THE SURVIVAL OF THE AVANT-GARDE--It is axiomatic that new music needs recording-but by whom?
How does the vanguard of the musical art cope-and how might it cope even better?
By Jack Somer
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ONE spring evening in 1960, while I wrestled with my taxes, there came from the radio an apposite sound: David Randolph was playing, on New York's WNYC, Avery Claflin's "modern madrigal" titled Lament for April 15th, a solemn setting of the instructions for Federal Tax Form 1040. The haunting opening lyric, "Who must file ... ," caught me 'twixt my Adjusted Gross and Deductions. Alone, I began to laugh. I re solved to obtain that recording post haste. I did. And for a dozen years it was the only Composers Recordings, Inc. disc I owned.
Today I own some fifty records on that label, a tribute to my developing taste for contemporary music-and my stint as a CRI vice president. But my collection includes music on other offbeat labels as well, such as Opus One, Finnadar, Chatham Square, Desto, WATT, Shih Shih Wu Ai, and Oblivion. These are among an increasing number of musician-generated re cording companies devoted largely to new music. They are filling the gap left by the "majors" in their failure to serve the avant-garde with consistency and conviction.
That failure, certainly, is due to the economics of New (non-pop) Music: the avant-garde simply doesn't sell enough to cover its share of a corporate titan's overhead. Yet, whether out of some sense of artistic guilt or impulse toward media image-making, the majors occasionally release an avant-garde bon-bon, which then customarily languishes for a brief time in the catalog before being deleted for lack of sales.
Not only does this folly break a composer's heart, it absorbs significant portions of the resources that support the avant-garde: foundation grants and gifts from private donors. For new mu sic depends heavily on subsidy for the commissioning and performing of new works, and though the money would be most effectively spent by low-overhead specialist labels, the majors do not of ten refuse when the offer of subsidy is made.
Just where does this money come from, and, more important, what is done with it? Foundation aid to avant-garde music began with the 1940 formation of the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University. In 1950 it gave $5,000 to establish the American Re cording Society, a precursor of today's mail-order record clubs. The Society was quickly embraced by music-appreciation teachers across the land who were just then Discovering America. Recordings of the music of Henry Cowell, Roger Sessions, Charles Ives, Edward MacDowell, and Walter Piston sold well; Randall Thompson's Second Symphony reportedly sold over 45,000 copies before the Society was dissolved eight years later.
Both the Koussevitzky Foundation and the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation have, since the 1940's, supported a virtual Who's Who in American com position, awarding most recording rights in the resulting productions to Columbia Records. Unhappily, most of these recordings have been deleted from Columbia's catalog, though some have appeared as licensed reissues on other labels. Since 1970 the Naumburg Award winners have been recorded by CRI, which never deletes an album regardless of the accountants' cries.
The Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music, among the most active subsidizers of the avant-garde, supports new works selected by its own editorial board, assisting record companies regardless of size. Thus it gave RCA $10,000 to realize Elliott Carter's Piano Concerto. The assistance by no means covered all costs, but it sufficiently re duced the album's break-even point that it remains one of few modern works recorded but not (yet) deleted by RCA. MBR also gave the Contemporary Chamber Players $10,000 to initiate its "Spectrum: New American Mu sic" series on Nonesuch. And the fund currently allots $15,000 annually to CRI, out of which sum the company manages to squeeze a miraculous six or seven albums-though some require additional cash for completion.
In 1960 the Ford Foundation gave the American Music Center $210,000 to commission eighteen works. Of those recorded, twelve are still available on CRI; two have passed from Mercury's listings. In 1970 Ford renewed its sup port with the Recording-Publication Program. Out of a $375,000 fund, subsidies in amounts up to $7,500 were awarded to publishers acting in con junction with record companies and performing artists. The program has to date blessed some 230 works by 130 composers, on about a hundred discs, in conjunction with thirty-six publishers and seventeen record companies.
