RHYS CHATHAM AND CHRISTIAN WOLFF ON ARTHUR RUSSELL

The increasing presence of intermedia and cross-disciplinary performance in New York in recent years has been accompanied by renewed interest in its historical legacy, as well as in a number of its central figures - among whom Arthur Russell (1951-1992) must now be counted. Arriving in Manhattan in 1973 to study cello and classical composition, Russell soon became musical director of the Kitchen, where - as an important sponsor of music from Stockhausen to Bootsy Collins - he was instrumental in the downtown scene's mteirrdngling of genres as diverse as folk, funk, punk, jazz, classical, Minimalism, and disco. For perspective on the person and the place, Artforum invited composers Rhys Chatham and Christian Wolff to reflect on the milieu and the role that Russell - currently the subject of an ongoing series of CD releases from Audika Records - played within it.

RHYS CHATHAM

I FIRST MET ARTHUR RUSSELL in New York in 1973, after a concert of Jackson Mac Low's sound poetry at the WBAI Free Music Store. As Arthur was studying uptown at the Manhattan School of Music (MSM), and I had recently founded the music program at the Kitchen (still at its original Mercer Street address in SoHo), our conversation soon turned to the contemporary music then emerging from classical traditions. I immediately noticed that Arthur's interest included not only the highly cerebral and atonal postserialist composers of MSM, such as Charles Wuorinen and Milton Babbitt, but also the new tonality that was being explored downtown by La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Tony Conrad, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich.

Like many of us making music in the early 1970s, Arthur and I felt that "art" music had become something that only other composers could appreciate, and we were therefore interested in moving away from serialism and toward tonality. It can't be emphasized enough what an important issue this was at the time, and establishing a music program at the Kitchen in 1971 had everything to do with giving these younger composers a place to play.

After I had served as the Kitchen's music director for its first two years, a composer named Jim Burton took over, followed by Arthur in 1974. Arthur's programming resonated with that of the previous years, but occasionally rock appeared in the mix - notably with Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers.

Perhaps the roots of this endeavor lay in the European groups of the late '60s such as Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) in Italy, which included a number of expatriate Amer- icans living in Europe - Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum - and AMM in London, which counted among its members Cornelius Cardew and Keith Rowe, as well as Christian Wolff. After John Cage's use of indeterminacy and Karlheinz Stockhausen's early attempts at introducing random elements into his scores, this seemed like the next logical step. The musicians of MEV and AMM thus began working within very loose structures, or no structure at all, to produce a free, immediate music made on the spot.

Taking note of America's own great tradition of improvisation - namely, African-American composers coming out of the jazz tradition, such as Omette Coleman and Don Cherry - Rzewski returned to the States and started the markedly influential New York version of MEV The city's free jazz loft scene was at its height then, and people such as Rzewski, Anthony Braxton, Garrett List, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Karl Berger were breaking down the hierarchical barriers between jazz and the Western European classical mode.

In 1975, a number of musicians in their early twenties, such as Peter Gordon, Jill Kroesen, Ned Sublette, and Peter Zummo, arrived in New York from the West Coast and elsewhere. Gordon, in particular, was doing something that I had never heard before: making compositions that worked perfectly well in an avant-garde context, yet using a vocabulary overtly drawn from rock. Shocked, I was hesitant to support this mix. But before long, I ended up playing in Gordon's Love of Life Orchestra, which consisted of his friends drawing variously on rock, dance, Minimalist, experimental, and even disco music. That year, List took over from Arthur as music director of the Kitchen, giving more than a quarter of his program over to improvisation, a clear influence of MEV and AMM. In addition to booking downtowners such as Arthur and Gordon, List also invited jazz musicians/composers to the venue - and not just a few. (Many in the community couldn't understand his reasoning for this, feeling that jazz composers already had places to play.)

In the meantime, Arthur was living on East Twelfth Street between Avenues A and B; he had an extra room and needed someone to help pay his rent. As it happened, I was looking for a place, so we became roommates for about a year. Allen Ginsberg and Richard Hell lived there as well. I'd get up in the morning to go out for coffee and sometimes see these weird guys all dressed in black with shades - they turned out to be members of Television.

Around the corner on Houston Street, Arthur had a rehearsal studio that we shared with Gordon. It was there that Arthur developed his composition Instrumentals (1974). Maybe I only noticed because I was studying jazz and tenor saxophone at the time, but the piece made heavy use of the chord progression ii7- V7- I (two minor seven, dominant seven, one) found in many jazz standards. The way Arthur put these chords together was highly idiosyncratic and produced a sound not normally associated with the genre. This approach to composition - the mixing of varying separate traditions - felt transgressive and fresh to us, yet occasionally may have been too much for a regular concert authence. In those days, I was bartending in the East Village and couldn't resist asking my friends to play. I invited Jill Kroesen to perform and gave Arthur a regular gig, but I was used to thinking of Arthur as a classical composer, and here he was, singing what sounded suspiciously like folk music. He played there every week and definitely raised some eyebrows.

