‘In 1963’, writes Chris Cutler,
Daphne Oram, working in her own studio in Kent, used Sandy Nelson's 1960 hit ‘Teen Beat’ as the soundtrack to the prize-winning British Transport documentary Snow, prefiguring [John] Oswald's ‘Pretender’ by 25 years in its application of nothing but speed alteration to an apparently unbroken original recording. (p. 18)Footnote 1
The British Film Institute's notes on Snow suggest that its director, Geoffrey Jones, already had to take account of the copyright in recordings.
Unable to afford his first choice of music, ‘Teen Beat’ by American jazz musician Sandy Nelson, Jones had British musician Johnny Hawksworth re-record the tune, expanding it to twice its original length by reducing it to half its original speed at the start and steadily accelerating the tempo over a period of eight minutes to a speed approximately twice as fast as the original. Daphne Oram of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop added various filters.Footnote 2
The Snow soundtrack rarely features in British music histories but is a good example of Cutler's interest in the accidental quality of key cultural moments. He is fascinated by the practical relationships between developing technologies and embedded ideologies, by the ways in which the former are policed by the latter and the latter unsettled by the former.
Applications of a new technology to existing art practice tend first to be inspired by existing art paradigms, simplifying or extending familiar procedures until new ideas emerge that engage more directly with the particular qualities innate in the technology itself. These typically arise as a product of happenstance, serendipity, accident, deliberate experimentation or cross-fertilisation – and almost always by ways of hands-on interaction. (p. 29)
This is Cutler's second collection of essays (the first, File Under Popular, was published in 1984). It is organised around three themes, music and memory, music and language and music as a life-form, although it is his long-standing interest in memory that shapes his approach in all the papers here and on which I will concentrate in this review.
Cutler first argued that developments in musical forms reflect developments in musical memory systems in a paper he presented in 1981, at the first IASPM conference. His schema, from biological memory to written memory to sound recording is by now, in the digital age, familiar, but Cutler's take on it as a working drummer and composer remains both entertaining and wise. His unusual place in the academic world is indicated by the variety of settings in which these papers were originally presented: the Rotterdam Dissonanten festival; the AngelicA festival in Bologna; Arcana IV, edited by John Zorn and published in New York; the UK's Gramophone; the Barcelona Museum of Modern Art; a Festschrift for Gunther Mayer's 75th birthday; a Symposium on John Cage at the Krakow Academy of Music; Espace Henri Pousseur in the Conservatoire Royal Liège; and Ancienne Belgique.
Even in their printed form (with illustrations by Peter Blegvad) these papers are performative, deploying deliberate gestures of repetition and freethinking. As a musician Cutler expects an argumentative kind of listening; as a writer he expects a similar kind of reading. My notebook is now full of quotes for further development.
Plundered sound carries, above all, the unique ability not just to refer, but to be. (p. 20)
Music evolved as an art haunted – or blessed – by forgetting. Permanent oblivion left no revenants wandering abroad to haunt the optimism of the living. (p. 47)
A sound recording seems not to translate anything, but begins and ends with the same thing: sound … [Recordings] are copies made without embodying any kind of manual skill, mental processing or interpretation. Copies that seem to bear no human touch. (pp. 62–3)
Because we are freed from the obligation to lead a certain kind of life or to be at a certain place at a certain time in order to experience certain kinds of sounds, the meanings that those obligations lend those sounds are irretrievably lost. They are just sounds now. (p. 71)
Before Edison sound had no history. (p. 110)
Cutler remarks that when was growing up ‘the accidents of geography or social class’ no longer had a controlling effect on the music he came to make. His musical education came from discs; he fell into circles ‘where creativity, guesswork, ignorance and enthusiasm ruled’, in which empathy for electricity and recording was taken for granted and learning meant ‘messing about in small, like-minded semi-incompetent groups’ (pp. 73–4). This was the music-making context that is now familiar: would-be players no longer have to travel to teachers or events.
Recordings come to us, they make everywhere local and all music universal and unlike teachers with their programmes of rules, habits and canons they are non-judgmental, since collectively they can't insist on a ‘right’ way to play, nor can they discriminate against eclectic, wilful or abstract approaches to music-making. Unable to explain, they also never complain. (p. 116)
Cutler is reflecting on his route into rock music here but his subsequent career was in the genre-fluid world of free improvisation, which was driven by different possibilities of bringing dead music to life.
As Eric Dolphy said, ‘after it's over, it's gone in the air; you can never capture it again’. We know he said this because it was spoken to tape at the end of his last recording session and has echoed back from thousands of LPs and CDs since. (p. 109)
The point of free improvisation was to develop a live music-making practice which through ‘its unrepeatability and lack of fixed structure could avoid appropriation’. The paradox was that it was ‘recordings that proselytised for improvisational practice. And it was the diversity of recorded music that supplied improvisation with new inspiration’ (pp. 113–14). And it was recording technology that extracted sounds from their original settings and preserved as new kinds of things that enabled them to live once more, if only for a moment.
There are many more ideas in this book than can be covered in a single review. Cutler's arguments about music as language, for example, are developed as a kind of feisty dialogue with John Cage; his insights into music as a life form are shaped by a drummer's understanding of loops of time and space. I doubt that all his arguments would survive close critical reading but then his interest is the process rather than the authority of musical understanding. In one of his aphorisms on the effects of recording he writes that
Since we can turn recordings on and off at will – and pick and choose what we listen to – there is increasingly less call to exercise an already too rare generosity of aesthetic hospitality. (p. 182)
Not As We Choose reminds us of the importance too of the generosity of intellectual hospitality.