The largest grant ever given in the new-music area was the $500,000 the Rockefeller Foundation gave to the Louisville Philharmonic Society for its extraordinary First Editions, but after one hundred commissioned works had been recorded the sum was exhausted.
Even with commissions curtailed, LFE still manages to issue a handful of al bums yearly while struggling, through expanded, non-avant-garde repertoire, for wider sales.
Other key subsidizers include the Fromm Music Foundation, the American Academy/National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Thorne Music Fund, the American Composers Alliance, and numerous orchestras, universities, and individuals. And while corporations and government agencies have generally steered wide of the record business, the Creative Artists Public Service program (CAPS), financed by the New York State Council on the Arts, is producing a multi-disc set of commissioned works. The first four al bums of the package, a mix of jazz, academic, electronic, and avant-garde styles, have just been released on the Folkways label.
But, despite all this aid, recording new music remains a brutal, competitive, and highly political enterprise.
ASCAP and BMI report that there are no fewer than 20,000 composers currently active in this country, compared with 1,000 in 1940. And the Schwann Record Catalog tells us that its roster of living composers grew from 147 in 1972 to 280 in 1973. So, when one composer cries out to be recorded, who will answer? The most likely answer, though certainly not the only one, is Composers Recordings, Inc.
Founded twenty years ago by Otto Luening, Oliver Daniel, and the late Douglas Moore, CRI is the only major company totally devoted to contemporary music and totally subsidized by a galaxy of music-oriented organizations. It began operations with $15,000 from the American Composers' Alliance (ACA) and the American Musical Associates (AMA), clearing houses for members' scores. With aid from the Ditson Fund it began recording works from the pens of ACA and AMA com posers. Its catalog now comprises some 250 albums with more than 600 works by 400 composers in every con temporary style. And more than 90 percent of CRI composers are living and active.
Through its pioneering efforts, CRI has attracted both a loyal following and a nattering of critics. The former celebrate CRI's unique service: few works it records are duplicated elsewhere.
The latter decry CRI's allegiance to ACA, which, they say, has led to conservatism and other academic aridities.
Both views can be justified, but every one agrees that no other company has dared to champion so many unknown quantities and qualities without any comforting illusion of financial gain. In fact, as Carter Harman, CRI's producer, says, "For some obscure historical reason, CRI was organized as a business corporation rather than a nonprofit operation. The result is that many potential subsidizers who wish to get tax benefit from their gifts cannot offer the company aid." While this has proved to be cumber some and has often prompted serious discussion at CRI about conversion to tax-exempt status, the company man ages to skirt the trap of "vanity" operation. Scores or tapes submitted for re lease are screened by an anonymous editorial board and acceptable music is recorded only if subsidy accompanies it, though sometimes the company will assist the composer in finding the necessary backing.
The miracle of this complex mode of operation is the rich catalog it has produced. "We recorded the larger works of Ives before anyone else," says Harman. "We've recorded more than sixty works by twenty Pulitzer Prize-winning composers, most before they won the prize. And we have-as a matter of history, not condescension-done works by nine black composers and twenty one women." Many other composers whose stars subsequently rose high enough in the musical firmament to make them interesting to the majors were recorded earlier by CRI, Carter, Milton Babbitt, Lukas Foss, David Diamond, Harry Partch, George Rochberg, Ned Rorem, and Wuorinen among them. And not the least of the satisfactions of being recorded by CRI is the knowledge that, however small the sales, the album will never be deleted.
