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session 8
M Do you have anything to say about any differences you might have had with the AACM? Did you have an experience there of people growing apart, having clashes, or whatever?
A There are many people who might feel that I've separated from the AACM and that I have some individual complexity, but in fact that's never been the case. Rather, my life has just taken me into a different space, and I've grown up and want to do my own music; and just the events of my life have kind of seen me go into my own space. But in fact when I think about my life, I've basically in the past 30 years built on the information I learned in Chicago from the AACM. If I'm not on a given concert by the Experimental Band in this time period, it's only because I don't work very much, and when I work I want to do my own music. So I can understand how in some quarters my decision to be by myself might be seen as a break with the AACM. There have been different periods in time--say, in the last 15 years where I've heard people express that I've had a problem with the AACM and have disconnected--but that doesn't really describe what has happened. It's more just that I'm not 25, I'm 55, I've evolved my own processes, have had my own experiences, and would like to do my own work. But my feeling about those guys has remained consistently one of love, friendship and respect.
M How about Joseph Jarman? We didn't mention him.
A I think Joseph Jarman, again, is an example of a restructural visionary master whose work has had a direct impact on me on many different levels. It was Joseph Jarman who opened up correspondences into theater musics; his "Non-cognitive Aspects of the City" was very important to me, not to mention the live concerts I went to. He's a great composer, a great multiinstrumentalist; he's evolved a very special music that is particular to him and his interests. And like Leo Smith, Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell, his work has not been dealt with. He was always very interested in multimedia musics, and many of his works would define, for me, fresh possibilities for the future in terms of interaction dynamics, musical language and syntax. I think Joseph is a very spiritual and mystical person, a difficult guy to understand on one hearing; his work is the kind of effort that requires sustained listening. There are many different levels to it. But I have nothing but respect for this guy, I've learned a lot from him.
Also, Leroy Jenkins. He's another example of a dedicated American master who has done so much but received so little from our country in terms of acknowledgment or work possibilities. Leroy Jenkins is a post-Stuff Smith violinist who has advanced creative violin playing into the modern age. As a composer he has operas…
M His daughter was at Wesleyan. Did you meet her there?
A Oh yes; I saw her only once. We used to be very close, Leroy and I; I used to be very close with his family. In the past 15 years everyone has had to deal with their particular dynamics, so I don't see him or his family very much any more. But yes, Chantille is her name, she went to Wesleyan.
Finally, I would mention George Lewis as an example of a restructural visionary musician whose work has yet to be talked about. George Lewis is the most incredible virtuoso trombonist that I've ever heard in my life. He can play anything; he's equal to Globokar, he's equal to any trombone player who's ever lived. As a composer, he has a broad spectrum of works that are trans-idiomatic; George Lewis is a point of definition for modern electronic music. In that domain he has demonstrated an interactive electronic music, his "Voyager" musics, which are second to none. He's just a very special composer. Like most of the musicians from the AACM, he's demonstrated and demonstrates a trans-idiomatic music experience, working in different domains. If the subject is chord changes and bebop, George Lewis could demonstrate if he wanted to a music that would make JJ Johnson back up. That's how efficient and proficient he is in that medium, and yet it's only one aspect of what he does. This is a guy who's played with Count Basie, as well as Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell. As a scholar, George Lewis is equal to Leo Smith, and it doesn't get any better than Leo Smith in terms of scholarship. Leo is awesome, and so is George; they keep abreast of so many different areas. I miss being in their company more, because they would keep me straight with what books to read and what to keep up on, because they're really omnivorous intellectuals.
M This seems like the time to start getting into your music, and also your intellectual interests in books and so on, both together. Maybe the best way for me to do it would be, since we've been through my book on you and a couple of papers over the last decade, to start with what we haven't covered, what you're doing right now, namely the operas and the Ghost Trance musics, and to kind of work back from them into your system.
