business. […] And as long as people are like
that, they’re victims. That’s been going on since day one.”8
In order to not be a victim, Zorn has made sure his own music will always be
available through his own record label (Tzadik), publishing house (Hips Road Editions)
and music venue (The Stone). He laments feeling greed grow in him “like a cancer” when
4
5
6
7
8
John Zorn, ed., Arcana II: Musicians on Music (New York: Hips Road, 2007) v.
Zorn, v
Zorn, v
Zorn, v
Milkowski, 28-35, 118-121
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he was under contract from Nonesuch, a major label,9 and so has decided to make his own
economy, ostensibly separated from the music industry. This economy is vertically
integrated: it enables Zorn to communicate his artistic vision from the ground up, making
scores, recordings, and live music all available to musical consumers on his own terms,
with his own imprint, funded by his own money and with the financial support of his
community.10
Obviously, this economy is not a utopia free of commodification and
commercialization. Tzadik must still categorize its musicians to sell CDs at major record
stores, often side by side with the “evil” record industry that Zorn wants no part of. This
compromise also happens at The Stone: it still has to charge people at the door, still deals
with the Fire Marshall, still fits only 50 or 60 people at maximum. Both ventures are
attempts to not get “ripped off,” to ensure that Zorn will still be able to live independently
as an artist. Yet for Zorn, The Stone is on its way there: it is a physical space where
musicians can explore the metaphysical space of musical expression that pushes the
boundaries of what is acceptable and even conceivable in music—or, as he puts it, the
“EXPERIMENTAL and AVANT-GARDE.”11 Zorn uses those same delineations to
describe Tzadik, which is “dedicated to releasing the best in avant-garde and experimental
music, presenting a worldwide community of contemporary musician-composers who find
it difficult or impossible to release their music through more conventional channels.” Not
only is the label a commercial outlet for these avant-garde musician-composers, but it also
9
Milkowski, 28-35, 118-121
For an example of such integration, Tzadik, his record label, manufactures CDs of live
recordings from The Stone to sell at the venue to defray costs of rent; tickets for certain
concerts at The Stone are also sold at Downtown Music Gallery, the record store that
handles all of Tzadik’s distribution.
11
The Stone, , 3/24/2008 <http://www.thestonenyc.com/>.
10
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distances itself from other commercial labels: it “believes most of all in the integrity of its
artists. What you hear on Tzadik is the artists’ vision undiluted.”12
The project of letting each artist communicate an undiluted vision carries over to
The Stone. The venue is hard to find; there is no sign, no advertising, no drinks. It is an
ascetic environment created with the intent of focused listening. Zorn wants his audiences
small: only people who will appreciate the musical communication should be allowed to
witness it, lest they be conservative listeners who shut off their ears. Nobody who is
ignorant or unappreciative should be allowed entrance to a musicians’ club, a safe space
for experimentation. This is not a new concept; over twenty years before opening The
Stone, Zorn and other members of his community performed at Studio Henry, a jazz-loft
name for the basement of a pet store (“Exotic Aquatics”) on Morton St. The system was
roughly the same: people heard about performances through word of mouth, and posters
for shows would go up the night of, or even the night after.13 Only the brave and informed
entered; critics seldom made it in, and if they did, they were appreciative. Several
improvisers remember Studio Henry nostalgically as a home for their music: small, gritty,
cheap, but the center of a community. Zorn moved on to other venues: the Knitting
Factory, Tonic, and other hole-in-the-wall venues where he could curate, creating
community and fostering his own music through hundreds of performances and dozens of
recordings, even if those recordings and performances were “underground,” hard to access,
and hard to obtain.
12
“Tzadik Records”. http://www.tzadik.com/
Claudia Heuermann, A Bookshelf on Top of the Sky: 12 Stories About John Zorn, ed.
John Zorn (New York: Tzadik, 2002).
13
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Yet despite Zorn’s notoriety and fame within his own circles, it is unclear what
significance he holds for music in general. He is an unabashed self-promoter, a figure who
vocally tells critics, detractors, and even appreciators to leave him alone and let him
operate independently of the industry. He has built up so much status within the
Downtown music scene that a CD on his record label is a sign of status, and a performance
at The Stone, which must be earned by invitation, is a sign of success. He has established
himself as an impresario, a father figure, and a taste-maker. Add to this his recent
MacArthur grant, and Zorn’s reputation as a fully autonomous, independent, avant-garde
composer falls into question. If we are to take Zorn on his own terms—that both he and his
music are “avant-garde,” that his music and the music of his peers is “the true music of our
generation,” that he is living in “Dark Ages,” we must question those terms, interrogate his
rhetoric, and attempt to understand his philosophy, his music, and his life.
I. Locating Zorn in New York: Composition and Theory
Downtown and the Field of Improvisation
John Zorn lives and works primarily in New York, specifically on the Lower East
Side of the island of Manhattan. This is crucial to understanding his position as a
composer, a performer, and a figure operating within a well-defined artistic community. It
would be an understatement to say that New York has, over the course of the 20th and 21st
centuries, served as a capital of artistic and cultural production; the sheer volume of artists,
critics, galleries, performance spaces, concert halls, and other sites of cultural production
are testament to New York’s enduring artistic spirit. For Zorn in particular, the amount of
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music that was self-described as “avant-garde” when he entered the scene in the mid-1970s
served as a base for a musical self-discovery, self-identity, and self-segregation.
According to many critics, musicians, and even academics, there existed, and still
exists, very clear boundaries within New York’s musical scene, particularly between
scenes delineated by geography: “Uptown,” “Midtown,” and “Downtown.” According to
the crudest schematic possible, these locations are widely held to correspond to
“Academic,” “Repertory,” and “Avant-Garde” musical practices, respectively. Kyle Gann,
a music critic for The Village Voice who championed a certain kind of grassroots,
community-oriented “Downtown” music, defined “Uptown” music as academic, elitist,
extreme, and in direct opposition to the project of “Downtown music,” which was focused
on community, accessibility, anti-elitism, and communal response to unfavorable
economic and social conditions.14 The sociologist Samuel Gilmore was one of the first
scholars to attempt to study these divisions academically, publishing a paper that
effectively lumped musicians and performers together based on the organizational
properties of institutions—locating academics at Columbia University, repertory
performers at Lincoln Center, and the avant-garde anywhere below 14th street.
Such divisions are obviously flawed. As Marcel Cobussen points out, massing
every artist who lived below 14th street into “the avant-garde” makes no sense, especially
when one compares someone like Zorn, who in the late 70s was playing on the street and
in loft spaces, to Philip Glass, who at the same time was having works such as Einstein on
14
See Gann’s introduction to Music Downtown. Kyle Gann, Music Downtown: Writings
from the Village Voice (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California
Press, 2006) 2-5.
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the Beach performed at the Metropolitan Opera.15 Despite the musico-political and
economic commonalities between musicians of the Downtown scene as struggling artists,
there are also severe differences in aesthetics across the spectrum of artists who inhabited,
and still inhabit, the scene. Borders in the early scene were defined by economics and a
common mentality of organic composition, and according to Gann, against the elitism of
the Uptown academics. Composers, painters, sculptors, and others in mixed media who
have been labeled Downtown are extremely varied: the same label has been placed on John
Cage, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, Jack Smith, Henry Flynt,
and of course John Zorn.
It is dangerously easy to conceive of a narrative history of experimental music in
New York that is ultimately teleological and exclusionary, one that sews up the messy
seams of modernism and postmodernism into linearity and favors certain groups of artists
over others. The first wave of Downtown composers (developing what most people refer to
as Minimalism) could easily be described, through reduction, as a reactionary movement
against John Cage, a grand forefather of American experimentalism, therefore making it
the inheritor of Cage’s experimental spirit through dialecticism; the next big generation of
experimentalists who found their home downtown (mostly known as Zorn as his circle,
composers embracing poly-stylism, “totalism,” and postmodernism) could be seen as
reacting against minimalism through another dialectical interpretation, and so on.
This narrative of expanding and contracting the aesthetics of music is a temptation,
and indeed has been sub-textually included in the theses of several books, including
Michael Nyman’s “Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond,” published in 1973, and
15
“Positions I,”Marcel Cobussen, "Deconstruction in Music," Erasmus University
Rotterdam.
12
William Duckworth’s 1993 collection of interviews, “Talking Music.”16 It is also
contained within the popular terms used to pool diverse artists together into cohesive
movements: terms like “minimalism” and “maximalism” tend to beat one over the head
with the idea that culture is a continuum of static, legible movements, each on the same
trajectory, each with the same roots and the same goal, however distant and unclear. Zorn
obviously wants to do away with history and crystallization when he claims that all genres
“are used to commodify and commercialize an artist’s complex personal vision,”17 yet in
his desire to escape the mass market he also implicitly states his desire to be part of the
antithesis of the mass-market, what he calls the “avant-garde,” a genre with its own
history, its own crystallizations, its own trajectories.
Outsider Circles: Zorn and Avant-Garde Composition
In Zorn’s view of the history of music, the “avant-garde” is defined by composers:
in every interview where he is asked to name influences, he cites Americans Harry Partch,
Charles Ives, and John Cage, and Europeans Schönberg, Stravinsky, Stockhausen, Kagel,
Xenakis, Cardew, and MEV, among others. This was the music that first turned him on to
the avant-garde; in an interview on “The South Bank Show” in 1989, Zorn pulls out a
record from his collection of over 13,000 LPs:
16
The idea of a linear narrative of experimental music, influenced primarily by John Cage
and Harry Partch, is also insinuated in the introductions that Walter Zimmermann (1973),
Edward Strickland (1991) , and Cole Gagne (1993) have all written for their collections of
interviews with “American Composers.” This may be a result of the authors’ requirement
to somehow neatly summarize their books for casual readers, but Gagne spells it out
explicitly: “Even young composers such as Glenn Branca and John Zorn, who have felt the
need to rebel in their own ways against Cage’s example, have created indeterminate scores
that owe their existence to the doors opened by Cage’s music.” (Gagne, vii)
17
Zorn, v
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Here we are: Kagel, “Improvisation Ajoutée.” I bought this when I was about 15.
Still marked: got it at Sam Goody in September, for 98 cents. And it’s a really
crazy piece, with the guys screaming and hooting, something that attracted me. I
was over at my friend’s house, and he really liked the rolling stones. And I just
got this record, and I put it on and he looked at me like… who the hell are you?
Are you out of your mind? And his mother was there, and she was like [puts palm
on cheek] my God, take this off… and right then and there, I decided: this was
the music.18
Kagel, along with other European composers whom Zorn cites, becomes a representative
for autonomous composers of concert music who have historically been considered
experimental, boundary-breaking, difficult, and obscure, despite his involvement with the
Darmstadt school and his status as a well-respected, almost canonical, composer of
experimental works. Viewing Kagel, as Zorn does, as merely the music he created, moves
the concept of “music” into a vacuum of aesthetics, devoid of the aspects of musical
production that Zorn cares about the most—preserving individual artistic vision through
the tight control of music in the marketplace. Kagel’s involvement with Darmstadt is
ignored completely, the composer reduced to the subjective experience his music brings.
