On July 30, at Café Oto in London, the English improvising ensemble AMM played what they said would be their final gig. Though I’m hardly an expert on AMM’s music - as I will discuss in a second, I don’t own any of their records - the end of AMM still caused a little shudder in my understanding of the musical universe. AMM recorded its first album AMMMusic for Elektra Records in 1966 in the midst of the heady London milieu that also birthed Cream, Pink Floyd and Soft Machine. Eddie Prévost and Keith Rowe, two of the members of the band on that first release, were still there fifty-six years later at Oto. It would be inaccurate to say that AMM hasn’t changed since their first record, but there is an argument to be made that the aesthetic they defined in the mid-60’s - sparseness, duration, extreme concentration, openness to chance, rigorous avoidance of genre signposts - remained in place until last week, as commemorated in this blog post by the eminent English critic Richard Williams.
Williams’s description of the Oto gig sounds quite a bit like my one encounter with AMM, a 1993 (I’m pretty sure) performance by Prévost and Rowe with pianist John Tilbury, who was a regular if not original member of the band, in Hartford, Connecticut. It was a perfect situation for AMM, their ghostly drones, rattles and snippets of radio static and speech echoing in a large, dark, mostly empty church. Nobody “played” in the sense that I was familiar with. Rowe’s guitar lay horizontally on a table. He induced the strings to vibrate by placing electronic gadgets a few inches away, or caused the pickups to amplify the crackle of a radio’s small speaker by resting it on the guitar’s body. Nothing as routine as picking a line. Likewise Prévost, while using a more or less standard drum kit, seemed more interested in coaxing the drums and cymbals to emit long, sustained tones with bows than in hitting them. Though Tilbury is one of the great interpreters of post-Cage experimental music, I don’t remember any Cage-ian preparations to his piano, but he played so little that his silent, meditative attention at the keyboard functioned as a kind of negative space against the constant, unassertive presences of Prévost and Rowe. The few gestures he did play had incredible dramatic weight, though it seems wrong to speak about drama in the context of something so distant from the typical ways that music generates narrative meaning. AMM’s music didn’t tell a story so much as open a window onto a totally different way of thinking about musicianship, sound and time, transforming restraint and understatement into a kind of inverse virtuosity, sustained concentration into quiet, unrelenting intensity.
At the time, I was studying with Alvin Lucier and Anthony Braxton. I was stunned to hear something that seemed to unite my two teachers’ highly contrasting ways of thinking about something I mentioned a second ago, what we then called “experimental music,” the music that emerged in the wake of John Cage and European composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, among many others. Lucier’s mode of teaching was very rooted in post-Cage thinking, in a hands-on technical sense. Considering that we were dealing with something that on the surface seemed so esoteric, we would work through techniques in a surprisingly methodical, nuts-and-bolts way. In a semester-long series of homework assignments, roughly echoing what would later be Lucier’s book Music 109, we would work on tape technique, then graphic notation, then theatrical or sound art-like pieces. Though in general Lucier was a positive, or at least a neutral critic of our work, he was not truly happy with a piece unless we could articulate its central idea. What he wanted most from the pieces we wrote for these exercises was conceptual clarity. Meanwhile Braxton, who regularly said that his three favorite musicians were Cage, Stockhausen, and John Coltrane, would throw us into the deep end. He would make us sight read his hardest charts, frequently meant for instruments other than the ones we played, working through them in a rough and ready, wrong and strong (to use a phrase from Marc Ribot) way, forcing us to break out of whatever concepts of playing we had learned before. He transformed the familiar act of playing a composition in an ensemble into something strange and revelatory, frustrating some students, but drawing a few into his musical world. In its critique of standard musical practice, Braxton’s work incorporated aspects of Cage-ian thinking including graphic notation and indeterminacy, but it was charged with improvisational energy and rhythmic drive. With Lucier we studied post-Cage technique and crafted our own versions of it as homework, with Braxton we realized versions of _his_ music in real time, by the skin of our teeth. To me, both things were “experimental music.”
AMM’s focus and their dogged avoidance of anything like “normal” technique seemed related to Lucier’s technical precision and his insistence that compositions needed solid conceptual foundations, but the energy and intensity of their music (even if it was quiet and minimal) had the kind of improvisational edge that I had learned to love in Braxton’s work. It balanced rigor and risk. It was austere but also very tactile and immediate. Like Lucier’s work, it seemed to access some mysterious understanding of physical reality that existed in between or underneath the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale, the grid of musical notation, or even the basic material of sound, but like Braxton’s, it was unburdened by the rituals and traditions of the classical concert, or even of the jazz set. But this bridging between two forms of experimental music came with what felt like a critique. In Hartford, AMM showed me that there was no actual line between what I worked on with Lucier and what I worked on with Braxton, but also that there was a certain limit to both of their practices. Like Cage, in their own ways both Lucier and Braxton were rooted in the idea of the composer as auteur of musical experiences, even if those compositions invited the performers’ input up to the point of some version of improvisation. By playing clearly Cage-influenced music without the authoritarian figure of the composer, AMM proved that music didn’t need to be “composed” to have focus and purpose, and that just because it was “improvised” it didn’t mean “anything goes.” Echoing their collaborator Cornelius Cardew’s Marxian thought, AMM’s musical unity emerging from individual autonomy reflected a model for other kinds of human organization beyond the hierarchies imposed by capitalism.