A I think it would be easier for me to go from the early part to what I'm doing now. I think it was in 1966 when I broke into the fresh space and found a way for myself, because that's what I was looking for: a way where I could contribute to this incredible movement that luck made me a part of. It was in 1966 that I started to build the components of my music. It was after the improvisatory solo concert, when I started to sketch a different way, that I would really enter into the universe of my own music. Starting then, the language musics would become a genesis component of my experiences in the house of the circle. It would be at that point, in seeking to better understand the question of identity, that I would start to isolate the different components of my music. As Leo Smith and I have always talked about and agreed on, the act of defining a methodology and a way of procedure would separate our work from everything, would give us the possibility to define something and walk away from it and go back to it and read it. That was important.
M When you say "identity," do you mean something like the proposition of existential identity, where you start expanding out and defining yourself step-by-step in a new way?
A By "identity" in this context I'm talking about identity for musical materials, for ideas and compositions, identity with respect to "what am I thinking?" So identity in the house of the rectangle; from a tri-centric perspective, in my system, involves taking materials from the house of the circle, the twelve geometric units; and, in the house of the rectangle, using that information to define architectonic possibilities that could give me the possibility to have a creative experience within a defined concept space.
M Did you call it the house of the circle back then?
A No. When I first started to build my system, I just spoke in terms of what I called language music.
M One language being the trill, one the long tone, and so on…
A Yes. With the language musics, it was a way to have improvisatory real-time experiences that would give me the hope of not bumping into the same idea, or using the same devices.It would help me as an improviser have different things to work with.
M And your system chart heading "Identity State" is the last column on the far right, which suggests an end point of definition after the processes of the language units, then the geometric units, finally producing the identity state.
A Yes. The house of the triangle in my music system is the house of synthesis logics. For me, this symbol is about integration, or synthesis. Going back to the house of the rectangle, the house of ideas, or architectonic structures, the Tri-Axium Writings [Braxton's three-volume set of books on his "re-philosophical system," published by Frog Peak Press, 1987] would make the combined information connection tri-centric. The Tri-Axium Writings would be a component of what I would later come to call "tri-centric." By that, I'm only saying that the concept of "tri-centric" would involve more than simply music compositions, and more than simply ideas, but rather a systemic context to apply that information (and those connections). That's why when I talk of my work, and when I use the word "tri-centric," I'm referring to what I call a "thought unit," as opposed to a composition, or one methodology. The idea of a "tri-centric thought unit" is a way of expressing the interconnection between the Tri-Axium Writings--which was an attempt to define a world perspective based on particular focuses--and specific examples of that focus, and then questions and answers, or dialectical extensions of that focus, and the music/architectonic system and symbolic ritual holistic system. The Tri-Axium Writings would give me an opportunity to have a context of ideas and perspectives, which is in the house of the rectangle. This information would also include schematic modules that reduce the philosophical particular (target) arguments into "transpersonal" logic associations. [These schematics resemble the diagrams students used to parse grammatical elements of sentences, only in this case the circuitry is directed toward abstract social and philosophical/metaphysical concepts, charting their relationships]. The Tri-Axium Writings would also be a context where I would define my own terms, and create my own language. This for me was not a one-dimensional experience, but was rather a chance to establish the philosophical foundation of my music in the sense of given specifics to a general subject area; internal specific subject perspectives related to that subject area; questions and answers on one hand, and then coming back to the integration schematics, which is actually in the next triangle set under that--to define my own set of terms, and to establish my own emotional and feeling perspectives about the information I was writing about.
M As I recall, your first definition of Tri-Axium was drawing from the past in the present to define the future.
A Yes.
M So it had something to do with the tricentric nature of time.
A Thank you. Which is to say, for me, the tricentric musics are a transtemporal thought unit that integrates past, present, and future. The tricentric thought unit is a transtemporal thought unit that brings together fast, medium, and slow. The tricentric thought unit is a mechanism for individual, group, and finally spiritual unification. So three to the third power on its own plane in the third house, or the house of thought…
M It sounds a lot like Plato's ideas, abstract pure forms that all the material stuff comes from.
A What I tried to do, and what I've been trying to do is have a viewpoint that respects navigation through form, through life, and inside of that to build a construct that integrates my experiences on the various planes, so that does connect me to the mystic Europeans, the mystic Africans, and the mystic Africans.