Thus “Avant-garde” is a contradictory genre, one Zorn defines as both critiquing
“mainstream” music, but simultaneously adding to another canon built on the same
economic structures as mainstream music—commodification, economics, and
consumption.
A particularly telling example of Zorn’s relationship to canonical avant-garde
composers is his interview with William Duckworth, himself a composer who lived in
New York at the same time as Zorn. Duckworth’s book is one of several collections of
interviews with late-20th century experimental composers written by musicologists and
18
The South Bank Show: "Put Blood in the Music" (United Kingdom: ITV, 1989).
14
composers. Many of the composers in these books are those whom Zorn cites directly as
influences, and several of these volumes also contain interviews with Zorn. Already we
can see how Zorn’s agenda is mitigated by the crystallization that textual interviews gives;
perhaps that is why he has shied away from any interviews since the late 1990s.
The
most strongly codified and legible period of the canon of so-called experimental
composers must be the 1960s, a decade most known for the development of American
Minimalism to many scholars and critics. Though Duckworth’s project started out as an
exploration of “not so much what happened in the sixties, which had already been
documented, but how and why,”19 he ended up collecting interviews with experimental
musicians to develop “a freewheeling exploration of twentieth-century American
experimental music—five generations’ worth—as described to me by the composers
themselves.”20 The result of several governmental grants and over 50 interviews with
musicians, “Talking Music” extrapolates the concept of “experimentation” from an
Ursprung of creativity—the 1960s—and projects it onto all experimental music composed
in the twentieth-century.
It is not Duckworth’s fault, but for him, the most interesting subjects to interview
about experimental music not only all lived in New York, but also apparently happened to
mostly belong to the same race and gender; this is symptomatic of many musical genres
that developed in the 20th century.21 It is significant, however, that in a collection of
interviews that started off as an exploration of a musical “scene” delineated by time (the
19
William Duckworth, Talking Music: Conversations with John Cage, Philip Glass,
Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers (New York:
Schirmer Books, 1995) xi.
20
Duckworth, xi
21
Of the 16 interviews he included in the volume, only 3 are with female artists.
15
sixties) and geography (New York, particularly “Downtown”), the end result is a volume
of interviews with “all individualists” who “work alone.” Of these composers, Duckworth
writes, “What groups them is a spirit, a compelling personal goal, and a loner’s sense of
adventure.”22
That experimental music can be produced only by individualists may seem logical,
but the idea of a “maverick spirit” is contradicted by the histories of some of the subjects
he chooses to interview. Certainly some of his subjects are extreme individualists, such as
Conlon Nancarrow or La Monte Young, but others—notably Milton Babbitt, Philip Glass,
Laurie Anderson, and especially John Zorn—all are widely regarded as constituents of
certain communities of composition: Babbitt at Princeton, Glass in film scores, and
Anderson and Zorn in the “Downtown scene,” to speak generally. Moreover, despite any
individual composer’s “pioneer spirit” or impetus to be aesthetically independent and
original, every composer is a musician operating within a specific field of cultural
production, both aesthetic and economic. Though probably not Duckworth’s intention, his
book still propagates the mythos of the strong individualist composer operating totally
independently, like a “desert plant,” to borrow the phrase from Walter Zimmermann.23
It is important, then, to analyze the interview that Duckworth conducts with John
Zorn in the frame of “American experimentalism” to see to what extent Zorn actually
comes across as an individualist with little or no creative ties outside of himself.
22
Duckworth, xii
Zimmermann’s 1973 collection of interviews with American experimentalists, “Desert
Plants,” is an obvious ancestor of Duckworth’s volume (and Duckworth even
acknowledges it in his introduction), yet the musicians Zimmermann interviewed were
much more varied in geographical location than Duckworth’s subjects. Zimmermann also
approached American experimentalists as an outsider, having no prior connections to his
subjects; Duckworth, however, is a composer who had lived and worked in New York for
many years before he started the “Talking Music” project.
23
16
Duckworth groups Zorn with Glenn Branca and “Blue” Gene Tyranny as “The PostModerns,” a category to which Zorn is often assigned for his early game pieces and midcareer bands, Naked City and Painkiller. By grouping Zorn with Branca and Tyranny, and
placing the “Post-Modern” section at the end of a volume starting with interviews with
John Cage and Milton Babbitt, Duckworth implies that Zorn has come belatedly to the
field of experimental composition and therefore must be some kind of re-assembler,
looking upon the past and interpreting it into his own musical praxis, rather than a
musician involved with an entirely personal, idiosyncratic mode of composition.
Duckworth opens his interview by complimenting Zorn on his status of having the
“biggest record collection in the East Village.” Zorn answers, “Well, see, it’s not really
true. There are only about 13,000 pieces.”24 From the beginning, Zorn emphasizes his
humble attitude towards “paying tribute” to composers he fell in love with during his
teenage years, running the gamut of canonical European composers: Stravinsky, Bartók,
Berg, Stockhausen, Ligeti, and Kagel.25 As I have mentioned before, in other interviews
this list also includes American composers such as Ives, Partch and Cage. The diversity of
this list is striking; these composers are often considered part of serious movements,
especially Stockhausen, Ligeti and Kagel at Darmstadt and Cage with the “New York
School.” Through his encyclopedic knowledge of concert music regarded by many as
modern, experimental, and avant-garde, all of which at once questions the field of
canonical “serious music” and also reifies it through its status as part of the tradition, Zorn
brought a similar attitude of “tribute” to experimental music when he discovered an
entirely separate musical tradition: jazz.
24
25
Duckworth, 446
Duckworth, 446-448
17
Outsider Circles Outside Outsider Circles: Zorn and Avant-Garde Jazz
Zorn draws a very clear line between what he considers his foundation (diverse European
and American experimental musics) and another, separate musical tradition that offered
something else:
“In high school, I was into all of that shit [avant-garde composition]; I was soaking
in as much information as I could. Maybe it was a dissatisfaction in my own ability
to perform that music. Or maybe it was not the music itself as the situation that the
music was being played in. I went to the rug concerts of Boulez, and I saw the
premieres of Stockhausen pieces. It was exciting, but at the same time, it was, like,
very dry. No one was standing up going “Yeah!” An emotional quality was
missing, somehow.”26
The “emotional quality” that Zorn appreciated came from a completely different tradition
of music, one that had its own history, its own crystallizations, and, according to some
(such as Amiri Baraka, then LeRoi Jones), its own trajectory. This tradition was jazz.
Zorn’s influence came particularly from the Association for Advancement of Creative
Musicians in Chicago, and specifically from Anthony Braxton.
“I remember buying For Alto by Anthony Braxton and just getting blown away,
in that it had the kind of energy that I was looking for. I was tired of the kind of
overly intellectual, very dry approach that a lot of contemporary classical music
was moving towards. I wanted like a real kick butt kind of thing […] I wanted
someone who was up there, you know, blowing his guts out, but I also wanted
the structural complexity that contemporary classical music had reached.”27
As Tamar Barzel (2002) points out, Zorn inadvertently positions Braxton’s music, with
more roots in Jazz, into a jazz/classical binary; he “appears to be endorsing the notion that
26
27
Duckworth, 452
Duckworth, 452
18
jazz improvisation (‘blowing’) is emotional but lacking in the “structural complexity” of
classical music.”28
Braxton’s For Alto is a 73-minute solo saxophone recording, broken into segments
dedicated to various artists (including John Cage and Cecil Taylor), was released in 1969
as a double-LP put out by Delmark Records. Zorn tells the story of how he found it: “I
went into a record store in St. Louis and asked, ‘What’s weird? What’s really out there?’
The guy at the counter said, ‘You gotta get For Alto. We’ve got 20 boxes of it downstairs,
nobody wants to buy it.’ I said, ‘That’s the record I want.’”29 This anecdote is strikingly
similar to Zorn’s explanation of his early infatuation with Kagel and European
experimental composers: he finds a recording that is “weird,” that doesn’t sell, that
alienates people, and admires it not only for its musical content, but also because of its
transgressive act against mainstream culture. For Zorn, the shared weirdness of Kagel and
Braxton’s music is what brings them together—no matter who they were, where they came
from, or what economy of music they were operating in, their records were still records.
Zorn repeats this story of being totally infatuated with experimental European
“classical” music but discovering the “emotional” qualities of free Jazz in several
interviews he gave throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, and also in television
documentaries filmed at the time. In every instance, he emphasizes his interest in both
“structural complexity” and “emotional chutzpah,” which he considered opposites in all
28
Tamar Barzel, ""Radical Jewish Culture:" Composers/Improvisers on New York City's
1990s Downtown Scene," Doctor of Philosophy: Ethnomusicology, University of
Michigan, 2004, 33 n19.
29
"Hear and Now: John Zorn" Parts I & II. 2000.
19
previous music to his own: “I still wanted all those horrible noises, but I wanted an
emotional basis for them, not just a stopwatch.”30
Without the fact that the implications of both the “jazz” and “classical” traditions
had (and still have) acute and very real ramifications in New York’s music scene, a
theoretical discussion of Zorn’s position between the two might seem pedantic and alien to
the music itself. This is certainly Zorn’s opinion: we have already seen his aversion to
categorization. Not only does he condemn categorization as an exploitative tool, he also
condemns “listening with your eyes instead of your ears,”31 a rhetorical device intended to
draw one’s attention to an abstract, free-floating musical experience, as opposed to any
actual social or economic factors that music actually contains—factors on which Zorn has
based his career as a curator, record producer, promoter, and venue operator.
George E. Lewis (2002) suggests that Zorn’s successful championing of diverse
musical influences came not only because of his position as an improviser within the
“Downtown” scene, but also because he was not seen by his contemporaries as belonging
to the jazz tradition. “[Zorn], who [was] never subjected to the discourses of transgression
and ‘roots’ that were being used to police the world of black experimental musicians, [was]
able to take full advantage of [his] relative freedom from cultural arbitration.”32 As an
example, Lewis points to several reviews in the New York Times that praise Zorn for
30
Cole Gagne, Soundpieces 2: Interviews With American Composers (Metuchen, NJ: The
Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1993). . This quote also brings to light other classic binaries that
Zorn imbues to the classical/jazz opposition—namely the Apollonian/Dionysian paradigm,
metonymically represented by opposing a stopwatch (knowledge, mathematics, logic, etc.)
to an “emotional basis.”
31
Zorn, v; Heuermann, 2000
32
George E. Lewis, "Experimental Music in Black and White: The AACM in New York,
1970-1985," Current Musicology.nos. 71-73 (2002): 145.
20
“transcend[ing] categories”33 and condemn Anthony Braxton, whose experimental praxis
mirrored Zorn’s in many ways: “However much he may resist categories, Mr. Braxton’s
background is in jazz, which means an improvisatory tradition.”34
Instead of discussing these ramifications, Zorn appeals to a kind of rootless,
polymorphous musical literacy based on the very commercial genre system that he
disavows: “The ultimate answer is, you can’t put what I’m doing or what Elliot [Sharp]
does or what any of these guys [the “Downtown scene,” TG] into any kind of box like that.
