There is a very dramatic and beautiful photograph by Oscar van Arpken, of a performance of Ben Patterson’s Paper Piece, from 1963, in the Hypokriterion Theatre, Amsterdam. In stark black and white, performers can be seen ripping and grasping torn edges of a giant sheet of paper. The image looks like a negative of a Franz Kline action painting, containing people. Kline died a year earlier, in 1962, and the active mark-making gestures embodied by the action painters of abstract expressionism would become translated into the sounds and choreography of the emerging experimental music and dance scene of the 1960s, mainly in New York City. Everyday movements and gestures would become the material for performances by different Fluxus artists, the Judson Dance Theatre and choreographers such as Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer.

Documentary photographs are often the only remnants we have of early Fluxus performances, as well as scores, text instructions and written accounts. Images of George Brecht carefully polishing a violin, Ben Vautier wrapped in string, Dick Higgins hurling paper into the air, and a group of Fluxus artists destroying a piano in Philip Corner’s Piano Activities, are all very evocative and powerful images. What interests me is what do these things sound like? What is the music of Fluxus and in particular one of its lesser-known protagonists, the Black American composer and artist, Ben Patterson?

Many of the early Fluxus artists were also musicians or composers. La Monte Young played the saxophone, Jackson Mac Low the recorder, Philip Corner the trombone (and composed). Nam June Paik was a pianist and also a composer. George Mačiunas collected early musical instruments. George Brecht was a chemist (seemingly non-musical, but he did succeed in incorporating it into his 1968 score, The Chemistry Of Music). And Ben Patterson was an extremely accomplished double bass player.

Patterson studied music and composition at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1957. At this stage he had already come across the music of Gordon Mumma, who with Robert Ashley and others would found The ONCE Group, which became a platform for experimental music concerts in Ann Arbor. Unable to find a job in an American orchestra due to de-facto institutionalised racism (“America was not yet ready for a Black symphony musician,” as he put it), he moved to Canada where he became principal bass and an assistant conductor with The Halifax Symphony Orchestra.

His time in Canada was interrupted when he was conscripted into the United States Army. He was posted to Germany, where he was a member of the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra based in Stuttgart. The posting enabled him to experience contemporary and experimental music performances firsthand, in both Stuttgart and Cologne. After two years he returned to Canada, working with The Philharmonic Orchestra Of Ottawa. He also began experimenting with electronic music at the National Research Centre. Keen to return to Europe, he moved to Cologne in 1960 and met Stockhausen (a meeting described by Patterson as a “disaster”).

Attending performances at the atelier of Mary Baumeister, he met a number of composers such as Sylvano Bussotti, David Behrman, Nam June Paik, David Tudor and John Cage. Subsequently he was invited to take part in performances of new works by La Monte Young, Toshi Ichiyanagi, George Brecht and Cage, an experience that was a turning point for him and his own compositional practice. Liberated by these experiences, between 1960-1962 Patterson composed a series of experimental works which combined humour, sound and performance.

The years 1960-62 were seminal years for experimental music. George Brecht created Water Yam, his box containing a large series of event scores. George Mačiunas created a collection of compositions using his own particular scoring system, for balloons, mouths, coins, mud, ladders, violins (being slowly destroyed), etc, culminating in his vast Music For Everyman. Works composed by Patterson during this time include Paper Piece (1960), Situations For Three Pianos (1960), String Music (1960), Ants (1960-62), Duo For Voice And A String Instrument (1961), Composition For Any Situation (1961), Décollage Piece For Wolf Vostell (1961), A Disturbing Composition (1961), Variations For Double-Bass (1961-62), and Pond (1961). All of these pieces use either graphical symbols or text instructions, resulting in different performance strategies, and are united by one organisational principle, structured chance.

Let’s look at some of them in more detail.

Paper Piece, completed in September 1960, was originally a purely acoustic work and like many Fluxus works subsequently took on a life of its own, enveloping (literally) entire audiences. Patterson described the work as being a direct reaction to his encounter with Stockhausen’s composition Kontakte. “The excesses of his ego-centricity revolted me so much that I eventually went into isolation for three days to ponder a more socially responsible way of making art,” he said. “Paper Piece was the result.”

Kontakte contains musical actions, of course, and Patterson, unable to travel home to visit his family during the holidays, sent them his own composed ‘action’, instructing them to make sounds with various types of discarded wrapping paper, in a variety of ways. Patterson honed the score and the final version is actually quite precise regarding the number of performers (between one and five), as well as the sizes and types of paper to be used. Actions such as inflating and popping paper bags, tearing, shaking, crumpling, rumpling, rubbing, and twisting are indicated, as well as their approximate durations. There are elements of improvisation at play here also: “dynamics are improvised within natural borders”.

Like many of Patterson’s other early works, Duo For Voice And A String Instrument was first performed at the Galerie Haro Lauhus in Cologne in 1961. The vocalist was the bass-baritone William Pearson (another Black American classical musician who spent most of his career in Europe), with Patterson on double bass. The score is a rather beautiful one page landscape of graphical symbols, utilising transparencies and with a separate page of instructions. Patterson creates a list of different sound making actions on the string instrument: trills, tremolandi, pizzicati, prepared sounds, and different bowing techniques. The vocal part has a more extensive list of actions, with lots of different lip, tongue, teeth, inhale and exhale techniques: ‘suck between teeth’, ‘blow between closed lips’, ‘slap tongue against base of mouth’.