M So the Tri-Axium Writings--and I remember these three components in the writings themselves, where you had the questions and answers, and the other specifics and the generalities, the ideas involved. Did they issue forth directly forth from this concept of time?
A As a young man, I wasn't as aware--I mean I have the perspective now of thirty years to go back and try to understand all that. When I was a young guy, I just wanted to do the best that I could do, and I understood at some point that I needed to integrate my world perspective, to have a better understanding of where I was coming from, because everything was changing in the '60s. The Tri-Axium Writings came out in the '70s, so I had the vantage point of going back to the '60s, but I knew I needed to integrate that information. The Composition Notes would be the next degree of the thought system, looking only at systemic notions based on the compositions.
M You wrote those after the Tri-Axium Writings?
A Yes.
M So you started in '66 with the language musics, and you weren't really thinking of the house of the circle or anything like that yet, that was later, in retrospect?
A I was thinking of this in the '60s. I wanted to find a way that would help me negotiate a music in real time in the house of the circle. Also, I wanted to find a way that would help me to generate compositions that would be relevant to what I was learning. Needless to say, Stockhausen was a profound influence, and so was the great work of Ornette Coleman, and I felt I needed to find in the late '60s and early '70s some way, some sense of myself that could help me from becoming a clone, and that could help me sort out my own interests. So the Tri-Axium Writings, or the early language musics, would be a way to take in experiences in real time and then parlay that information into the house of the rectangle, as far as ideas--because you're improvising, and while you're improvising you get ideas and you have memory. And memory is in the house of the rectangle. What I wanted to do with those memories is take some of those ideas and use them to fashion an architectonic universe that compositionally could bring me back to some aspect of that original experience (memory)...
M You know this really reminds me of the way, when we talk about Plato and all that, and the whole…you know, I know a lot more about European history than I do African, and the ancient Greek music was categorized as Dionysian and Apollonian. So you had this duality between the improvised, which came from the East, the aulos players and the thinkers, the composers; and the earliest notated Western music is Greek.
A And your book, by the way, put it on me. I thank the creator of the universe that I met you, Mike Heffley, and those days in the snow in Eugene. You have put together so many things for me in your work; I've learned so much from you. But, in fact, in the book you did, you started to define what that was, and I was shocked. We tend to think that this moment in time is unique, and we think what we're dealing with is something nobody else ever dealt with--only to discover that in fact it's all always been there.
M And Greece was kind of the bridge between Africa and Asia and Europe: right in the middle there, with influences from all of them. And it was the cradle of the West, you know. And I'm thinking too that when the Germanic barbarians came down, they didn't really get literate themselves until about 1000 A.D. At that point, Western chant was not written down, until around then. So we're talking about an oral tradition of material that was embedded in people, and they would improvise on it a little bit too, just like people improvise on notated material. But the whole project of writing down music in notes didn't really take off until around that time, and it too was a way of codifying in a traditional oral, mutable kind of space, and then codifying it to push it up further into new areas.
A Yes.
M And your experience…you started out as an improviser who got into the notational devices to capture something about the improvisation and push it up into a new improvisation, or a new musical experience. So we have the language musics starting, getting into your first codifications of open improvs. What came next?
A First, establishing the house of the circle--which would be the genesis component of my music system on the tri-plane formed by circle language musics; and then, under the circle, two more circles: intuition, and mutable logic transient states (and/or transitory strategies). Looking at the first circle, the circle of experience, and memory, I would take ideas from real-time improvisation and then look for compositions that would demonstrate that same logic. It would be at that point that I would start what I would call the formula musics, integrating components from real time, using numerology, friends' initials, chess moves--all of that would be in the house of the triangle, looking for ways to integrate method. Thus would begin the compositional musics.