Inherently it’s music that resists categorization because of all the influences we’ve had.”35
Zorn implies that both the “complexity” and the “emotion” of his music are merely two
equal influences, culled from the same source—recordings acquired at a young age. Zorn
argues, it seems, that the incongruous nature of that combination—and the combination of
other musics with this “classical”/”jazz” binary, such as film music, hardcore, world
music, etc.—make the music both everything and nothing at the same time. By culling
influence from such a wide variety of genres, Zorn wants to get rid of them all, to create
only “avant-garde” music. Yet the musics he claims dominion over are not the same. These
records, and the people who made them, are vastly different in terms of economics,
politics, aesthetics, and race; the lowest common denominator of sounding music cannot
erase these differences.
Jazz music is as crucial an influence on Zorn’s music as the experimental music of
the Western canon. The compositional paradigms of collaboration, free improvisation, and
33
Rockwell, John. As Important As Anyone in His Generation. New York Times (February
21, 1988): sec. 2, p.27, in Lewis, 145
34
Rockwell, John. Jazz: Two Braxton Programs. New York Times (April 23, 1982): C23, in
Lewis, 145
35
Gagne, 524
21
“blowing,” all of which Zorn has used in his compositional work, all stem from the
influence of experimental jazz musicians, especially Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor,
both of whom Zorn mentions by name in several interviews. Most important for Zorn’s
early music was the integration of “emotionally charged blowing sessions” into “more of a
compositional atmosphere than an improvised one.”36 The synthesis of collaborative,
freely-improvised music and of through-composed music intended for a concert setting set
up Zorn to straddle the paradigms of “Downtown experimental music,” with
contemporaries rooted in the classical tradition and venues like The Kitchen and Roulette,
and “Downtown improvised music,” with contemporaries involved with Jazz and venues
such as Studio Henry and other downtown lofts.
These musical paradigms were not mutually exclusive, as composers and
performers played their work wherever they could; they were, however, deeply entrenched
with different traditions that held important boundaries determined by race and perceived
historical importance. More than a philosophical or theoretical importance, these
entrenchments also held an economic value: funding from grant organizations and
performances in venues traditionally devoted to one tradition or the other.
Though performances of music from these two traditions took place in all sorts of
venues in the 1970s, and found increasing support in the 80s, Lewis points out that there
was a severe difference in public funding between the two perceived genres. The National
Endowment for the Arts split music funding into discrete categories, forcing musicians to
choose sides between “jazz-folk-ethnic” and “composer-librettist;” in 1973, $225,000 from
the NEA was split between 165 “jazz-folk-ethnic” artists (with no award over $2,000),
36
Duckworth, 453
22
while in 1974 over $400,000 was given to “composer-librettists,” with many individual
grants totaling over $5,000.37
Composition and Difference: Theorizing “Blocks of Sound”
This early segregation had little effect on Zorn’s own practice, but it does show
how theoretical lines drawn gained particularly real significance in the case of working
musicians. Especially for Zorn, who would attempt to establish his own systems of
financial and artistic support outside of the mass market he despised so much, a discussion
of genre classification seemed irrelevant, pedantic, and useful only to critics and the record
industry who would attempt to capitalize, and exploit, some kind of true avant-garde
zeitgeist of individuality. For Zorn, music is simply music, either composed or
improvised—and his compositional philosophy treats genre simply as a variable among
others, something indexical, finite, and able to be organized into blocks. Zorn lays it out
clearly in Derek Bailey’s “On the Edge” documentary, aired on the BBC in 1992: “I think
in blocks—in changing blocks of sound. And in that sense, one possible block is a genre of
music.”38
Despite Zorn’s insistence on the singularity and simplicity of his music, the
paradox of his compositional praxis remains: by leveling the musical playing field and
treating all musics as equal, Zorn completely ignores the political, social, and economic
histories attached to musical traditions. How can he claim heritage from both Stockhausen
and the AACM? The answer, for Zorn, is that he was exposed to both musics through
recordings, not through direct instruction. “This is the first generation of composers that
37
Lewis, 117
Derek Bailey, On the Edge: Improvisation in Music - Episode 1: "Passing It On"
(London: BBC4, 1992), <http://www.ubu.com/film/bailey.html>.
38
23
was brought up on a range of music as wide as this—available to us because of the
recording boom,”39 Zorn comments; “We were the generation that benefited from [the
recording explosion]. And we looked for like-minded individuals to work with.”40 This
reduction of music to recordings informs Zorn’s paradigm of “blocks of sound,” as a
recording is quite literally that: a static representation of a musical performance,
crystallized into its status as a record—a cultural product with a genre, album art, and liner
notes. Zorn corroborates this with his own anecdotal history—he was exposed to both
“classical” and “jazz” music through recordings.41
Zorn, in his record-stuffed apartment in the late 1970s and 80s, seems to have been
operating from a degree-zero of composition: if every genre of music was available to him
as a composer, then he was free from the burdens of any specific compositional heritage.
However, as he has said and as his music has communicated, his early works (and his
compositions throughout the 1980s and 90s) owe a striking amount to the precedents set by
musicians and composers falling into two different, often racialized, camps. Both of these
groups were major influences not only to Zorn but also to his contemporaries, the
community Zorn speaks for in his introduction to Arcana. By establishing himself as a
serious composer who merely incorporated the “emotional chutzpah” of experimental jazz
musicians into the more complex more serious paradigm of “composition,” Zorn, perhaps
inadvertently, widened the gap between experimental jazz and “experimental music,”
39
Gagne, 524
Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, eds., Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music
(New York, London: Continuum, 2006) 198.
41
Zorn’s obsession with the record as an artistic product brought him to dispute with
Nonesuch, his record label during the late 1980s, for artistic differences regarding album
art. Since founding Tzadik, he controls every aspect of his albums, including art; this has
earned him some notoriety, as he often puts graphically violent photographs on album
covers. (See Gagne, 531-534).
40
24
finally giving primacy—through his refusal to acknowledge the political ramifications of
genre—to the concept of a general “avant-garde.”
Synthesizing Influences: “Paying Tribute”
Zorn’s simultaneous denial and embrace of genre came to a very real manifestation
in his “game pieces” of the late 1970s and early 1980s, where he would compose a set of
complex rules for performers to improvise with. This was a solution to the problem of
integrating two disparate traditions into an original “avant-garde” musical product: it gave
all of the “structural complexity” of “classical” music while allowing the “emotional
chutzpah” of “jazz.” It was a new kind of improvisation, played by musicians Zorn knew
well, like-minded improvisers and performers. Because of Zorn’s formalistic innovation,
this music was not immediately definable. Yet it was Zorn set out to create: a more perfect
avant-garde, an amalgam of everything he liked.
George E. Lewis describes the nuances of improvised music as belonging to either
an “Afrological” or “Eurological” system of “improvisational musicality:” “My
construction of [these systems] refers to social and cultural location and is theorized here
as historically emergent rather than ethnically essential.”42 Lewis, who also has written
extensively about the AACM in New York (2002) and who also contributed a chapter to
Zorn’s first book, constructs these historically emergent classifications in order to undo the
tangled history of improvisation that lies between the two. It is clear that Zorn’s
compositional stance on his own music is involved with both of these modes of
improvisation; most apparent among the instances of such systems are what he terms
42
Lewis, George E. “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological
Perspectives” in Cox and Warner, 274
25
“tributes,” a phrase used to describe his mode of taking both “Afrological” compositional
paradigms and also compositions themselves and synthesizing them to make new cultural
products, ostensibly associated neither with Europe nor Africa but with New York’s
downtown scene.
The manifestations of Zorn’s tributes to “Afrological” music take place in multiple
aspects of his artistic praxis, including both music he composes himself and music he
chooses to record on his record label, Tzadik. Two tributes, specifically tributes to Ornette
Coleman (“Spy Vs. Spy”) and Thelonious Monk (“Shuffle Boil”), came in the same format
as his musical tributes to the Italian film composer Enrico Morricone and his tribute to
Mickey Spillane, the author of “hard-boiled” crime novels: a CD of recorded music,
accompanied by a live tour. Coleman’s tribute is an album on which Zorn and a small
ensemble of two drummers and another saxophone player reinterpret Coleman’s
compositions loudly, brashly, quickly, and furiously. Live performances of the tribute,
titled “Spy vs. Spy,” were so loud and unorthodox that at one performance, much of the
crowd left, booing, even overturning Zorn’s merchandise table at the door.43 The cause of
this riot was, according to one reviewer, the sheer volume at which Zorn played his set;
perhaps it was also because the tribute Zorn gave to Coleman so radically ignored every
extra-musical aspect of Coleman’s work, and explored Zorn’s radically personal
interpretation of jazz, one that was perhaps impossible to communicate to such an
audience.
Another “tribute” Zorn gives to genres and communities that have influenced him,
specifically the AACM, is his use of phrases such as “great music” to describe the kind of
43
Francis Davis, "'Zorn' for 'Anger'," The Atlantic Monthly January 1991.
26
artistic practices associated with his record label, Tzadik. Zorn curates a “Great Jewish
Music” series contained within Tzadik’s “Radical Jewish Culture” imprint, with “no small
tip of the hat to the Art Ensemble of Chicago,”44 appropriating their phrase “Great Black
Music”—a phrase which was strategically worded as an attempt to elevate the music the
Art Ensemble of Chicago was creating out of the critically subordinate and somewhat
maligned genre of “jazz,” and into the discoursal realm of “serious music.” The Art
Ensemble of Chicago is one of the most well known sub-groups of the AACM, and
includes Anthony Braxton, whom we have already discussed as a pivotal influence in
Zorn’s development. Zorn’s use of the phrase “great music” describes fundamentally
diverse musical compositions by diverse composers (ranging from Burt Bacharach to T.
Rex’s Marc Bolan) as played by Zorn and his community of downtown improvisers. The
link to the AACM’s “great music” is clear: Zorn sees this music as containing the static
tradition of Jewish culture No matter how much the music strays from tradition, it still
must belong to a static “block,” a block of genre, a block of identity.
II. Zorn’s Music: “Cobra” and Blocks In Action
Until now, I have discussed Zorn’s musical philosophy in abstract terms, tracing
the contradictions that arise with his self-positioning as a member of the avant-garde, with
his problematic influences from both “classical” and “jazz” music, and with his theoretical
leveling of all genres into formalistic “blocks of sound.” These “blocks,” as I argue (and as
Zorn implicitly states), are static identities with which he, as an avant-garde composer,
44
Radical Jewish Culture, 2006, Accessed 3/18/2008
<http://www.tzadik.com/rjc_info.html>.
27
could compose new music—with which he could transcend the labels and categories those
blocks inhabit. This transcendence is not intended to break those boundaries for the
masses, however; Zorn never claims the weight of the world on his shoulders. In fact, we
must remember that Zorn and the artists he identifies with look not back at the world they
critique, but rather “out—toward a new world of truth and beauty.”
