THE EVOLUTION OF PETER GORDON'S MUSIC: an eyewitness
account
I have known Peter Gordon since 1972, when we were both graduate
students at the Music Department of the University of California at San
Diego, which at the time was a futuristic foundation-endowed think-tank
of new musical research. Through the 1980s and into the '90s I
performed in his ensemble and spent many hundreds of hours in recording
studios with him, so I had
a unique point of view from which to watch his music develop.
Mr. Gordon's music has been categorized both by its peripatetic,
eclectic curiosity and by its rootedness in European compositional
tradition.
Since he is a polymath and not a one-note artist, it is difficult to
summarize his work and any short account must leave out much.
When I met Mr. Gordon it was the era of revolution against atonal
serialism -- an insular, dry style which did much to alienate the
public from "serious" music and which was all but mandatory for
university composers of the day (and which, for all I know, may still
prevail in the universities where
it was most vigorously promoted). Young composers, taking their
cue
from La Monte Young, Terry Riley and others, were using simple tonal
materials -- sometimes as a drone, sometimes with a palpable pulse --
to create a
new kind of art music, one that used amplification (sometimes, though
not
always, at high levels) and borrowed from Asian, Indian, and (often
uncredited)
African music traditions. This new movement came to be badly
named
"minimalism."
Unlike many of the composers of our generation who were touched by this
emerging style, Mr. Gordon was a competent working musician who could
pay his rent playing in popular bands. He was already a
sophisticate, having studied the mechanics of film composition at USC,
jazz at Berklee School of
Music, and electronic music at San Diego and subsequently Mills
College. Having lived as a teenager in Germany and in Los
Angeles, he comprehended both European intellectual trends and American
pop culture.
After leaving UCSD he moved to San Francisco and subsequently New York,
where in the mid-70s he became one of the prime movers of a new style
that fused ambitious compositional principles with popular
instrumentation --though, speaking as an expert witness, I believe his
contribution has been underestimated by the few historians who have
written about the topic.
His Love of Life Orchestra (better known as LOLO), with its soap-opera
name suggesting an embrace of the trashy, played lean, rigorous,
instrumental
miniatures whose timbre dispensed with the high seriousness that
plagued
new music of the day. Though experimental in outlook, it evoked
the
fun of early '60s r&b and rock combos like King Curtis's Kingpins
or
the Ventures, as well as the thumping timbral palette of the
then-popular
orchestral disco records.
A chronic early adopter of technologies, Mr. Gordon was repeatedly the
first composer on the scene to comprehend the possibilities of each
subsequent
wave of mechanization and cybernetization of music. Unlike many
others
who used automation as a substitute for engaging directly with musical
content, resulting in a dumbing-down of the resultant music and an
anonymity of sound, Mr. Gordon's music seized on the possibilities such
instruments afforded
to make a music which bore his seal.
Incorporating synthesizers, rhythm machines and samplers into his music
as they became available, he also continued to compose for acoustic
instruments.
Beginning in the mid-70s as we gained access to multi-track recording
studios, he developed an original and influential style of composition
directly for tape. Prior to that era, "tape music" had been
electronic or concréte, or had been the elaborated product of a
pop band.
Mr. Gordon's method was somewhat similar to that of working pop
producers -- he often cited his admiration for Brian Wilson's music --
and had elements in common with the work being done by the musically
radical composers of
the generation preceding ours, e.g., Robert Ashley and David
Behrman.
But his tape scores created an original kind of continuum between the
composed and improvised, and between the acoustic and the virtual, one
that gave
performers a broad scope to create their own sound and their own parts
while
hewing to a carefully thought-out composition, creating layers of
interlocking
musical signatures to which another level of composition was added at
the
mix stage.
In the '80s, he received a number of commissions for large-scale
scores, thereby embarking on a career of stage composition which he
would continue to develop to the present day. Always prolific, he
was never more
so than during this period, turning out numerous pieces for dance,
theater,
film and video, while also producing records (which, in the interests
of
brevity, I will not discuss in this letter, except to note that two of
them,
Innocent and Brooklyn, were released on, and of course
mis-marketed
by, CBS Masterworks).