I separated myself from the earlier compositions, which were attempts to write bebop compositions, in the army. In that time period I was very excited about finding fresh harmonic sequences à la "Giant Steps," so I would have a body of musics with fresh harmonic connections. Once I got in the AACM, I began to generate compositional paradigms from the improvisatory experiences I had in the language musics, and the formula musics would come out of that. After that, the schematic musics; that being a defined time space, and boxing in language-state directives in a linear single or multiple time space. The piece for four soprano saxophones (37), the piece for four pianos (16) are examples of schematic musics, extracting from improvisation with respect to reducing an improvisation to one of the key twelve languages, and just making schematic structures. And from there, evolving that idea into the dimensional structures, which would start to factor in color. The basic concept was that, more and more, I tried to extend defined components into the compositions. Later I factored in spatial dynamics. Of course, I was so interested in Stockhausen; whatever he did, I tried to find some equivalent that I could do that could be mine. I was in awe then as now of the great man. Thus, in the house of the triangle, I would transpose strategies from the circle to the rectangle involving both conceptual and/or syntactical logics that would later become an architectonic logic, which I would then start to expand from different premises: formula musics, in this context, being the integration of different compositional and nonmusical elements; and later schematic musics, the positing of timespace and design as formal schemes to be filled with musical ideas.
In that period I tried the "golden section" and different compositional techniques. I discovered that you could get the same results, or that I could achieve a result that was meaningful to me, by evolving different kinds of premises as far as decision-making inside of schematic empty time spaces and positioning different focuses, and from that point adding color as an intuitive mechanism, expressive in the beginning; and then later, synthesis in the sense of dance and movement. Just trying to develop that line and also express it compositionally. So that would be the route of my evolution there.
Then in the house of the triangle, I would start to look for holistic strategies, ways to integrate idea, real-time experiences. Composition 113 would be an example of an attempt to demonstrate a holistic model [it features not only musical performance but a story staged before a visual backdrop].
House of the triangle, ritual and ceremonial musics, the beginning of storytelling.
M Would you say that piece was your first step into the opera space, 113?
A No, I'd say "Composition No. 76," the one called "For Trio," would be the beginning of composite integration. It was the beginning of the synthesis musics, the real house of the triangle established on its own plane.
M I remember all this from the book.
A I'm lucky to be talking to you, because--
M But I would never have connected it to the kernel of the opera; I would have thought it would be 113.
A 76, for me, was the beginning of a composite aesthetic approach, one that integrated vocalization, modular notation, color, with improvisation…
M That was your first modular notation.
A Yes. At the time, I didn't know I was going to go into opera, but I knew I was looking for a broader reality.
M Well, by the time you got to 113, weren't you thinking…well, even before that, what was that composition that Nickie did all the slides for?
A 96. That was an example of the new composite aesthetic attempts to integrate something that would function as something connected to the actual music logic and strategy.
M So it was right around this period then that you really did start thinking in terms of…well, since you always were interested in composite reality, this was the first time it started breaking through into actually representing composite reality.
A Yes, and I was also very influenced by Joseph Jarman, who had by 1970 created a whole poetic universe, a whole ritual and ceremonial universe, that has never been written about. I was starting to see that I could move into that direction as well. So I wanted to integrate color, and movement, and later intention.
M That's when you came up with all the charts of the movements?
A Yes. That whole period for me, the basic focus was on looking for ways to integrate components outside of sound outside the composition.
M But meanwhile all this is also kind of dictated by whatever opportunities are coming up in the real world for projects.
A That's right. And it was also dictated by what I had been learning about the real world. Stockhausen was doing "Inori," John Cage was working with Merce Cunningham; there were many people working in multimedia. Cage was doing happenings. He had been doing happenings in '54 and '55, so by the time I embarked upon this, there were many people I could look to to learn from. I was learning from Harry Partch, one of my heroes then and now; he had already walked this road and gone to another road. i say that to keep an honest perspective. When I embarked on this direction, I was on the shoulders of great masters who had already brought forth compositions and ideas that could help a young guy like me.
M Was the poem you wrote that Jeanne Lee sang the first time you ever wrote words of your own for a piece?