Zorn continues his argument: “This world is essential to their existence, and they
do what they do because they are compelled to—out of necessity—because the truth must
be told at all costs.”45 But to whom must this truth be told? If these are musicians on the
outside looking out, and if Zorn severs all ties from mainstream culture, it is unclear whom
he transgresses against, whom he trespasses, what rules he violates. It is clear, however,
that in the early years of his career as a composer and improviser in New York, he chose a
particular group of improvisers to play his music, for whom he would write music, and
with whom he would often perform. Zorn clearly situates his work within the tradition of
the “classical” avant-garde: “When Stockhausen and Cage created their own units, they
were initiating a very eloquent dialogue between composer and performer. I took the whole
process one step further […] when I write music, I write music for performers, for a
community of players of which I, too, am a member.”46
Zorn’s early works of that period, known as the “game pieces,” were “very simply
done—a series of structures. Here’s a solo, then there’s a duo, then a trio—almost a list of
different permutations of players.”47 These pieces would develop in complexity, adding
different limitations, permutations of rules, and temporal instructions that culminated in
45
46
47
Zorn, v
Cox and Warner, 198
"Hear and Now: John Zorn" Parts I & II
28
Zorn’s most widely known game piece, “Cobra,” a complex, 12-player game that involves
several sets of colored rule cards, headgear and “guerilla tactics.” It is one of Zorn’s most
performed pieces, and it is one of his most enigmatic: at once a merely formalistic set of
rules and also a signature piece for Zorn and the “Downtown” performers he selects to
perform it, an ostensible “framework” whose filling out is inexorably bound to Zorn’s
compositional paradigm of “blocks of sound.” It is a paradox: a composed improvisation,
an authored piece that should be authorless.
“Blocks of Sound” as Compositional Praxis
Zorn deals with this paradox by treating improvised instructions on stage as another
instance of “changing blocks of sound,” a compositional paradigm he links to Stravinsky,
Stockhausen, and even Schönberg.48 It is clear to him that such a practice of ordering
blocks of improvised sound takes cues from the European tradition:
I think a comparison of what Stockhausen was doing in the 60s and what I’m
doing now is very valid. “Plus/Minus,” a very important piece for me, has
instructions like “play louder than the last note you heard.” […] I took that
basically one step further—I don’t talk about any sounds that anybody’s
making, I talk about the improvisers themselves.49
48
“I think in changing blocks of sound. And in that sense, one possible block is a genre of
music […] and it’s just a way of ordering those blocks, just like the 12 pitches in the
chromatic scale can be ordered.”
49
Bailey, On the Edge; in a different interview, Zorn echoes this concept of “taking
improvisation in concert music one step further” by citing an expansion of American
compositional forms of indeterminacy: “With early pieces […] I was dealing with Earle
Brown-kind of idea, Available Forms. I moved that into a little more open area in pieces I
called Linear Bubbles, that dealt with choices, like George Crumb’s circle, where you start
anywhere in the circle and go around.” (Duckworth 1995, 463)
29
Similarly, he traces the “block” paradigm back to Stravinsky: “The biggest influence I had
[was] Stravinsky, who worked in block form;”50 “[Changing blocks] was something I
really felt was my personality, my style […] [b]ecause it came from my interest in
Stravinsky and Ives, who had always worked that way.”51 Blocks, therefore, are both a
legitimizing link to European “classical” heritage and also a leveling-down of that heritage
to become merely a genre, on the same plane as any other genre available to Zorn as a
gatherer of diverse influences through recordings.
On a fundamental musical level, Zorn argues that an organized block of improvised
sound is, in all respects, identical to an organized block of genre-specific sound (a coded
way of saying a recorded sound, as genre here is fixed), and that the “ordering” of these
two kinds of blocks carries the same compositional weight. Indeed, Zorn conceives,
somewhat paradoxically, of improvisation as drawing from a fixed repertoire of ideas:
“Improvisation has a broader palette that it draws from, but ultimately it’s the same piece
over and over. And composition is literally the same piece over and over, too.”52
Earlier, in the same interview, Zorn says of “blocks of sound,” “it’s like I hear a
sound element in a Bartók section and I’d say, ‘That sounds neat’ so I’d take that section
right out of the score and transcribe it into my own notation. Right?”53 The concept of a
“block of sound” stems from a paradigm of music as a static object, able to be played back
and analyzed either aurally (as most jazz is analyzed) or visually (as “classical” scores are
analyzed)—Zorn transcribes the Bartók section he likes instead of describing it verbally as
an improvisational instruction or influence (i.e. “play something like Bartók!”). Ives,
50
51
52
53
Strickland, 127
Gagne, 512-513
Duckworth, 461
Duckworth, 449
30
another composer whom Zorn cites as an early influence, is a particularly striking example
of such “blocks;” sections of his music are lifted note-for-note out of other musics, instead
of merely emulating the genre of those other musics.54
As Zorn constantly repeats in interviews, his influences are weighted equally
between several modes of musical production: “jazz” and “European classical,” which
roughly correspond to both improvised and notational “blocks,” and also to “Afrologic”
and “Eurologic” paradigms of composing. Separate from these is the influence of cartoon
composer Carl Stalling, whose fast-paced, often mimetic orchestral music offered an early
example of quotation and pastiche to which Zorn took an immense appreciation. Despite
the obvious differences in all of these modes of musical production, Zorn insists on
throwing out everything external to the “music itself,” “listening with the ears,” ignoring
the crucial differences between improvised and through-composed music, and any
differences within both improvised and composed music. “There’s good music and great
music and phony music in every genre and all the genres are the fucking same!”55
Games with Blocks: “Cobra” and Form
“Cobra” is, according to many critics and even Zorn himself, the most complex and
most interesting of his game pieces. The piece is composed not of musical content but of
musical form, giving instructions to musicians on when to play and allowing them to
explore the musical and inter-personal dynamics within their given ensemble. Inevitably,
genre-specific snippets of sound are produced, with no small influence by Zorn; there is
even a “cartoon trades” instruction, during which players are asked to play extremely short
54
For example, the motif from Beethoven’s 5th symphony is literally quoted in Ives’
Concord, Mass Piano Sonata, not merely imitated.
55
Strickland, 128
31
phrases of music as if they were sound effects for a cartoon.56 More generally, however,
“Cobra” extends Zorn’s compositional paradigm of “blocks of sound” into the realm of
improvisation: just as Zorn composes with objective blocks of sound on paper, he also
composes “Cobra” live, as the prompter, with objective blocks of sound identifiable not by
genre but by a specific performer’s personality, their characteristics, their identity.
By extending his musical paradigm of the improviser’s palate and fashioning
ostensibly “objective” and “formalistic” rules around a certain expected type of
improvisation, Zorn essentially treats the musicians who play “Cobra” as homunculi,
engaging in a post-“LP generation” aesthetic re-contextualization and re-combination of
improvised “blocks of sound,” Zorn’s musical paradigm put into practice. “Cobra” often
skews towards new developments of instrument technique and technology, towards
noisiness, towards an “emotional” style of improvisation supposedly inherited from free
jazz. We can recall Zorn’s quote: “I still wanted all those horrible noises, but I wanted an
emotional basis for them, not just a stopwatch.”57 Because of the fact that “Cobra” was
written with this clear, distinct musical paradigm, and because Zorn intends to keep the
players limited to those who will be supportive of the piece, improvisation in “Cobra” is
limited to Zorn’s concepts surrounding the nature of music itself; and the rules of “Cobra,”
though slightly opaque and never made public, reflect such a paradigm.
In 1992, a four-part television series directed by Derek Bailey, a historically
important figure in British improvised music, aired on the BBC’s Channel 4. Its title, “On
56
Heuermann
Gagne, 511. This quote also brings to light other classic binaries that Zorn imbues to the
classical/jazz opposition—namely the Apollonian/Dionysian paradigm, metonymically
represented by opposing a stopwatch (knowledge, mathematics, logic, etc.) to an
“emotional basis.”
57
32
the Edge: Improvisation in Music”58 positioned the show in the realm of the experimental,
avant-garde, and other descriptors usually associated with music at the periphery of some
kind of public consciousness. Interestingly, the topos suggested by situating improvised
music “on the edge” was not purely theoretical or limited to the musical world of Britain; it
would be easy to describe improvised music in opposition to the rigid, standardized
“classical” music of England and the Continent, but Bailey expanded the series well
outside the Western world, exploring improvised or semi-improvised traditions in
international indigenous cultures as well as with jazz and the “Downtown scene” of New
York. What linked all of these disparate musics, the series seemed to imply, was that their
focus on improvisation had put them at a severe disadvantage to Western recorded
music—both “classical” and “popular” alike—because of the impossibility of capturing the
spirit and community generated by improvised music.
The segment on John Zorn is an outstanding glimpse at his early rehearsals and
performances of “Cobra,” well at his attitudes towards composition and music in the late
1980s and early 90s. Zorn first appears in a tracking shot, leather jacket-clad and walking
through Times Square, as a cool, post-modern figure: somewhat cynically, the cacophony
of “Cobra”—a set of rules for structured improvisation—is implied to mirror some kind of
cacophonous public life, political system, or post-modern dystopic arena of free play. This
audio-visual exploration of “Cobra,” as well as Zorn’s descriptions of the piece, offer a
striking example of Zorn’s integration of influences, including notions of “contemporary
classical” music, free jazz, postmodern composition, theatricality, and the downtown scene
of improvisers. An examination of “Cobra,” as Zorn’s most well-known game piece, gives
58
Bailey, On the Edge
33
us insight both into Zorn’s position within New York’s downtown scene and helps us
understand his own terminology for his music: that it is definitively avant-garde, a brainchild of his obsession with both avant-garde “classical” music and free jazz.
From what I have been able to gather from liner notes and observations of live
performances, a set of cues of different classes is realized on a set of colored cards, each
with one of several numbers and letters. There are also hand motions with numbers
associated with them, which correspond to the colored cards and their symbols. Each cue is
given to a player chosen by Zorn on a downbeat when he delivers the cue, often quickly
and with dramatic effect. There is also a “guerilla” system of rules signified by the donning
of hats and headbands, which allows players to completely ignore Zorn’s given rules.
Players chosen by the prompter play whatever they want at first, but as the piece
progresses, they can revert to sound ideas previously played by them or other members of
the ensemble earlier within the same performance, and also mimic other players’
improvisation. Besides the music, the theatrical effect of musicians engaging with several
other radically personal styles of improvisation becomes the center of attention, making
“Cobra” as much a “psychodrama,”59 as Zorn puts it, as a musical performance.
Recordings of “Cobra” lack this element of theatricality, and have been often maligned by
critics as not successfully capturing the spirit of the performance.60
59
browbeat - issue numero uno - john zorn, , 3/16/2008 2008
<http://www.browbeat.com/browbeat01/zorn.htm>., Bailey,
60
For example, Francis Davis’ “Zorn for Anger” (1991) calls Zorn’s game pieces “frathouse Stockhausen” and says of Cobra, “I listened to immediately upon receiving it in
1987 and have had no interest in playing since.” Even a fan-site (Maykrantz 2004), one of
several on the Internet belonging to fanatical followers of Zorn, says “Personally, I'd
recommend about 40 other Zorn albums before this one.”