I’m getting a little bored with stories from thirty years ago, but if you’ll bear with me for a second, let’s look again at what I was studying when I heard this concert: two experimental music practices, as personified by Alvin Lucier and Anthony Braxton, under the aegis of the Wesleyan University music department. Even for established artists like them, almost thirty years after its explosion in the 60’s, the period that started both of their careers, by the early 90’s the business of experimental music was at a bit of a low ebb across the United States, maybe exemplified by the end of both the New Music America festival and Carla Bley and Mike Mantler’s New Music Distribution Service in 1990. Schools like Wesleyan, Bard College (then the employer of Richard Teitelbaum and Wadada Leo Smith among others), and currently endangered Mills College (Braxton’s previous school) were among the few well-funded institutions doing _anything_ to keep these practices alive. Later in the 90’s, experimental music was on its way to becoming something very different. The rise of electronic music and DJ culture spurred a wave of interest in pioneers like Pauline Oliveros and the European musique concrète composers. Rock and rollers like Thurston Moore were championing free jazz revolutionaries. The CD boom warped the profit margin of the music business to the point where as long as production costs were relatively conservative, one only needed to sell a thousand copies of anything for it to be profitable. By the early 2000’s, experimental music ceased to be something made mostly in academic music department studios and became something practically anyone could make at home on their computer and send all over the world with the click of a few buttons, something almost like popular music in the sense of the practicalities of its making and in the sense of its democratization. Twenty years into that change, after the transformation of the music industry from buying and selling physical media to whatever it is now, a massive oversupply of artists making music they call “experimental” has blurred its meaning to the point where practically anything made in a computer without a beat claims the term. Everyone from social media synthfluencers to South African dance music producers uses it, with barely the hint of a look backwards at Cage. Maybe the “cassette underground” of the 80’s provided a clue of what the future held for experimental music - a network of individuals united by cheap and accessible technology rather than by a system of institutions teaching Cage’s ideas as if they were building a new musical tradition modeled on, and in some cases part of, the classical conservatory. Maybe it’s significant that both of those methodologies, the lone artist working in a home studio and classical pedagogy, exclude the element that made AMM so thrilling, group improvisation.
I have heard a lot of experimental and improvised music since 1993, some excellent, some not, but this AMM show in Hartford has stayed in my mind in a way that many concerts and recordings haven’t. I never felt the need to buy any AMM records. There was something about this night in Hartford that was so perfect that I didn’t want to disturb my memory of it with any more AMM music. In a way, it has been in the back of my mind whenever I’m listening to an improvised performance, both the ones that inspired me and the ones that made me wish I’d stayed home. I wonder if my desire to hold on to that live experience of AMM reflects an old-fashioned way of experiencing music that privileges the live over the recorded, the embodied and the communal over the electronically mediated and the individualized. And maybe my resistance to engage in the economic side of AMM’s work besides buying tickets for the gig reflects a version of another aspect of the problem we’re facing now. As I read Williams’s post about AMM’s Oto performance, a comment composer Jeremiah Runnels made on a Facebook post by saxophonist/electronic musician Jorrit Dijkstra was echoing in my mind. Jorrit shared a 2018 Damon Krukowski Pitchfork article about the economics of streaming (spoiler alert: it’s bad!) and Runnels’s response, speaking about the dubious, and at this point mostly symbolic, economics of improvised music was, in part, “it takes more courage to be an audience member than a performer at this point in the art.” While it pains me that this is my second essay in a row at least partially inspired by a snarky comment on social media, I could not stop thinking about Runnels’s quip. As performers go back to gigging in this still precarious - in financial, political, and physical senses - moment, I can’t help but wonder whether when we improvise on stage, we are taking seriously enough the responsibility that we have towards audiences to use these increasingly rare experiences in shared space to do something new in music even if it’s rooted in something old. AMM wasn’t just three guys “going for it.” They proved that communal, real-time musical activity could crystallize a unique shared moment between performers, audience and the space itself- and they weren’t the only ones who did it. When those gigs happened, and they happened more often than you might think, those ephemeral nights made the whole enterprise worth it. I’ve heard a lot of excellent music in my life, but for me the peaks have been those concerts when something emerged that I couldn’t predict or even imagine, like AMM in Hartford in 1993. I hope there will be many more.