"We're constantly in touch with the university," Harman adds, "as both a supplier and a marketplace. And we've discovered a whole new generation of performers devoted to difficult modern music, singers and instrumentalists who can realize with ease today pas sage work considered impossible a decade ago." Such musicians, refusing to don the symphony-orchestra strait-jacket, are the mainstays of the avant-garde mini-industry, and whether they are accomplished groups (the Contempo rary Chamber Players, the Light Fantastic Players, the Speculum Musicae, Aeolian Chamber Players, Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, Dorian Wind Quintet, Composers' String Quartet) or shining individuals (mezzo-soprano Jan De Gaetani, conductor Arthur Weis berg, violinist Paul Zukofsky, soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson, flutist Harvey Sollberger, percussionist Max Neuhaus, bassist Bertram Turetzky, trumpeter Gerard Schwarz), they are responsible for much of the new vitality in new music-live and on record.
To such musicians Teresa "Tracey" Sterne gives unqualified credit for the success of Nonesuch Records, which Vi she directs. "We come by our new repertoire by total immersion in the musicians' world," she says. "Composers who respect our taste and judgment bring in their new work, often before its completion. But more often the mu sic is brought in by a performer with whom the composer is working." Despite her rapport with musicians, Ms. Sterne offers no exclusives, no wholesale buying of compositions or performances. Rather, she selects works for their musical quality and sales potential, refusing "transitional" works or those that are not, in her judgment, up to the composer's own standard. The most conspicuous proof of Nonesuch's respect for the composer may be its habit of listing on its own record liners whatever recordings his work may have received on other record labels.
Nonesuch, now in its eleventh year, was a classical spin-off of Jac Holzman's Elektra Records. Its initial thrust went straight to the heart of the Baroque and Renaissance literature from Josquin to the Bachs--using masters licensed from European producers. The low cost of this method of operation permitted a budget price. This, plus fine recordings and fresh packaging, spelled success. It was not until 1968, however, that the fledgling company could afford to dip into the twentieth-century repertoire to any significant extent. It did so by commissioning a series of works "composed specifically for the LP record," beginning with Morton Subotnick's Silver Apples of the Moon.
Subotnick's success with the com position and the good record sales that followed encouraged further commissions, works by Charles Dodge, Jacob Druckman, Eric Salzman, Donald Erb, and William Albright, and the 1970 Pulitzer Prize-winning composition, Charles Wuorinen's Time's Encomium. Other astutely selected works round out the Nonesuch avant-garde list, and it is perhaps testimony to the conspicuous excellence of this contemporary catalog that the company's strong modernist reputation is based on only a tenth of its total output.
Some credit should be given, of course, to Nonesuch's marketing clout.
It is one of the few companies dedicated to working with new music that also has access to a pop company's fully operational marketing staff-advertising--and one that, since 1970 (when Warner Communications took over), has few peers. With such help, Nonesuch's records of contemporary music have all been self-supporting and self-amortizing, though the fact that the company has also dipped minimally into the well of foundation generosity has contributed as well.
ONE thing Nonesuch studiously avoids is that plague of the avant-garde, the "ragbag" album, an anthology, a conglomeration, anomnium gatherum of disparate composers, com positional styles, and instrumentations. According to Horace Grenell, the history of Desto Records displays the perils of the ragbag dilemma in capsule.
"When I started out," he says, "too few modern composers had reputations worthy of a full album. I jammed as many works by different composers onto each disc as I could, hoping the best would carry the rest. It didn't. So I began exposing new people by coupling only two. As reputations then developed, certain composers like Rorem, [Elie] Siegmeister, or [Ezra] Laderman merited whole albums. Recently, I've been widening our audience by coupling new American works with those of established Europeans. And that is working. "But, I always have to ask myself, should I record only what I like? That could be suicide, so I'm open to all sorts of music; I even record some things I don't like. I draw the line, how ever, at electronic music; I just can't judge between one piece and another." Though Desto lost money for years (friends say Grenell made it up out of his own pocket), it is now turning a profit, and Grenell has turned over distribution to another company so he can concentrate on producing. Desto's profitability was attained by building a low-overhead operation ("I'm the best shipper in town," says Grenell), and coupling it to some outside subsidy (the Ford Recording-Publication Program).