34
“Cobra” is a difficult piece to define in any sort of music-theoretical sense, or even
a music-historical sense. Rather than existing in the form of a written score or an orally
transmitted melody, harmony, or any other musical structure, it is merely a set of rules for
improvisers, a “game piece” that structures their improvisation into a cohesive experience
for both musicians and audience members. “Cobra” is not the first of Zorn’s game pieces;
it was written after a string of other pieces with sporting names: “Lacrosse,” “Pool,”
“Archery,” and others. Unlike these “sporting games”, “Cobra” is a war game—musicians
are pitted against a prompter, usually Zorn, who, with a series of colored cards and hand
motions, issues commands to the players who can either accept or reject them. The players
can also suggest commands to the prompter and even completely ignore him or her, thus
creating “guerilla tactics” that force musicians to act against each other and the prompter,
rather than acting in cooperation or in a peaceful manner.61
These tactics, and the interplay between the musicians, is as important an element
of the performance as the actual musical utterances themselves. The musical content of
“Cobra” varies depending on the ensemble performing it, and changes with each
performance. The musical content, however, in both of the commercially available
recordings of “Cobra” (Cobra [2002] and Cobra Live at the Knitting Factory 1992 [1995])
is generated mainly by performers all associated with New York’s downtown scene, and
therefore adheres to a similar sonic aesthetic despite the piece’s lack of any necessity for
61
Though in Bailey’s 1992 television piece Zorn explicitly calls Cobra a “war game” as
opposed to a “sporting game,” in a 1990 interview for the indie zine Browbeat, Zorn says,
“It's not a war game. A lot of people get upset with that stuff. Apparently, Willie Winant
tried to do the piece down in San Diego, or somewhere down south at some school, and
some girl student got really upset and tried to blockade the performance. Cause she didn't
like the use of the word "tactics" or "guerilla systems" or "cutthroat." This military stuff.
We gotta get rid of that.”
35
those particular sounds. Specifically, the sonic profile of “Cobra” adheres to the sonic
profiles of the individual musicians who play it. Since Zorn admittedly wrote it for a
specific group of improvisers, a group whose talents, limitations, and personalities he knew
very well, “Cobra” could be considered a piece specific to Zorn’s community, and
therefore a creative product not only of Zorn but of the scene in general.62
In Zorn’s own words, “Cobra” is “more about the live situation, because you can
really see the physicality of these people going through the process of dealing with these
set rules. Every society has a set of rules that people deal with in different ways, and what I
basically created is a small society.”63Zorn acknowledges that he has, in fact, created a
“small society,” if only one whose political back-and-forth mimetically criticized “society”
at large. Zorn’s metaphor places him within the created society not as a rule-follower, but
as a rule-maker: this is the closest he becomes to being a composer, in any classical
meaning of the term. On writing “Cobra,” Zorn says,
What I was fascinated with was finding a way to harness these people’s talents
in a compositional framework without actually hindering what they did best,
which was improvising—finding a way for them to work in kind of a group
with a certain kind of sound that could be identified with what I was interested
in, which was changing blocks of sound, but at the same time didn’t limit their
imagination, never told them what to do.64
Games with Blocks: “Cobra” and Psychodrama
“Cobra” shows Zorn’s perceived joining of the influences of “contemporary
classical music” with “free jazz,” as he maintains the conceits of a strong, intentional,
interesting organization of “blocks of sound” on top of the conceit of improvised music as
62
Indeed, Zorn is very protective of the score, and is quite reluctant to give it out to
musicians whom he does not know.
63
Bailey, On the Edge
64
Bailey, On the Edge
36
being interesting in itself. The sounds improvised by Zorn’s scene obviously depend on the
individual musician playing them, but in general, many tend toward exploration of
extended technique on traditional instruments, textural ostinati and patterns (or “riffs”),
and the creation of new sonic possibilities with the creation of entirely new instruments—
for example, Christian Marclay, Zeena Parkins, and Ikue Mori, all frequent players in
earlier performances of “Cobra,” add these very obviously “new” elements by the very
nature of their exploratory and experimental choice of instruments.
Essentially, Zorn’s piece, written exclusively for a certain type of improviser, is
more of a theatrical construction of interactions between the personalities of individual
avant-garde musicians, rather than an avant-garde piece of music written to break
boundaries. Instead of being composed of blocks of genre, it is composed of blocks of
identity: it dictates who will play when, and treats each player’s identity as a static
structural element. It denies comprehension and strives towards radically individualized
expression, all with Zorn’s authorial stamp and theatrical manipulation. Of “Cobra,” Zorn
says, “It’s like scream therapy, or primal therapy. People are given power, and it’s very
interesting to see which people like to run with that power […]”65 It is this element of
“psychodrama,” the theatricality of live performance, that wrenches Zorn’s ideal of a
strictly formalistic interpretation of his own music away from its cozy home in the “blocks
of sound” concept. To argue that all music can be reduced to blocks of sound, and that the
way that one organizes these blocks of sound is the most interesting part of composition is
to completely ignore what actually happens when “Cobra” is performed, and Zorn does not
65
Bailey, On the Edge
37
disagree—he acknowledges that “Cobra” is as much a piece about that interaction as it is
about the form in which the improvisation is structured.
This is a basic formalistic differential. Zorn argues that the only thing that matters
is form and structure (“My concern is not so much how things SOUND, [but rather] with
how things WORK”);66 for composed music, this can be examined through a recording, a
score, or any sort of static document that shows how Zorn interestingly combines blocks of
sound to make an original, organic composition. For an improvisational “piece” that
consists of a set of rules rather than a pre-determined combination of those rules, the focus
of the piece must be on how the musicians interact with each other, what they play, and
why they play it. While “Cobra’s” rules attempt to define it as a composition that forces
improvisers to play discrete blocks of sound based on their strong, personal musical
identities, these rules need radically subjective human interpretation to gain any meaning at
all, and belie the meaning contained within the application of the rules during a
performance. In fact, Zorn says that playing “Cobra” is even less about the music played
and more about the manipulation of the players, the exposure it brings them:
“The people on the stage are exposing themselves more nakedly than they ever
have before, more nakedly than they are when they’re just playing music.
Because they’re having a little carrot dangled in front of them. And it’s
interesting to see who tries to grab the carrot, and who doesn’t. And a lot of
times, the people who try to grab the carrot have it pulled out of their hands by
someone else in the band. So it becomes kind of a scary, frightening thing, to be
in front of that band, to see these people kind of blossom and become the assholes
that they really are.”67
There is a story of a traveling oddity of the late 19th century: a “Mechanical Turk,”
who would beat any opponent in a game of chess. It was thought to be a “pure machine;”
66
67
Gagne, 528
Bailey, On the Edge
38
in reality, of course, there was a small person inside the contraption controlling its every
move. Walter Benjamin uses the Mechanical Turk as a metaphor for the hidden forced
behind Historical Materialism: “The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is always
supposed to win. It can do this with no further ado against any opponent, so long as it
employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be
kept out of sight.”68
In Benjamin’s metaphor, theology is the small dwarf in the body of the spectacle,
controlling every move and acting as a homunculus in an empty formalistic shell. In the
same way, “Cobra” can be considered the Mechanical Turk: its improvisers the homunculi,
laboring away at a seemingly interesting formalistic interaction between chess-players. The
experience of the game—the psychodrama, the therapy—is controlled, we assume, by the
individual players, their own identities. Yet this logic is not what it seems: it is small, ugly,
and must be kept out of sight. It is always itself controlled by Zorn’s own compositional
paradigm, his own aesthetic, his own game. Zorn sets them up, makes them play, rigs the
game so that he, as composer, always wins. The Mechanical Turk is controlled by a small,
hidden dwarf inside the machine; the game of chess remains fixed.
Identity Blocks: Composing for a Community
Here we encounter paradox: “Cobra” is about how the music works, how it allows
its performers to interact with each other, how it creates a small community outside of
society—how it is a game, essentially. This game is played out through interpersonal
relationships; he doesn’t care how the came sounds, but rather how it works. Yet Zorn also
68
Benjamin, Walter. On the Concept of History, Accessed 3/23/2008
<http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/ThesesonHistory.html>.
39
insists that in all other scenarios, he does not care about anything “but the music itself,”
and he scorns people who focus on the “trappings” of a music:
Is it [Torture Garden, an album of short-form compositions influenced by
hardcore music] hardcore? No. There’s a certain set of rules which you have to
obey. And with most scenes, the most important rules are the least important to
me: attitude; stance; posture; the clothes you wear; where you play. All the
trappings of the music. I‘m not a skinhead with tattoos on my arm, who goes and
slam-dances at CB’s. I’m interested in the music those people are making. The
same thing with the jazz scene: Their trappings are not my trappings. The
classical scene too: I don’t obey those rules. I’m interested in music, and not the
bullshit trappings that surround so many of the scenes, and which people are
convinced are the tradition of the scene.69 [Emphasis added, TG]
Zorn’s stance is a clear delineation of borders, and a clear statement of allowance and
personal liberty. Zorn is obviously interested in “trappings” that surround the music: he has
acted as a curator for over 20 years at several prominent music venues; as an executive
producer for every single record produced on his own record label; as a community leader
and venue manager at The Stone since 2005; and, generally, as a charismatic locus of a
large group of downtown improvisers and composers. As for the “bullshit” trappings, he
is, contrary to his disdain for the hardcore, jazz, and classical scenes, very concerned with
his appearance (camouflage pants with tzitzit), attitude70, and the venues in which his
music is played.
One such example is the infamous 1989 New Music America festival, for which
Zorn wrote a scathing diatribe in the concert pamphlet to accompany a performance by the
69
Gagne, 524
“I’m a down-to-earth person like you, who’s going to tell it like it is. If someone’s jiving
me, I’ll say, “Fuck you, you’re jiving me.” And people are threatened by that. And then
they think you’re some obnoxious asshole, when you’re just someone who is very straight
about shit.” Michael Goldberg, "John Zorn," BOMB Magazine Summer 2002.
70
40
Brooklyn Philharmonic of a piece they had commissioned for him, “For Your Eyes Only,”
which claimed
Less than an actual music festival, New Music America is a one-sided overview
that’s more about politics, marketing, and sales than about the music it pretends
to support… it’s no more than a convention for people in the music business who
try to “out-hip” each other in the manipulation of artists. This postmodern yuppie
tendency of business people dictating creative policy to artists is a very real
danger that I intend to avoid at all costs.71
Many critics, such as Kyle Gann, dismiss Zorn’s comments as hypocritical, citing the
“$10,000 orchestral commission” he supposedly received for it72; in reality, the Brooklyn
Philharmonic had commissioned that piece from Zorn two years prior, and played it at the
festival without his involvement.73 Zorn’s decision to not be involved with New Music
America highlights the unintentional presuppositions that come with a desire to consider
music “without the trappings,” namely that a specific set of “trappings” are required to
present music in such a way that will render it “pure” and unadulterated. Zorn’s statement
about “trappings” should be amended, however: rather than remove himself from
everything outside the music, he instead has chosen to create those factors himself by
making his own scene, his own home. “Artists stand on the outside of society. I think that’s
an important point: I see the artist as someone who stands on the outside, they create their
own rules in a lot of ways and shouldn’t try to be socially responsible; being irresponsible
is the very point of existence.”74
71
Reprinted in Gann, 232
Gann, 233
73
Gagne, 527-528
74
Gagne, 530
72
41
III. Border Patrol: Zorn and Musical Community
“The modern location for music is not the concert hall, but the stage on which the
musicians pass, in what is often a dazzling display, from one source of sound to another. It
is we who are playing, though still it is true by proxy; but one can imagine the concert—
later on?—as exclusively a workshop, from which nothing spills over—no dream, no
imaginary, in short, no ‘soul’ and where al the musical art is absorbed in a praxis with no
remainder.”75 – Barthes
Let us return, once again, to “blocks of sound.” This concept is neither limited to
Zorn’s “game pieces,” nor to obvious examples of blocks of sound such as Naked City, his
band infamous for speedily traversing genres within the format of a short popular “song.”