A I had been doing a little writing, dabbling in poetry in that period. So I was very happy to do the piece for Jeanne Lee. Then suddenly no more opportunities came up, and I just kind of stopped. So there's been an imbalance in my catalogue of works. I'd like to hope in this next decade to have more experiences and do more work in the song form tradition. But the composition for Jeanne Lee was an exception to the norm, and that period of writing poetry was a brief one that I'd like to get back to. In fact, I must say, Mike Heffley, in this period I'm starting to have dreams that I even remember. So I'd like to draw on these intuitive things.
M You know how you mentioned that when you improvise you get ideas and memories? I find when I improvise in a practice session for a long time that I specifically recall dreams that I'd totally forgotten. The process of improvising somehow…
A …rejuvenates your memory. Only in the last couple of weeks have I found myself waking up and remembering dreams. And they've been pretty far out lately, for whatever reason.
M The psychic terrain's undergoing a shift?
A That's how it feels; I'm having a lot of dreams about my mother, and my family; far out kind of dreams, actually. And I'm kind of rejoicing in it, although that might not be the right word. But I'm paying attention to it in a different kind of way. Up until the last couple of weeks, I can't say that I've been dealing with dreams in a real kind of way. In the '70s, during the attempts to demonstrate composite aesthetic types of music, like 96, I was only functioning from an intellectual awareness that it was time to start expanding the domain of decisions that I was working with, and to have more inclusive music strategies, and to build a system of movement.
M I notice in your Composition Notes, sometimes you'll have a little poetic way of describing a composition--like, an island where the wind is blowing and there's a storm or something…
A That's another thing about the Composition Notes and the decision to write about the music and, in writing about it, you can separate from it and it's still there. After doing X amount of analysis, I found that I could not really express what I wanted to express using a conventional relationship to what I would call conventional analysis, in that my analysis would have to become more and more poetic if I was going to tap what I was really trying to find.
M You know, this is an evolution that the German philosophers also had. Like Nietszche? They started out in college with the technical jargon of philosophy that they inherited. Heidegger too. At the end of their lives, they started writing stuff that read more like poetry.
A That's far out. It just goes to show, there's nothing new under the sun. I would arrive at a point where, in the Composition Notes--that's why, for me, it was so important to do that--and that's why, when you say poetry, I find myself thinking, "Ah, that's the other part of the three that I haven't evolved." I have Tri-Axium Writings, a philosophical system; I have Composition Notes, a methodological, architectonic system; but I don't have a poetic system. Now my plan is to write the story of Shala, the story of Ashmenton…
M But you've already started that, right? I mean, the libretti?
A But I see that in another category. I see the dialogues of the opera as representing something else. I would like to enter into the world of poetry; I'm not there yet…
M Like the myth of each one of those characters?
A No, for me that would be something separate. Poetry, just in terms of writing poetry, for me, would complete the circle on the tri-plane in the house that we're talking about, because we're really talking of triangle, and then circle three. And the bottom circle would be pure poetry. And that's going to be something that will help me.
M But all those librettos that you've written are not that?
A For me, in terms of my perception of myself, I look at the librettos as part of the tri-plane and, say, schematic composition, and then libretto.
M But don't you, when you actually write these operas, don't you write the libretto first?
A Yes.
M And then you write the music to go on top of it. So do you sort of let the rhythm of the words dictate the music?
A Yes.
M So if we're moving through your system then, up to the present, where would you pick up that thread again? Because I want to get to the operas and the Ghost Trance.
A Okay. Solo experiences, individual experiences, house of the circle; house of the rectangle; duo to orchestral experiences, extending from that point into the house of the triangle as a way of tying up the architectonic logics, which translate for me into structural dynamics on one rectangle; into interaction dynamics--composition as a way of defining interaction dynamics. And composition as a way of defining summation conceptual regions inside the music.
House of the triangle: ritual and ceremonial musics, the beginning of storytelling.
M When did that come in?
A In the time period of the 80s, with the story music works like Composition 165 (for creative orchestra). Composition 123 is an example of a composition where I told a story for solo flute and constructed environment, and then I told the story and had the music re-enact the story; that was the beginning. And the story involved area spatial components that the soloist would fulfill inside of this constructed environment.