But, like the others, Grenell credits performers for the vital, unwritten subsidy they contribute when they agree to accept minimal scale instead of their normally Another company that has drawn well from the Ford program and encourages minimal recording fees is Turnabout/Vox. George Mendelssohn, Vox's reigning monarch, runs his company as if it were a Calder mobile, balancing subsidy and self-support in very selective quantities. At CRI, for example, the subsidy pays for everything; Vox, on the other hand, will pay for manufacturing, packaging, and distribution if a satisfactory paid-for master is delivered. Composers and per formers therefore frequently collaborate in the studio and then turn over the master for a royalty or a flat fee. Naturally, they tend to accept studio scale also as a way of reducing their own financial outlay.
In this way, Vox has created a good portion of its catalog, including the "Survey" series of chamber music played by the Kohon and Concord Quartet's reading of Crumb's Black Angels. Angels, for amplified quartet with doublings on tam-tam, maracas, glass harmonica, and mystic chants, is one of a very few avant-garde works to receive a second recording. (The first recording, on CRI, became familiar to the larger public because of its inclusion in the soundtrack of The Exorcist.) Rather than being a negative factor, such "competition" is desirable, for the lack of it in avant-garde music tends to impute a possibly unjust definitiveness to singular versions.
Charles Wuorinen sees this potential monopoly on individual works declining only if "record companies stay in touch with musical life instead of-as they are presently constituted-using music, barbarously, for turnover of profit." We shall, no doubt, have to wait some little time for Wuorinen's implied reconstitution of the record business. In the meantime, it should be noted that this "monopoly" does have some redeeming features. For one, many composers attend the recording sessions. Though composers are not necessarily their own best interpreters, the phrase "composer supervised" appearing on a release, particularly of new music, is reassuring-it lends authority to the proceedings and must therefore be saluted.
------ HARMAN: We recorded the larger works of Ives before anyone
else. We've recorded more than sixty works by twenty Pulitzer Prize-winning
composers, most before they won the prize. STERNE: Composers who respect
our taste and judgment bring in their new work, often before its completion.
But more often the music is brought in by a performer with whom the composer
is working.
------------- GRENELL: I always have to ask myself, should I record
only what t I like? That could be suicide, so I'm open to all sorts of music;
I even record some things I don't like. GLASS: I had to start making my own
records because audiences, particularly in Europe, recorded my concerts without
permission, bootlegging and distributing those dreadful little cassettes.
SOME composers, though, growing impatient with waiting not just for second recordings but for firsts, start their own companies-and succeed. One such company is Chatham Square Rec ords, started in 1971 by Philip Glass and Klaus Kertess, a New York art dealer, on a $500 loan and a good deal of simple conviction. Glass is a composer/performer; his ensemble of highly amplified keyboard and wind instruments has won him loyal audiences in museums, lofts, and even concert halls. His music, influenced by Asian travels, consists of subtly altering ostinatos, thoroughly written out, sequenced by visual cues, and played at a steady high level that has been known to drive some sensitive listeners to the streets. But Glass uses the very best audio equipment in his performances, and engineer Kurt Munkasci is an integral part of the group; the Glass sound is therefore always undistorted.
"I was greatly impressed," Glass says, "by the sound at the old Fillmore East rock auditorium-the high level seemed to be a natural expression of the times. So, my music doesn't lend it self easily to recording; not because it's improvised-it isn't-but because the recording process can't capture both our subtlety and our intensity. But I had to start making my own records be cause audiences, particularly in Europe, recorded my concerts without permission, bootlegging and distributing those dreadful little cassettes. In France they once had the gall to set up microphones onstage so all the little pirates could tap in to make their tapes." Glass didn't start Chatham Square solely as a defense against such rip-offs. He had tried to interest commercial companies in his music, but he was advised by friends Steve Reich and Terry Riley that a record "deal" was not likely to return him any significant sales income--nor would his records remain available very long (records by both Reich and Riley are still in the catalogs of Deutsche Grammophon, An gel, and Columbia, however). But, with a handful of releases to date-by Glass himself, Jon Gibson, and Dickie Landry-Chatham Square seems success-bound, even though its records are not listed in the Schwann catalog. Minimal production outlay, low overhead, and Spartan packaging enabled Glass to produce his first two-disc set, Music with Changing Parts, for under $5,000, despite hundreds of hours of editing.