The paradigm of music as blocks of sound also pervades Zorn’s life as a curator and
advocate for a rootless avant-garde. He is an extremely outspoken opponent to genre
labels, categories, and legible blocks of sound when they are applied to his music; he is
quite obviously obsessed with genre, with what it means and how it impacts him as an
artist. He recalls finding that he was written up in the “college CMJ report—what the fuck
is that supposed to mean? Who am I? What kind of musician am I? Are we not stuck doing
this kind of thing? What are we doing when we’re on stage? We’re alienating the hardcore
people with the jazz shit; we’re alienating the jazz people with the hardcore shit; and then
there’s the movie soundtrack stuff that nobody likes.”76 Zorn seems worried that the CMJ
report will reduce him to categories, to make him “stuck.” This worry is actually a strong
admission of authority, and an argument of privilege: Zorn sees himself as inevitably
alienating a general audience, who are stuck into the static categories of “jazz people” and
“hardcore people;” only he, the composer, the author, the combiner of both genres, can
75
Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang,
1977) 153-154.
76
Gagne, 533
42
fully appreciate what he’s doing. Again, Zorn positions himself as an artist outside of
society looking out—his genre-blending compositions are not intended for mass audiences,
because, to Zorn, they will inevitably alienate them.
As I argued earlier, this compositional paradigm and musico-political stance,
combined with Zorn’s insistence that composition is merely a way to “put music together,”
positions Zorn as a “post-modern” composer, one who acknowledges and feels the burden
of the Modern era of music and produces music explicitly in reaction and in dialogue with
that music. But Zorn goes even further than being “post-modern;” he also insists on a
dialogue with genre-specific music bring produced at the same time he writes music—
music that does not yet have a history or an era. “I like to say that I’m really rootless,”
Zorn says; “I like to think that the music that my generation—Elliott Sharp and Wayne
Horvitz and Fred Frith—is doing is really rootless in a lot of ways, because we listened to
a lot of different kinds of music from an early age. And we were obsessive about it […]
and as a result, we don’t have a single home.”77
Though Zorn may not have a home yet on the shelves of major record stores, he
does, however, have a home—one that he has created for himself and, it seems, the entire
scene of “Downtown” musicians. Despite all of the elements he perceives as aimed against
him—forces such as commercialism, complacency, the “yuppie” movement, the fear of the
new, and the music industry’s “to not like anything truly creative—”78 he has found a
social home in the community he has created around himself, and a creative home in his
record label, Tzadik, and his music venue, The Stone. The integrated nature of these two
homes could also be an aesthetic home: a comfortable medium of artistic expression that is
77
78
Gagne, 516
Heuermann, A Bookshelf On Top of The Sky
43
legitimized not only by Zorn himself but the aesthetic world he has created around himself.
Zorn has successfully, by many standards, positioned himself firmly, with roots, within
New York’s volatile tradition of “scenes:” he has a venue for producing live music, loyal
musicians to play his written music, a publishing company for publishing his own sheet
music, and a record label for distributing his recorded music. Though all of the rooted
elements that Zorn has created for himself fall outside of “the music itself,” as he might put
it, they constitute the music’s availability, publicity, and actual substance; they legitimate
the music and give Zorn authority.
Charismatic Homes
Zorn’s double-life as both a composer and a promoter of his and his
contemporaries’ work—through virtually all steps of the production chain—forces us to
examine his artistic praxis not only as “composed music” but as music produced within a
certain economic, social, and political environment. As Zorn claims he is “rootless,” and as
he has created for himself a scene for which he acts as a curator and editor, an examination
of his music begs for an examination of the scene he has created. Pierre Bourdieu asks the
question: “Who creates the creator?”79 Though such a question may seem ultimately
simple, our easy answers often fall short. As mentioned earlier, Zorn has said, “There’s
good music and great music and phony music in every genre and all the genres are the
fucking same!”80 The concept of “great music” and “phony music” existing within every
genre assumes as casual scale of “goodness”—but what are the criteria of this scale?
79
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993) 76-78.
80
Strickland, 128
44
This question delves frighteningly close to the radically subjective concept of taste,
but Zorn makes his stance clear: there are certain artists he admires and certain artists he
does not. This stance, combined with the “leveling” of “all the genres,” and combined with
Zorn’s earlier mention of his love of recordings and his philosophy of “blocks of sound,”
leads to the conclusion that Zorn believes in certain artists and doesn’t trust others (those
who create “phony music”).
Bourdieu calls such a belief in a cultural product a “charismatic ideology”—a
paradigm of interpreting cultural products which “directs attention to the apparent
producer, the painter, writer or composer, in short, the ‘author,’ suppressing the question
of what authorizes the author, what creates the authority with which authors authorize.”
Within the field of cultural production lie countless economies of authority, power, and
cultural and symbolic capita; Bourdieu’s analysis of such an economy necessarily contains
a polemical element against casual thinking and paradigms of the intricacies of such
relationships. Yet even without a strict economic analysis of the field of cultural
production, the call against casual and “charismatic” ideologies surrounding the field—
specifically surrounding the field of arts management, including publishers, managers,
concert venues, and everything surrounding the “art itself”—rings especially true for Zorn,
who constantly falls back on such a “charismatic” ideology in his interviews, writings, and
“tributes.”
That is not to say that Zorn is wrong in conceiving of his own musical lineage as a
series of influences from great musicians, but rather to argue that Zorn’s insistence on the
“rootless” quality and “purity” of his work contradicts everything else he has done with his
career—namely to grant authority to himself and his collaborators by creating his own
45
seemingly autonomous zone of cultural production, where every aspect is vertically
integrated—including the creative process alongside the publishing of the score, the
pressing of the record, and the live performance.
Even in the extra-musical realm, as within the musical realm, Zorn has
“charismatic” influences. He is extremely aware of the tradition of artists who have made
homes for themselves within New York’s “Downtown” scene—artists who span discipline
and time, and who are unified by their mutual disdain for their contemporary
commercial/mainstream artistic fields of production and consumption. In every case, these
artists strove towards autonomy: complete self-reliance, cut off from any influence that
would force them to compromise their artistic work. Interestingly, it is not composers or
musicians from whom Zorn takes most of his cues for creating his “own society,” but
rather from filmmakers and actors—namely Jack Smith, Ken Jacobs, and Richard
Foreman.
When Zorn moved to New York in the mid-70s, Smith and Jacobs had already
ended their earlier collaborative friendship and partnership that had produced seminal films
of New York’s underground in the 1960s, such as “Flaming Creatures” and “Blonde
Cobra,” but both had moved on to explore more experimental theatrical praxes, Smith with
radical incorporation of theater into his life and Jacobs with the “nervous lantern”
exploration of cinematic form. Richard Foreman was already an established playwright at
the time, having founded the Ontological-Hysterical Theater; Zorn recounts how Foreman
was charitable to him in his early years as an artist in New York, giving him performance
space and supporting him in his early theatrical projects.81
81
Gagne, 514
46
All three of these artists sought autonomy; Smith, perhaps more than Jacobs or
Foreman, both worked and lived in a completely self-made world, often holding theatrical
performances in his loft where he would simply lounge about and talk about his life while
dressed in fantastic Orientalist costume, which he also wore every day. For Zorn, Smith
was “the real Warhol;” he was the “true grandfather of Downtown,” a figure who was
successful in creating a small world in which he could operate on his own terms. Citing
Smith, Jacobs and Foreman as strong influences from which he is directly linked in terms
of political artistic intent, Zorn claims:
I really feel like I’ve created a small society: a way of working. People fit into
it—they like it—they have time off and then they’re called to perform [...].
They’re asked to do different things at different times. It’s like Hakim Bey’s
concept of a TAZ, a Temporary Autonomous Zone: a moment separate from
society, which creates its own rules. […] Some people can enter it and some
can’t, but regardless of that, it has validity, it’s organic, it’s alive, it has life in
it—you can see it and you can’t deny it.82
Hakim Bey, née Peter Lamborn Wilson, conceived of the “Temporary Autonomous
Zone” as a sort of “temporary enclave,” “like an uprising which does not engage directly
with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of
imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen [sic], before the State
can crush it.”83 In many respects, Bey’s proposition for a TAZ reflects a generational
desire for the commune, the “hillbilly enclave,” the small, libertarian unit that can “stand
outside of society.” Bey justifies the TAZ with generalized revolutionary language,
opposing the TAZ to a “1984”-esque “Society”: “Because the State is concerned primarily
82
Gagne, 514
Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic
Terrorism (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1985, 1991).
83
47
with Simulation rather than substance, the TAZ can ‘occupy’ these areas clandestinely and
carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace.”84
Zorn’s community is similar to the conception of a TAZ, inasmuch as it defines
itself in opposition to an all-encompassing “Society,” one filled with the specters of
governmental regulation, mass media and mass markets, and unbridled free capitalism—a
“Society” that supposedly does not look kindly upon artists attempting to be “truly
creative.” It is significant that Zorn has denounced such a “Society” so much in interviews
and written texts; his music is not political in its content, but rather strives for individuality
and autonomy from “Society” by ignoring it. (“Being irresponsible [to society] is the very
point of [an artist’s] existence.”)85 Zorn’s most polemic text against the problems with
society does not lie within a piece of music, but rather in the preface to Arcana II, his
collection of essays, instructional texts, and artistic explanations from dozens of musicians
involved, either at the core or the periphery, with the Downtown Scene:
“[T]he dark ages have become darker. Age-old tactics of fear and oppression are
used to divide us. Career-building is taught in music schools, integrity is replaced
by compromise […] People are listening with their eyes, not their ears. To
survive in this world of distractions and adversity, good music has gone
underground, becoming more invisible than ever. It is always there, but to find it
one has to make an effort.”86
Avant-Garde Utopias: The Stone
When Kurt Gottschalk—a long-time supporter of John Zorn and writer for several
of New York’s Jazz periodicals—asked Zorn for an interview about his “50th Birthday”
84
Bey, “Festal” is a key word here: Bey’s “TAZ” concept has been used extensively to
theoretically ground Dionysian festivities such as raves, the Burning Man festival, and
other semi-autonomous party atmospheres.