In particular, four of Mr. Gordon's stage works from this period stand
out. Two of them were tape scores -- Otello, for the Neapolitan
theater
company Falso Movimento, and The Birth of the Poet for Richard
Foreman.
Otello featured more than an hour of continuous music and had no spoken
text. The score, which used motifs from Verdi's opera as
generative cells, largely determined the pacing and intensely dramatic
gestures of the mostly choreographic stage action. The music was
collectively invented by Mr. Gordon and the performers in the studio
and finalized in Mr. Gordon's mix, which itself was always a
compositional process. The score won the Village Voice's Obie
Award for 1985, and Falso Movimento toured worldwide with the piece for
several years.
The Birth of the Poet, presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in
1985, was much maligned by critics for its libretto by Kathy Acker and
its theatrical realization. But the score, in three acts, was
complex and spectacular -- particularly the first act, which, with the
late Julius Eastman's virtuosic performance of a difficult vocal part
using a German-modernist 12-tone row, made ample use of one of Mr.
Gordon's greatest compositional assets: a quick, dry wit undetectable
by the humor-challenged.
Mr. Gordon's biggest popular success as a theater composer was probably
the live-orchestra score for Secret Pastures, an all-star collaboration
at Brooklyn Academy of Music (subsequently performed in Milan) with
choreographers Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane, artist Keith Haring and the
designer Willi Smith, which won Dance Theater Workshop's Bessie Award
in 1985. But his most important extended composition of the '80s
was Return of the Native, a collaboration with the video artist Kit
Fitzgerald, to whom Mr. Gordon got married while they were in the
process of creating the piece.
Taking as song text the chapter titles of Thomas Hardy's novel, Return
of the Native brought a new level of lyricism into Mr. Gordon's
music.
It was, I believe, the first fusion of live orchestra and live video
projection.
The tight collaboration between the two principal artists made for a
high degree of unity between sound and image. The images included
footage shot on location in Ireland and live-camera feeds of the
musicians as they played, subjected to real-time mixing and
manipulation by Fitzgerald.
Premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1988, the work was
subsequently performed in its entirety in Rio de Janeiro in 1989 and
Amsterdam in 1990 -- still under the rubric of LOLO, which in this
incarnation had evolved
from a rock trio to a 15-piece chamber orchestra.
In the 90s Mr. Gordon left New York to become a professor at the
College of Santa Fe, where he and Kit Fitzgerald raised their son
Max. Isolated in the mountains of New Mexico, Santa Fe has a long
history of being a sort of chrysalis for mid-career composers -- most
notably Edgard Varése, who spent several ostensibly quiet years
there prior to premiering Déserts in 1954.
Mr. Gordon was anything but quiet during his years in Santa Fe.
In the absence of any kind of professional structure for composers in
the United States, with steadily decreased funding for any but the most
commercialized of artistic activities, it is a remarkable
accomplishment that he has continued to turn out at least one major
stage work every year for a variety of collaborators.
In this latest phase he has been composing works that more closely
resemble the conventional definition of opera, completing a
metamorphosis from being an almost purely instrumental composer in the
'70s to being a dramatic singer's composer. This new direction
was clearly evident in The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin (1994), which
was followed by other sung stage works, most impressively The Society
Architect Ponders the Golden Gate Bridge, a collaboration with artist
Lawrence Weiner, performed in 2000 in Berlin and Bonn, and in Paul
Zimet's Bitterroot (at LaMama, 2001), a musical which re-imagined Lewis
and Clark's expedition as enacted by a group of 19th-century
players.
And now it's the end of 2001. I have no idea what he will do
next.
Maybe he doesn't either. It's not so easy to know what to do
right
now. But one of my favorite things about Peter Gordon's music has
always
been that I can never predict what turn it will take.
I predict he will surprise me.
NED SUBLETTE
December 27, 2001
Ned Sublette is a 2003-2004 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman
Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
His
book Cuba and its music: From the first drums to the mambo will appear
in
spring 2004 from Chicago Review Press.
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peter gordon