The initial press run of 1,000 sold out in a few months, and there have been several re-runs.
"I want to record," he says, "to help the group book more concerts-we do forty or fifty per year. My only fear is that Chatham Square could turn into a big business. That would be terrible;
I'm not a company president, I'm a musician." The use of recordings as a promotional tool in this new-music area is not unusual. Serenus Recorded Editions, for example, uses recordings to pro- mote the sale of sheet music. Serenus is a branch of General Music, a publishing firm owned and carefully tended by Paul Kapp, who has an almost un blemished record of supporting the un supportable. He has for that reason been instrumental in exposing much new music by unknowns, always against heavy commercial odds. His press runs of a few hundred records sometimes fail to sell out, but he has been aided by subsidy, including grants from the Ford program, and this has enabled him to add a remarkable thirty two new works to his catalog.
Kapp specializes in coupling records with scores, the whole handsomely packaged. He sells primarily to schools and libraries, where there is still a healthy interest in contemporary mu sic. But, like other small labels, Serenus hasn't cracked the tough commercial marketplace.
THE conservatism of the market is a major stumbling block for the avant-garde. "They" say that new music doesn't sell and so, true to its tradition, the avant-garde rises to the challenge in avant-garde ways. Rather than join the commercial fracas with fancy, expensive packaging, small companies adopt an "underground" aesthetic. Chatham Square albums, for example, have appropriate black-and-white minimalist graphics, and Opus One prints in fluorescent inks that identify its albums immediately.
Liner notes, too, have taken an avant-garde turn. Phil Glass refuses to use any notation other than the credits and contents. "There's a school of academic composers," he says, "that over-explains its music, depriving listeners of a virgin experience. My music needs no explanation." And though many composers earn part of their living by explaining their incomprehensible music in print, even that bastion of academic propriety, CRI, is loosening up. For a recent liner note George Perle wrote that he wanted to tell nothing about his composition except its title.
"The piece," he wrote, "was originally called 'Toccata in D,' but I thought this might imply too much and some things I didn't want to imply. When a colleague told me he considered this title inflammatory, I decided that I would simply call the piece TOCCATA." If the trend is away from stuffiness and from words in general--in jacket notes, the leaders of the movement are the numerous small labels whose music is manifestly anti-traditional as well, la bels conceived, created, and operated by musicians. Max Shubel, creator of Opus One Records, is a composer/per former who saw clearly that launching a privately financed "vanity" operation was for him superior to being dumped into the hopper of a massive company.
"I started by recording only my own music," Shubel recalls, "but I quickly learned that there were musicians in even direr straits than I; musicians who had to be heard. So we've opened the door." Opus One now has some thirty albums out, some realized with aid from the Ford program. Like Chatham Square, Opus One operates as a semi cooperative in which each composer produces his own recordings and bureaucracy is minimal. And because Shubel's catalog bridges the gap be tween the "classical" and jazz ghettos, Opus One is dispelling some tired myths about the compartmentalization of music as well.
ONE unusual factor the small companies have going for them is a spirit of cooperation: they talk to one another as colleagues, not competitors, and they pool their talents for solving common problems. That may sound unlikely in the notoriously cutthroat and cynical record business, but there is tangible proof of this cooperation: the New Music Distribution Service ( 6 West 95th Street, New York 10025). The NMDS is a branch of the Jazz Composer's Orchestra Association, which gives free public workshops and concerts and has its own label, JCOA Rec ords. The Distribution Service was born out of the problem JCOA faced in distributing avant-garde albums through a commercial system not at tuned to them. The Service was immediately successful, and its help was promptly sought by other musician operated labels. The NMDS catalog now lists nearly 300 albums on seventy labels.