85
Gagne, 530
86
Zorn, v
48
concert series at Tonic, Zorn flatly refused. Gottschalk writes editorial pieces for Squidco,
an online music store that specializes in downtown, avant-garde, experimental, and other
“out” musics; it is also, through Gottschalk’s editorials, a supporter of Zorn and the
composers in his scene. Gottschalk was trying to make a write-up for “The Squid’s Ear”,
Sqidco’s editorial page, about Zorn’s concert series—something that would definitely have
benefited Zorn with publicity. Kurt and several other people involved with the business
frequently attend concerts downtown, leaving their cards at concert venues for interested
parties to discover.
But Zorn wouldn’t give the interview. He became frustrated with Gottschalk’s
writing: “‘These little peppery phrases that you put through the article don't even matter.’
‘What matters is what's happening, the music. […]You can figure it out yourself. Whatever
you guys write about, you write about. I can't be concerned with it or I would have killed
myself years ago.’"87
Zorn’s stance indicates a hard-line position concerning music criticism: only the
music matters, and nothing said or written about it could ever compare to the meaning
contained within the music itself. Zorn still talked on the phone with Gottschalk for almost
an hour, acknowledging that he could have used the time for an interview. Is this merely a
sadistic prank pulled by an egocentric musician, too concerned with his own music to help
the people selling it write a blurb on their website? Or is it the position of a composer with
conviction, with a political mission of keeping his music pure and concerning himself
entirely with the creative process?
87
The Zorn Non-Interview: Ah, John, We Hardly Knew Ye, 8/20/2003 2003, 3/12/2008
2008 <http://www.squidsear.com/cgi-bin/news/newsView.cgi?newsID=241>.
49
Of course, Zorn’s behavior is a mix of both. Though by the very act of commenting
on his behavior I have violated the primary rule he keeps about talking “meaningfully”
about music, it must be done; his stance on musical production and creation in New York
and in the world belies a critical composer who is as concerned with how his music is used
in the marketplace as he is with writing it. This layer operates both literally and
figuratively: his acerbic, protective demeanor signals that he is self-consciously struggling
to survive in the “Dark Ages,” his term for the society in which he lives, but also against
actual critics and actual grant organizations who deny him praise or funding, two important
currencies in the economies of musical production. He is not shy to tell these people off:
“A lot of my life has been reacting against those fucking assholes that say, ‘You could do
much better.’ You know what I mean? […] It’s like—go fuck yourself. This is who I am,
it’s the best I can do, and if you don’t like it, drop dead.”88
This protectiveness and sense of imminent danger from the outside also manifest
themselves in Zorn’s record label, Tzadik, meaning “righteous one,”89 his “Masada”
project cycle (named after the ancient Jewish fortress built to shelter warriors against the
Romans), and as we have seen from his comments at the New Music America festival, the
venues in which he allows his music to be played.
88
"Hear and Now: John Zorn" Parts I & II
Tzadik is also shorthand for the Tzadikim Nistarim (hidden righteous ones) or LamedVav Tzadikim (thirty-six righteous ones). These are names for a mystical and folkloric
Jewish belief of a group of 36 people who, at any moment, exist on the earth and who are
so completely righteous that they prevent God from destroying the earth. The Tzadikim
Nistarim are often portrayed as humble, poor, hidden people who may not know they have
been chosen; nevertheless, they toil endlessly and righteously. The Ba’al Shem Tov,
founder of modern Hasidism, is believed by many to be one of these Tzadikim; Zorn
certainly knows these connotations, but I would not be so assuming as to argue he believes
he is one. See Tzaddik — The Baal Teshuvah - Letters of Light, , 3/23/2008
<http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/137090/jewish/Tzaddik-The-BaalTeshuvah.htm>.
89
50
In describing the musical “society” that he created as a Temporary Autonomous
Zone, Zorn mentions something in passing: “Some people can enter and some can’t.”90
What differentiates those who can enter and those who cannot? Is it openness, taste, or
appreciation of “experimental” and “avant-garde” music? Zorn’s position is clear: “one has
to make an effort” to find the music of the “Underground;” in order to escape “Society;” a
“rite of passage is necessary to break from this maelstrom, to gain contact and remain in
accord with the ancient continuum of creativity that gives true meaning and order to the
universe.”91
Though the “rite of passage” Zorn describes is ostensibly the practice of (“true”)
artistic production and communication, such a rite is also suggested earlier in the
positioning of “good music” as having gone “underground,” requiring effort to find it.
There is a certain rite of passage that a listener must go through in order to be allowed into
The Stone: the largest part of this rite is discovering the venue’s mere existence. Once
discovered, one must find it, which is difficult even for people who have the address; it has
no phone number and no sign, save for “The Stone” embossed in small lettering on the
otherwise nondescript door. Once found, one must dedicate one’s self to listening, as there
is nothing else to do in the small concrete room. In both incarnations, this “rite” is defined
as somehow defending or supporting “good music” in “dark ages;” in purely economic
terms, this translates to financially supporting worthy musicians who operate in markets
that do not validate their music with economic profit. Essentially, the message is: Zorn’s
Temporary Autonomous Zone of “Downtown” music is ignored by the economy of
90
91
Gagne, 514
Zorn, vi
51
Society at large, and therefore needs to find its own ways to operate outside of that Society
in order to fund itself.92
The Stone opened in 2005 with a major donation by the late Irving Stone, a longtime patron and fan of Zorn and the downtown music community. The donation came in
the form of both funding and a physical space—The Stone occupies the ground floor of a
building owned by Stone’s widow, Shirley Stone. Its rent is defrayed by the sale of CDs of
live performances recorded in the space.93 Zorn picks one artist every month to curate
performances at the stone, and often performs alongside other well-known “Downtown”
musicians for “Stone benefit nights,” where the $20 admission goes directly back into The
Stone’s budget. It is an almost hidden club that is publicized almost exclusively by word of
mouth; this keeps out “outsiders,”94 people who are not amenable or interested in the music
happening at the venue.95 Over time, several magazines and periodicals in New York have
begun to list concerts that happen there, and of course, the working musicians who play
there want as large an audience as possible; yet the Stone has no plans for publicity,
enlarging audiences, or making them comfortable with drinks or comfortable chairs—The
92
Zorn’s ultimate complaint: “This music has been marginalized and trivialized because of
money, because of greed, and because of people’s stupidity of not thinking things
through.” Heuermann, A Bookshelf On Top of The Sky
93
Personal Communications with Jeremiah Cymerman, August 2007.
94
Heuermann, A Bookshelf On Top of The Sky. At the start of this film, Zorn refers to
“outside people” as people who are only familiar with the work he puts out, and not
familiar with him personally. This distinction, however, separates those who know him
only through music and those who know him through his other community-building
pursuits—his record label, for example, or The Stone—pursuits which add an extremely
important aspect to his “work,” when his “work” is viewed in totality.
95
Personal Communications with Jeremiah Cymerman, August 2007. As an intern at The
Stone, Jeremiah and I would frequently talk about the small audience size for most events;
he shared the view that the audiences should be people who are sympathetic or agreeable
to the kind of music played at the venue. On nights when Zorn himself played, however,
The Stone was invariably packed.
52
Stone is “meant to be a place for focused listening.”96 It is an enclave for which admittance
requires the shibboleth of shared ideology, mutual understanding, and respect for the
charisma and greatness of the music contained therein.
Utopias Past: The Stone and the Society for Private Musical Performances
The Stone is not unique in being an exclusive environment for focused musical
performance. As mentioned earlier, Zorn used spaces such as Studio Henry, the Knitting
Factory, and Tonic to cultivate the Downtown Scene by curating their schedules, but his
curatorial positions were inevitably cut short by the venues’ desires to become more
financially successful and artistically diversified.97 The impetus to create a more
specialized club for the appreciation of marginalized music runs deep within the tradition
of misunderstood, outsider, or generally avant-garde music. Though Zorn has dedicated
himself to being insistently original and outside the mainstream, and therefore would
perhaps deny the comparison, The Stone offers a striking counterpoint to a much earlier
example of a musical clubhouse: The Society for Private Musical Performances (Verein für
musikalische Privataüfhurungen), founded by Arnold Schönberg and Alban Berg in 1918.
Schönberg’s Society was founded primarily in response to negative criticism from
major music critics in major publications, and also, according to its prospectus, to act as a
place where music could be communicated in the most clear, unadulterated way possible.
A (perhaps spurious) story tells of a sign hung from the door of the club: “Kritikern ist der
96
Sean Patrick Fitzell, "The Stone: John Zorn's Latest Downtown Venture," All About
Jazz April 7, 2005 2005.
97
The Knitting Factory moved from its location on Houston St. to TriBeCa, and now
features mostly rock and popular acts; Tonic, located a short walk from The Stone on
Norfolk St., shut its doors in April of 2007, but still curates performances at the Abrons Art
Center.
53
Eintritt verboten” (“Entrance forbidden to critics”). In Alban Berg’s prospectus for the
Society, one of the three main rules of the club is that “the performances must be removed
from the corrupting influence of publicity; that is, they must not be directed toward the
winning of competitions and must be unaccompanied by applause, or demonstration of
disapproval.”98 In the original prospectus, however, the banning of applause or dissent
among the audience is only secondary to the spurning of öffentlichkeit (openness) itself.99
The exclusion of openness, according to Berg’s prospectus, is natural, not imposed:
the performances “bear themselves away from the corrupting influence of openness,” a
result of the music’s basic purpose of the clear communication of difficult ideas. Such a
justification for a private music club is a clear swerve away from acknowledging public
opinion and toward a more self-important scale of success; no wonder that Berg prizes the
value of clear communication of information (Kenntnisnahme) over applause or thanks.
When even the audience is prohibited from expressing an opinion of a piece of music, the
meaning of the music can only come from the aesthetic experience of listening to the
music, according to Berg’s philosophy.
Furthering the purification of musical performance within the Society were its rules
excluding outsiders. “Guests shall not be admitted, and […] members shall be obligated to
abstain from giving any public report of the performances or other activities of the
Society[.]”100 The reasons for such an expulsion of the uninitiated are stated as political:
98
Joseph Henry Auner, Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2003) 151.
99
“Die Aufführungen selbst sind dem korrumpierenden Einflusse der Öffentlichkeit
entrückt. Die Mitglieder sollen hier nicht zur Beurteilung angeregt werden. Es wäre im
Gegenteil erwünscht, sich vorschnelles Urteilen abzugewöhnen, um dem Hauptzweck zu
erreichen: Kenntnisnahme.“
100
Gäste sind ausgeschlossen, lit. “guests are locked out”
54
Berg doesn’t want anybody talking to the press, or giving “propaganda” about the
performances held within the club.
This has a double significance. Berg assumes that the music being performed in the
Society is important enough, and controversial enough, to warrant potential propaganda
either for or against such music. In addition, the use of the word “propaganda”101
politicizes the musical discourse and is a major contradiction in Berg’s terms: the purpose
of the Society is supposedly only concerned with clear, near-perfect performances of
difficult music, not with politics. To keep politics out of the Society is to acknowledge
their presence within the music performed, and to declare a ban on propaganda only serves
to underline the sub-textual, inherent political element of the performances.
