Rite Angles
- Issue #65 (July '89) | Interviews
- By: Brian Morton | Featuring: Anthony Braxton
- Links:
- Printable version
A long-distance duo with the saxophonist-composer who's still squaring the circles and running rings around the squares.
It's a woman's voice, his wife's, that first comes on the answering machine, but then Anthony Braxton himself cuts in and a puckish "Good afternoon" chuckles off the dishes, and down the wires from where it's still the crack of dawn.
It gives him an audible belt to be able to orientate himself so immediately to someone else's time zone. It shouldn't be surprising, for this is a Puck who aims to put a musical girdle round the earth in 40 minutes - a necklace or orchestra strung on satellite beams - who thinks in millennia, and whose project-laying has more to do with metaphysical projections than with fiscal '89. Not for him a finger-check on time difference.
They used to cut off his phone for non-payment. These days, it has become his (global) village pump. "I long ago gave up any idea of making any money from my music but, at 43 and soon to be 44, when I look back at my life, I have to think how lucky I have been to be able to document my music. I'm as excited by it now as I was when I was 11. I'm a professional student and if most times I can only have six hours rehearsal with the musicians before a recording, instead of the six days or six weeks that I'd like, then . . .
"The music industry in the United States is still racially divided. There are still black charts and a mind-set that prevents meaningful communication between the Afro Americans aesthetic and the European tradition. I count Schoenberg and Webern as my daddies, too."
These days, as a Professor at Mills College in Oakland, just down the road from where Schoenberg spent his last, surprising happy exile, the saxophonist has found something like a niche. He sounds (in person, in performance and on record) like a man who is taking stock of his life, gathering force for another extraordinary engagement with the complex interface of aesthetics. Braxton's work has never been more staggeringly ambitious and in some respects, never simpler and more crystalline.
"I am currently engaged in the initial expansion of my model, to connect all of my compositions into a tripartite perpetual entity, a musical affirmation of the number three. It seeks to demonstrate three levels of discourse: the architectural, the philosophical, and what I could call the ceremonial and ritual."
Braxton's performances - notably since the image music of Composition 113 have taken on an aspect of rite, part-magical, part-questioning, with a consequent alchemical transformation of the purely musical material.
"There are three levels, the individual, awareness of the group and purpose" - traceable to the Christian Trinity, or even to Ayler's version of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, as well as to the advanced mystical mathematics of the Nile civilizations, number theory, the "perfect time" of the classical composers (4/4 was profanely "common") - "and I'm building a system to determine the nature of all those hook-ups that allow any piece of mine to be either a solo piece, a chamber piece, or an orchestra piece. The individual performer has that range of choices. My ideal is that every piece should be 33.3% notated, 33.3% improvised and the remainder in the realm of family intentions or purpose."
It gives him an audible belt to be able to orientate himself so immediately to someone else's time zone. It shouldn't be surprising, for this is a Puck who aims to put a musical girdle round the earth in 40 minutes - a necklace or orchestra strung on satellite beams - who thinks in millennia, and whose project-laying has more to do with metaphysical projections than with fiscal '89. Not for him a finger-check on time difference.
They used to cut off his phone for non-payment. These days, it has become his (global) village pump. "I long ago gave up any idea of making any money from my music but, at 43 and soon to be 44, when I look back at my life, I have to think how lucky I have been to be able to document my music. I'm as excited by it now as I was when I was 11. I'm a professional student and if most times I can only have six hours rehearsal with the musicians before a recording, instead of the six days or six weeks that I'd like, then . . .
"The music industry in the United States is still racially divided. There are still black charts and a mind-set that prevents meaningful communication between the Afro Americans aesthetic and the European tradition. I count Schoenberg and Webern as my daddies, too."
These days, as a Professor at Mills College in Oakland, just down the road from where Schoenberg spent his last, surprising happy exile, the saxophonist has found something like a niche. He sounds (in person, in performance and on record) like a man who is taking stock of his life, gathering force for another extraordinary engagement with the complex interface of aesthetics. Braxton's work has never been more staggeringly ambitious and in some respects, never simpler and more crystalline.
"I am currently engaged in the initial expansion of my model, to connect all of my compositions into a tripartite perpetual entity, a musical affirmation of the number three. It seeks to demonstrate three levels of discourse: the architectural, the philosophical, and what I could call the ceremonial and ritual."
Braxton's performances - notably since the image music of Composition 113 have taken on an aspect of rite, part-magical, part-questioning, with a consequent alchemical transformation of the purely musical material.
"There are three levels, the individual, awareness of the group and purpose" - traceable to the Christian Trinity, or even to Ayler's version of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, as well as to the advanced mystical mathematics of the Nile civilizations, number theory, the "perfect time" of the classical composers (4/4 was profanely "common") - "and I'm building a system to determine the nature of all those hook-ups that allow any piece of mine to be either a solo piece, a chamber piece, or an orchestra piece. The individual performer has that range of choices. My ideal is that every piece should be 33.3% notated, 33.3% improvised and the remainder in the realm of family intentions or purpose."