JCOA/NMDS, a not-for-profit organization, works out of a homey Manhattan brownstone, taking records on consignment, reselling to retail outlets, one-stops, schools, libraries, and a large number of loyal individual customers. Since there is only a modest service charge, the profits from sales remain in the hands of the record producers on one end and the retailers on the other. NMDS, in fact, operates at a deficit which is made up by grants, private donations, and a portion of JCOA Records income.
The founders of JCOA/NMDS, Michael Mantler and Carla Bley, both composers, are outspoken critics of the condition of the American musician.
"We started the Service to help musicians who faced the rip-off everywhere else," says Bley. "We aren't seeking commercial success; the music we rep resent isn't intended for the mass market. It's hothouse music; if you want it, you have to come to it and enter the hothouse with the few, not the many.
We don't want hits on our hands; that would be a cancer. Mass-appeal music is far better off in the hands of regular commercial distributors." Though NMDS sounds too avant-garde to be true, it works. It may, in fact, be the most significant development in record marketing since the un happy demise of the "mom and pop" store. For, if the diverse streams of modern music are to have any chance of reaching their audiences, it will be through such visionary organizations as NMDS and the cooperation of the foundations such as MBR (which recently inaugurated a $35,000 program to encourage composers to produce their own records).
PERHAPS, then, it's time for that "re constitution" of the record industry mentioned above, a reconstitution based on the economic realities. There might, for instance, be group discounts available to informal alliances of small labels from pressing plants and printers; central warehouses (massive one-stops such as NMDS) could handle distribution of small labels, saving handling, shipping, bookkeeping, and collecting costs; and retail stores certainly ought to separate the avant-garde exotics from the traditional perennials so that those looking for modern jazz, avant-garde classical, the off-the-wall, and the un-nameable need not sift through endless browser bins of standards. And perhaps this reconstitution can begin in our schools, where "modern" music is still treated as a barely tolerated stepchild.
Finally, a proposal to the major record companies: stop playing around with avant-garde music. Stop trying to assuage guilt, develop images, and play musical big brother. Confess that you cannot do the avant-garde justice and let it rest in the hands of those who can.
How? By setting up a cash pool for use by small companies, without artistic restrictions. They can produce and sell more mu sic-per-dollar than you ever dreamed of.
By making available, at modest royalty, masters of your deleted modern recordings.
They can, in the hands of small companies, produce income again.
By cooperating in the distribution, without profit, of noncompetitive avant-garde music. Inevitably, when a small label becomes big, it will repay you by turning over its distribution, for profit, when the avant-garde distribution channels can no longer handle it.
By refraining from using the resources of the foundations for demonstrably un profitable projects. Rather, use your influence to educate these bodies to the real needs of new music. Help break down resistance to the unknown, free modern music from the shackles of conservatism, and help it to find its own audience.
In the hands of independent spirits, avant-garde music can be effectively disseminated. The commercial market oriented segment of the industry has its right to plush offices, proliferating vice presidents, and all the heavy hype it can stand. All the avant-garde wants is to survive-which it can, as long as it is permitted to remains in the hands of the avant-garde.
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SHUBEL: I started by recording only my own music, but I quickly learned that there were musicians in even direr straits than I, musicians who had to be heard. So we've opened the door. BLEY: We aren't seeking commercial success; the music we represent isn't intended for the mass market. It's hothouse music: if you want it, you have to come to it and enter the hothouse with the few, not the many.
------------- Jack Somer has served in both rear-guard and avant-garde echelons of the industry; just now he is sailing the seas on sabbatical. --------
Also see:
AUDIO BASICS--Glossary of Technical Terms-24
Source: Stereo Review (USA magazine)