This contradiction is a major flaw within the document, but it is also extremely
valuable, for it lays bare the inherent contradiction in any attempt for composers to exclude
everything “external” to the music and to “focus” on the “music itself.” The most notable
result of this contradiction is the inherent acknowledgement of the political aspects of
music when discussing its supposed purity. It would be impossible for Berg to aspire to
such a pure communication of “intelligible” obscure music without his implicit
acknowledgment that such a feat is perhaps impossible, only a stop-gap measure to protect
the music of his circle of contemporaries from everything external to it, and therefore
render it even more obscure, more difficult.
The Society was a marked space for elite, important performances of elite,
important music. It was self-conscious of this elitism, and the literature it generated about
itself implied that the music performed therein was important enough for people to be
101
Auner, 48
55
upset that it was private. Ultimately, despite any influence that created, it was what it set
out to be: a society for the private performance of musical works deemed important by the
composers, performers, and patrons involved. It was autonomous from “the public,”
opposed to all those who disliked the music involved because of its obscurity and
difficulty. The Society had a location, a creed, and an owner: it is forever Schönberg’s own
attempt at consecrating his music in the face of a society that did not appreciate it.
The Stone operates in a different universe than the Society for Private Musical
Performances, geographically, chronologically, and historically. Some of the differences
are obvious, such as location; others are not so apparent, such as the crucially different
philosophies behind these two clubs that arrived at such similar ends. These differences,
however, coexist with certain similarities that show the true connection between these two
clubhouses: namely, the exclusion of outsiders for the ostensible benefit of the work itself,
the taking of refuge in an oppositional musico-political climate, and the praise, above all,
of the inherent meaning of the work itself outside the confines of commercial, public, and
critical criteria of success or failure.
Zorn’s work ethic seems to stem out of nowhere: he is not compelled by the telos
of a tradition, and indeed considers himself rootless. He claims to have support only from
himself and his community, delineating “outsiders” as greedy, capitalistic, and ignorant.102
Founding such a society is not a necessary act for a musician who simply wants to make
music; it is, however, necessary for a musician who wants that music to survive
economically, either in the marketplace of the elite or in the marketplace of the masses.
Schönberg, however, knew that he had the weight of the Germanic art music tradition on
102
See Zorn’s comment on why his music has been ”marginalized” in Heuermann, A
Bookshelf On Top of The Sky
56
his shoulders, as well as the critical support of at least a few academics (Theodor Adorno,
above all). Many popular critics, though, did not approve of Schönberg’s new music; one
described an early scene of a pre-Society concert: “
“Along with Schönberg and fifteen valiant musicians, a no less valiant
adventurous flock of listeners tackled the vile beast. One cacophonous passage
after another was tackled, and the muscular power of one’s aural apparatus was
steeled by the struggle with its sharp points, its hard surfaces, and its
asperities.”103
Yet the Society was a success, when measured in the context of history: Schönberg, Berg,
and many other composers whose music was premiered in the Society have become
thoroughly canonized, becoming a chapter in the grand narrative of 20th century music and
of Western art music in general. This probably did not come as a surprise to Schönberg, as
it fit perfectly into his paradigm of serious music—that it must be difficult, complex, and
hard to understand in order for it to be worth anything in the modern era.
Theodor Adorno wrote of Schönberg’s music,
The musical context wants to be understood purely from within itself, without
lightening the listener’s burden b means of an already available system of
coordinates within which the particular is nothing but minimal variation. In this
music, the only thing that still matters is the particular: the now and here of the
musical events, their own inner logic.104
To achieve a pure communication of this logic, the works had to be rehearsed incessantly,
and repeated in performance, for audiences to begin to have the ability to understand such
works. To overcome the problems of the “unklaren und problematischen Verhältnisse zur
103
Auner, 150
Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, trans. Susan H. Gillespie, ed. Richard Leppert
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2002) 630.
104
57
moderne Musik” [unclear and problematic relationships in modern music],105 Berg felt it
was a logical and advantageous decision to close off the communication of such music, to
confine it to people who cared enough about the supposed meaning within difficult,
obscure music enough to have the patience to hear it performed, often repeatedly. In
closing this music off from the press, as well, he cemented its self-generated position as
important, elevated, and above all, serious.
The Stone, rather than being founded in opposition to the harsh criticism of the
popular press or for the explicit purpose of the “clear transmission of information”, was
founded as one in a series of music venues largely curated by John Zorn, although it was
the first he also owned, and the first to be a “pure” listening environment, without drinks or
dancing. Like the Knitting Factory and Tonic in their earlier years, The Stone seemed to be
a safe refuge for experimental musicians, a place they could perform their music without
worrying about criticism. The economic aspect is important: The Stone is a “non-for-profit
arts organization”,106 and all profits from the door go to the musicians, not to the venue.
Musicians make a profit from performances at The Stone, even if it’s not much; it is
unclear how profitable performances at the Society were, but they still secured the
composers and performers a place in history. In any case, financial success was never an
important element for the Society; it is never mentioned in Berg’s prospectus, save for a
discussion of ticket prices.
Economic considerations are one of the main reasons for The Stone’s existence. In
all of its press and advertisements (mostly on websites for other organizations linked to the
105
Horst Weber, ed., Schönbergs Verein für musikalische Privatauffürungen (München:
Edition Text + Kritik, 1984) 4.
106
The Stone
58
Downtown scene), The Stone exhorts people to “support creative music,” a plea justified
by the club’s simple premise of giving the musicians 100% of the door profits. In reality,
the concept of giving musicians $10 per head per set is not new, nor is it so radically
different from clubs that only give musicians a percentage; what the musicians gain in
terms of percentage is lost in terms of the club’s prominence and attendance. In other
words, playing at The Stone might net a not-so-well-known soloist $100 for 10 audience
members, but playing at a more-publicized, more amenable venue might net them the same
$100 for a larger audience, which would result in more publicity.
There are further contradictions: while The Stone “receive[s] no grants,”107 which
seems to be a matter of principle, Zorn, has received multiple grants and public awards
intended for composers, including a Meet the Composer Grant, the Schuman Award from
Columbia University, and a MacArthur grant.108 Furthermore, the musicians who play
there cannot rely on funding from performances at The Stone, which for an ensemble of 3
or 4, might net each performer $100 if the venue is full. Despite it perhaps being a
theoretically ideal place for such musicians to perform, it is far from being most lucrative.
The idea of a fan-supported venue with no ties to the outside resources of public funding is
a theoretical conceit that has positive results for the curator—Zorn’s vision of the
Temporary Autonomous Zone is made complete by the autonomy of his club. This
107
The Stone
Names of 2006 Fellows - MacArthur Foundation, , 3/24/2008
http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.2070789/apps/nl/content2.asp?content_i
d={4A099024-6AC9-4CAE-AAD3-B5A64B241DD1}; “John Zorn Wins Columbia’s
$50k Schuman Award.” New Music Box, 3/2/2007.
http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=4983. The Schuman Award is a $50,000
unrestricted award for American Composers, and has been awarded to Steve Reich and
Milton Babbitt; the MacArthur Grant is an unrestricted $500,000 grant awarded to several
artists, academics, and “geniuses” each year.
108
59
autonomy is not positive for everyone involved with the club, however: because this
autonomy and exclusiveness, musicians who play there are forced into a situation where
small audiences are encouraged, even expected, where their concerts are not publicized
except to the select few who have “initiated” themselves into Zorn’s “small society.”
Locus Pocus
The Stone can be viewed as a project whose goals were to give a voice to Zorn’s
musical community, to find some outlet for creativity that otherwise would not be heard or
seen, due to the greed, hypocrisy, etc., of “Society.” It is a venue that attempts to break
from society, drawing the line between itself and normal venues with its unconventional
booking practice, its ascetic interior, and Zorn’s outspoken personality pervading the
atmosphere. Like the publishing of Zorn’s two books, which were “not a labor of love but
an act of necessity,”109 the opening of The Stone seems to have been theoretically
imperative to Zorn. As musicians who support The Stone admit, Zorn’s impetus cannot
have been financial profit; indeed, he makes no money from the venture. Yet what he lacks
in financial profit he gains in the profit of symbolic capital, of cultural capital—of the trust
of his peers, the esteem of the community, and the authority of being the curator of a major
locus of artistic practice.
This locus is comfortable, mutually appreciated, and, to the community it serves, a
generally positive sign that the self-positioned “avant-garde” can, indeed, have a place to
live and a place to be heard. Often, Zorn is not even physically present at The Stone,
109
Zorn, vi
60
instead trusting its operations to a network of performers and volunteers.110 Yet his agenda
of the separation from society and the construction of his own Temporary Autonomous
Zone is completed even without his presence: it is a philosophy shared, in one form or
another, by many of the volunteers and musicians who help to run the stone. This sense of
exclusiveness manifests itself in a number of ways, several of which I have already
mentioned; The Stone is a physical “outside”, an avant-garde looking outside of society for
some kind of Utopia, a location where “a music of community,”111 in Zorn’s words, can
produce itself.
The Stone, like Zorn’s “Cobra” and his compositional philosophy, toy with the
dangerously alluring concepts of freedom and truth. They are attractive frameworks that
call attention to themselves as solutions to the very real problems of art in the late 20th
century, of the growing commercialism of the popular music industry, of the economic and
social marginalization of artists who do not fit into traditional marketing categories. Zorn
and his community of like-minded outsiders have inhabited these frameworks for years,
and they have been prolific: one only need look at Tzadik’s list of titles to see that Zorn
has released over 100 albums of his own music, not including his contributions to other
albums.112
It might seem that Zorn has solved all of these problems, and is now reaping the
benefits of being completely autonomous, but his particular solutions to the challenges of
getting outside, playing outside, and staying outside of “Society” all are deeply embedded
with contradictions that undermine his claim to complete autonomy. All of these
110
Full disclosure: I was one of those volunteers in August, 2007
Zorn, v
112
“John Zorn” Search Results on Tzadik Records’ Website:
http://www.tzadik.com/list_frame.php?searchfield=artistnum&searchterm=34
111
61
challenges force musicians to come up with personal solutions; for Zorn, the solutions
were clearly embodied in his compositional philosophy, his synthetically composed and
improvised music, and his economic separation from major labels. These solutions were
engineered not to be radically personal, as one might assume, but rather to be radically
community-oriented, including the “Downtown scene” for whom he is a self-appointed
advocate.
These solutions are remarkably similar to games: they employ systems, hierarchies,
rules, and unspoken conventions. They create a “small society,” as Zorn calls it, one in
which players must navigate certain channels in order to “win,” to land a record contract, a
chance to play Zorn’s work, or a performance at The Stone. Some players win, and some
lose; some feel Zorn’s wrath as he spurns them for being not serious or dedicated enough,
and some feel his embrace as a member of his Temporary Autonomous Zone. In all cases,
these players’ fates within Zorn’s “Downtown” community are arbitrated by rules that
seem fair enough: you play when you want to play, you follow your own “complex artistic
vision,” you are not responsible for your place in “Society,” but rather irresponsible,
answering only to yourself. But, like playing chess with the Mechanical Turk, your moves,
moves that seem perfectly original, intentional, and transgressive against “Society,” are
always determined by that small, hidden, unwanted authorial figure lurking within the
inner workings of the machine. The hidden figure is Zorn. The game is rigged.
62
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