Watching Arthur, Peter, and Jill mixing all of these elements in their music, I finally went to see the Ramones in 1 976 at CBGB's, the month after they released their first album. I was twenty-four at the time and had never been to a rock concert. Until then, I had considered myself a hard-core Minimalist, having studied with La Monte Young in the early '70s, tuning his piano in just intonation in exchange for lessons and playing in his group, as well as performing with Tony Conrad's Dream Syndicate. Hearing the Ramones changed my life. I thought, Wow, I may be playing only one chord in my music, and these guys may be playing three, but I can really relate to this stuff. I reasoned that if Glass could use jazz instrumentation in Music in 12 Parts (1971-74), and Reich could use elements of Ghanaian music in Drumming (1970-71), why couldn't I use rock instrumentation for my work?

What came about was a piece I composed in 1977 called Guitar Trio (G3), for three electric guitars, electric bass, and drums. While its melodic content used the musical vocabulary of New York's downtown avant-garde scene-consisting entirely of the overtone series generated by the E string of the electric guitar - its rhythmic thrust and the way the musicians played together came out of rock. In 1979, we included the visual artist Robert Longo as one of the guitarists, and he created a set of handsome slides to be projected during the performance, titling them Pictures for Music, 1979. Just as Longo used preexisting images as the subject matter of his visual work, it felt perfectly natural for me to use sounds commonly found in electronic media as subject matter for musical compositions. Though I began to think of G3 more as a representation of rock than actually rock itself, I went on to play the piece in places like CBGB's, Max's Kansas City, the Mudd Club, Danceteria, and Tier 3. But where was Arthur?

One evening in the late '70s, we ran into each other at the Kitchen. It was then that he told me about his interest in disco; about the huge subwoofer speakers they had in these clubs, and how the disco composers were making compositions especially for these frequencies. He encouraged me to check this out, saying, "They're like temples for music, Rhys!" Though I didn't tell Arthur at the time, I remember thinking, I've heard of composers coming out of a classical tradition being influenced by jazz or rock as a primary compositional direction, but disco? To this day I've never understood why Arthur took up disco the way a number of us had taken on rock and punk. However I once asked Peter Gordon and he suggested,

Disco was joyous, fun, and social. Arthur never embraced the nihilism and negativity of punk rock. He never felt comfortable with the darkness and angry dissonance of (what was later called) "No Wave." Note that when Arthur brought rock to the Kitchen, it was with the Modern Lovers, and with Jonathan Richman's unabashed positivism and innocence. Arthur was drawn to the bacchanalian aspect of the dance clubs - initially at the Loft and later at Paradise Garage. He was also beginning to openly embrace his gay identity and there was a feeling of communality on the dance floor. In contrast to the punk/rock scene (typically angry, white, and heterosexual), disco was a culturally diverse party.

With the generation immediately preceding ours, the various camps of composers - whether conservatory, jazz, or rock - kept to themselves, maintaining barriers between forms. By the '70s there were many people attempting to dissolve these lines, yet it is the sheer number of areas in which Arthur did significant work during that era that remains amazing.

Arthur told me about his interest in disco; about the huge subwoofer speakers and how compositions were being made especially for these frequencies. "Disco clubs are like temples for music, Rhys!"

RHYS CHATHAM IS A MUSICIAN AND COMPOSER FROM MANHATTAN RESIDING IN PARIS SINCE 1987. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

RHYS CHATHAM is a composer and musician based in Paris. In 1971, at age nineteen, he became the first music director of experimental arts space the Kitchen in New York, where he organized performances by avant-garde and rock luminaries such as Maryanne Amacher, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Philip Glass, and Meredith Monk, among others. In the late 1970s he began writing music for large guitar ensembles, including Drastic Classicism, his 1981 collaboration with choreographer Karole Armitage, which was restaged at the Kitchen last month. In 2002 Table of the Elements released a three-CD retrospective of Chatham's works, and a live recording of his composition for four hundred guitars, A Crimson Grail, came out in 2007. Here, Chatham reflects on his friendship with musician and composer Arthur Russell during a turning point in New York's downtown music scene in the '70s.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF

HOW DID WE MEET AND WHERE? There are many blurs in my memory. I have the impression that Arthur introduced himself, maybe by phone, and came to visit in Hanover, New Hampshire, where I had moved with my family in 1971. I remember that he told me about having studied composition with Charles Wuorinen, which was surprising, because Arthur's interest in John Cage and the music around him (including mine) was difficult to square with that. He did say that Wuorinen, a strict and exclusive serialist and seriously uptown composer, had given him a hard time. Arthur must have been looking for more congenial musical company. Or, rather, he was just looking - which he seemed to do continuously.