There are similar techniques found in George Mačiunas’s Piece For Three Mouths (Homage To Toshi Ichiyanagi) (1962), which was perhaps influenced by Patterson’s work. Similarities can also be found with the extended vocal work of Henri Chopin, though Chopin’s work was often extended through different microphone and tape machine manipulations.

There is a clarity and purity to the Duo. Patterson pares down the expressive potential of each performer so conventional notions of musical drama, narrative structure and emotional syntax are abandoned in lieu of an acoustic counterpoint, distinguished by chance-determined collisions of sounds. The extended vocal and string playing techniques could also be seen as an attempt to ‘marry’ the two instruments and create a symbiotic acoustic pairing. The focus on sounds made with the mouth, as opposed to vocalising with the throat, is an interesting one.

Francis Bacon’s paintings of screaming, animalistic mouths and Samuel Beckett’s play Not I, with a single spotlight on the mouth of a woman, both point to the potential despair and isolation of the human mouth. Similarly, with Caravaggio’s painting Judith Beheading Holofernes and, of course, Edvard Munch’s The Scream. But mouths can also be funny and absurd, they say silly things, laugh, kiss and can be intimate. People find vocal sounds funny, children (and some adults) delight in blowing raspberries and making farting sounds.

Its time for a joke. Did you hear the one about the orchestral double bassist who was so out of tune his section noticed?

The double bass is a big, heavy instrument; as a cellist I can really appreciate that. It’s also tuned funny, in fourths, not fifths like all other instruments of the violin family. Yet it is also an amazing instrument with an incredible range of acoustic possibilities. A bass is the earth, the ground, the foundation of any ensemble it is part of. Take away the bass section from an orchestra and the bottom of the sound, literally, disappears. In the hands of a musician such as Charles Mingus we have the bass as an amazing embodiment of the soul.

However, when people are travelling with a bass it looks like they are wheeling a dead body around. This humorous potential was the crux of the matter for Patterson, himself a bass player, with his Variations For Double-Bass (1961, revised 1962).

The score for Variations is a series of events, similar to those created by George Brecht. But Patterson’s work is intended for live performance before an audience. Some of Brecht’s events are as well, of course, such as Motor Vehicle Sundown (1959), but many can be experienced as private or imaginary events too. Patterson’s four page score of 17 variations basically contains a panoply of different ways to prepare and play the bass: with two bows, with wooden sticks for holding newspapers, a feather duster, a comb, corrugated cardboard, a narrow wheeled furniture caster, etc. The piece even has geolocation, beginning with the performer unfolding a map of the world on the floor and locating the place where the performance is happening by sticking the bass endpin there.

Patterson also instructs the performer to prepare the strings and bridge with different objects and materials such as paper, clothes pegs and hairpins. In addition to the various actions in the score he states that “pitches, dynamics, durations and number of sounds to be produced in any one variation in this composition are not notated”. Thus, these elements are improvised in conjunction with the different actions. The use of a map at the start of the work is interesting, as the vast, physical body of the bass becomes a terrain for sonic explorations. Every action produces a sound and is also visible as a theatrical event. Variations is a landmark work in what would become know as performance art. Patterson said that he saw himself just as a composer-performer in this piece, as the term performance art had not been invented yet.

Ben Patterson was a Black American musician and composer exiled to Europe’s avant garde. The final work I want to touch on is a slightly later piece, the First Symphony from 1964. The word ‘symphony’ is synonymous with the great works of classical music. But in the context of Fluxus, neo-dada or experimental music, it becomes something else. George Brecht’s Symphony No 2 has just one word in the score, ‘Turning’. Patterson’s First Symphony (possibly an ironic title) is more extensive than Brecht’s, though still a text/event score: ‘One at a time members of an audience are questioned, “DO YOU TRUST ME?” and are divided left and right, yes and no. The room is darkened. Freshly ground coffee is scattered throughout the room.’

For years I was struck by the enigmatic qualities of this work, yet I failed to make any sense of it. Today I feel differently. The division of the audience by their choice of yes or no in answer to a question written in UPPER CASE, and also the darkened room — the psychological situation created by this score now feels to me to be an intimation of questions about race and segregation. Discussing the work with a critic, Patterson once stated, “I must admit that I do not remember being so consciously aware of… racial implications when I made this work. Of course, I knew I was a Negro (the terminology in those days) and quite a bit about racism and how it was affecting my life… Obviously, subconsciously a lot was happening.”

For me, the coffee is an alert, as in: wake up and smell the coffee.

Anton Lukoszevieze is the founder of Apartment House. An exhibition dedicated to Ben Patterson’s work is featured at Berlin’s SAVVY Contemporary in the framework of MaerzMusik: Festival For Time Issues which takes place between 18–27 March. The exhibition opens on 19 March and runs until 17 April.