M Did you see any connection between that impulse and the tradition of, say, storytelling by the jali from Africa, or the opera or the Singspiel from Europe? Or the blues?
A I saw it as connected to Stockhausen's Harlequin, for solo clarinet. It's not a story, but it's a clarinetist working and moving, a wonderful piece. I wanted to move into pieces that utilized area space, where the instrumentalist is moving and playing; I had already built a system of movement, so with 113 I had already built a story, and the story and the composition would express the components of the story and utilize the area space.
M Did you draw on experiences you had in the music before, where you had nothing but purely musical experiences, but were having visions inside of that of a story, or scene, or something like that?
A I don't know. At some point, I found myself thinking that it made sense for me to build a mythical story. For instance, Composition 113, for solo sopranino saxophone; I wrote a story for that. The soloist is thinking of this story in the improvisation, and there are all kinds of internal mechanisms, such as targeted phrase constructions that represent parts of the story of Ojuwain on this train.
M Ojuwain is one of your system's twelve characters, too. Was he the first to be expressed in the music?
A Yes. So he's on this train, and I came up with this story, and it gave me spatial dynamics and direction; also, the psychological component of having different phrases to express different parts of the story.
M Did you think of Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf"?
A I didn't think of it, but I should have, because that's one of my favorite compositions; Prokofiev is one of my guys. Anyway, I just tried to evolve that idea. Composition 103, for seven trumpets; it doesn't have a story, but there is a context of narrative and choreography about that composition.
M You know, this idea about having a phrase represent a narrative kind of reminds me of the West African rhythmic cycles, in which each of the rhythms express a different part of the community…
A …and makes something happen. That is connected to Composition 113, the idea of a target signal activation (i.e., talking drums); suddenly a phrase construction has a transcendent component. So I'm really moving toward the Trillium operas. By the time we get to this point, the idea of the triangle, which is synthesis, would also become the context for transposition. What that would mean, for me, would be the erection of imaginary constructs, more and more. And there were several reasons for it: one, imaginary constructs would give me a way to have definite things to deal with, as opposed to Composition 76, which is like a ritual gesture. I wanted to have specific things to deal with, where I could apply the movement system, and have it work in a specific way, like in Composition 123, for solo flute.
Also, an imaginary context would give me a way to continue evolving my music, since it was clear I wasn't getting any performances, and that it didn't look like I would get any in a normal kind of way. This was late '70s and '80s, after the Arista record deal. So I felt that part of evolving my music would involve creating imaginary schemas that I could hold onto whether I got a performance or not. So the imaginary schemas would give me a possibility to imagine a context and say that Composition 175, or 174, would be a composition where--174 was for a percussion ensemble, and they're climbing this mountain. What the imaginary scheme would mean for me would be that I could create an imaginary context on the tri-plane.
So what am I saying? Local experiences, national or greater experiences, and the largest, or galactic experiences, the largest I could think of. My plan here, then as now--because all of this started to come together in this period--was to imagine a state that I could fit my music system into, where I could have different things for people to do, different compositions to write that would fulfill the multitasks of these imaginary states--all the way from the individual experiences in Composition 113 of Ojuwain on the train to the concept of galactic actualization, where I could imagine rocket ships traveling through space in the largest framework that I could think of. As a result of defining that, I could then start to write not only compositions for those states, but to define works in terms of individual reality properties: the concept of twelve city-states, each state demonstrating the identity of the twelve languages. And then inside of that state, write compositions that demonstrate internal possibilities for, say, language #4, stacatto line logics--and making it even more definite and specific by actually defining the states.
What all that would mean for me as a composer, then, would be that I've got this expanding universe that I could microscope into different focuses, and in the city-state focus, build twelve city-state territories with roads connecting them; the roads would be rectangles, specific roads; the circle would be the ability to just travel in any direction you want, not on a road; and the triangles would be points of connection, large cities or whatever, where different strategies can interconnect and go to somewhere else.