Every so often, Arthur would telephone from New York, reporting and self-questioning about the scenes he was involved with there, his music, and how to survive making a minimal living. Why did Arthur talk to me? He admired Cage, who was in the New York area, but maybe he found me, though farther away, more accessible. At the time, my own work was taking an explicitly political turn; I was trying to loosen up from a rather pure and, I came to think, overly esoteric form of experimentalism (more in the character of its sound than in the collaborative processes of performance that it involved). That transition seemed to interest Arthur (though he liked my spare, undramatic earlier work, too).

When I met Arthur, early Minimalism had already gotten its start with Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. This was a breath of fresh air for some of us, after the tiring complexities of serial music, extended instrumental techniques (Luciano Berio et al.), and classical music pastiche (George Rochberg et al.) with the former, a somewhat forced effort to complicate things, and the latter, a kind of regressive nostalgia. The art world had shifted away from abstraction to Pop and representational painting, but somehow without the historical baggage that musicians still insisted on hauling around. Riley, Reich, and Glass had each been affected by their involvement with music outside the orbit of the Western concert - classical Indian raga singing, Ghanaian drumming, Indonesian gamelan. Technically, this led in the direction of diatonic (that is, adhering to neither the systematically chromatic procedures of serialism nor the traditional harmonic language derived from Romantic music) writing (or improvising) and a steadily pulsed rhythm. These are, in fact, features shared with pop music, as are the use of electric instruments and synthesizers; amplification of standard instruments; and composers forming their own ensembles to play their music (aside from the existing handful of groups performing new music). The aim was to make compositions that would be accessible beyond the more or less exclusive and closed circle out of which they came. These currents must have influenced Arthur as they did others, including Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Garrett List, and John Zorn, all of whom crossed over into a music that existed outside the givens of "new music" and its concert life.

I liked Arthur because of his genuineness and musical openness. I wasn't a fan of disco (indeed, at the time, I was hardly aware of its existence), but I found Arthur's engagement with it interesting. Periodically, he'd send me his LPs. (I recently turned up "Pop Your Funk & Is It All Over My Face?," a 12-inch he released in 1980 as Loose Joints.) He played cello and must have talked to me about performing my music, because he gave me the confidence to ask him to join a kind of floating band I had in New York that included List, Frederic Rzewski, Jon Gibson, and David Behrman. We all played a concert in 1974 at the Kitchen, the first performance of my "Exercises" series, along with some songs - straightforward unison singing on political texts. Arthur played cello and sang. The group was a mix of professional (really good) and amateur performers (Behrman, Arthur, and myself in the latter category). The compositions we played are open in the sense that, though they consist of melodic fragments in a single line, the instrumentation is free, as are many aspects of the playing: It is indeterminate as to whether a player plays or not; and if he or she does, whether notes are read in treble or bass clef; also unspecified are the tempo, details of rhythm, and dynamics. The score directs performers to play with the idea of unison observing unison in extremely varying degrees so that the effect is a continual negotiation of what constitutes "unison" in the process of playing. The music comes as much out of how the players - individually and as a group - are moved to do it, as out of how it is written. After the performance, Reich said that he now understood what the music was about: It was street music. And Cage, also there, said it was like the classical music of an unknown civilization. Arthur fit well into that mix.

Some years later, Arthur played in a concert of my music organized by Nicolas Collins at the Clock Tower; a variety of downtowners including Peter Zummo, Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Wayne Horwitz, and Dan Goode also participated. I noticed how Arthur's playing had a clear and valuable presence - and at the same time, amid some of the hard-edged playing of the others, how self-effacing he was. My last memory of Arthur is of his performance at a memorial concert for the English, avant-garde-turned-political (and tonal) composer Cornelius Cardew in 1981. Arthur and Ned Sublette chose, arranged, and sang two of Cardew's political songs in a country-western style, and accompanied by Arthur's cello, it was just right: strong and moving.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF IS A COMPOSER AND MUSICIAN. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

New York-based composer CHRISTIAN WOLFF is the Strauss Professor of Music Emeritus and a professor emeritus of classics at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. In 1953 he composed his first work for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and he has since collaborated with a number of artists and musicians, including Cornelius Cardew, Takehisa Kosugi, Steve Lacy, and Christian Marclay. A scholar of Greek tragedy, he has penned numerous articles on the subject that have appeared in Antiquity, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, and other journals. His introduction and notes to poet Tom Sleigh's translation of Euripides' Herakles (Oxford University Press) were published in 2001. Cues: Writings & Conversations (MusikTexte), a collection of Wolff's writings and interviews about music, appeared in 1999. He is presently completing a composition titled "String Trio for Robert Ashley." In this issue, Wolff recollects his encounters with the late Arthur Russell.Figure Among Motifs