Or transfer; triangle in this context is transfer. So I tried to take that concept and express it in the individual circle and reality experiences of the individual all the way to the galactic model. So I tried to take that concept and express it in the individual circle and reality experiences of the individual all the way to the galactic model.
M Transfer, from, say, like a city crossroads…to where?
A To the galactic model.
M Like, up?
A Up or down, since it's three to the third power. If you're at the top, you might want to go down. Or, if you're at the point of the triangle, you might want to switch into the Tri-Axium Writings; or, you might want to transfer from the Tri-Axium Writings to the system of movements--or to the Composition Notes [Braxton's five-volume set of his explanations of each of his works, also published by Frog Peak].
M So you mean a transfer from a musical experience to writing?
A From a musical experience to a musical experience; from a musical experience to a correspondence experience, to dance; from a musical experience to a poetic experience.
M So when was your first actual Trillium opera?
A Composition 120, Trillium A, was performed in 1985.
M That was right after 113 then, huh?
A Yeah, seven pieces after.
M Do the Trillium series of operas then represent something of a culmination of your whole system?
A No. The Trillium operas, if we would look at the city-state analogy, would be in the major cities in each state, like a giant castle in each state. On the galactic formal scheme model, the Trillium operas would be in the center of the major galaxies. In the area-state formal scheme model, the Trillium operas would be equivalent to the big tree, in Wagner. The big local store.
M So little things like duo projects, or solo projects, or quartets--those would be just, like, other little stories in the big city?
A Thank you. Composition 37, for four saxophones, the first of the modern saxophone quartet musics, that they don't want to give me credit for, is really a transposition of language # 4 into the house of the rectangle.
M That was a quartet with you, Oliver Lake…
A …Hamiett Bluiett, and Julius Hemphill. And they brought in David Murray when I told Julius I could not be a part of the saxophone quartet on a fulltime basis, that the project for me was a one-time project.
M So that started it, and they took it from there.
A They took it from there, but they've never given me any credit for that, and I don't understand why, because that experience in no way takes away from the greatness of their work and what they would go forth to do. But for some reason, they've never remembered that experience. Unfortunately, it is documented.
M Fortunately.
A Yeah, fortunately, for me.
M So the first opera performance was of 120, in California…
A No, the operas are the dialogues. We're in the house of the triangle: number one, triangle, schematics, for the Tri-Axium Writings. The integration schematics from the Tri-Axium Writings serve as the genesis point for creating the libretto. The integration schematics are reductive diagrams of the ideas and arguments inside the Tri-Axium Writings. The integration schematics weren't conceived to tell anyone what to think on any particular subject; they only establish the context of terms and connections. Each person will come out of them with his or her own understanding of relationships. In my opinion, it's a restructuralist approach to information integration that sets up postulates, but doesn't tell anybody what to think. At the same time, it itself is a reduction of the philosophical writings of the Tri-Axium Writings.
M You mean your librettos?
A No, I mean the actual writings in the Tri-axium book. The arguments of the Tri-Axium Writings are reduced to schematic forms. The opera libretto is a story based on the schematics, so it makes the second triangle; third triangle I guess would be the intuitive implications of the actual fantasy experiences. The libretto of the Tri-Axium Writings is constructed in such a way that the singers have to find out their own meaning of it. I write it, but the actual experience of the stories, since they aren't linear stories…
M …that's part of their interpretive task.
A Yes, and the psychological dimensions that the singers bring to the music, a personal dimension.
M When we did the opera Shala in New York, the part I focused on most was that second act, which I wrote a paper about. Are you saying that when the performers bring their own spins as artists to the performance of the libretto, when they sing it, that they're defining it somehow?
A Yes, because it's not a story in the sense of Wagner, where you become a character that expresses the psychology of the story. In Trillium, the whole concept of a story is very different. It doesn't go from beginning to end, it's just a slice of time. Inside that slice of time there's the ritual of dialogue, and the singers bring their own personal psychologies to it.
M Did you notice that happening much in the performance of Shala?
A Oh yes.
M What sticks in your mind about that, like an example of something that someone brought to the character that was sort of fresh and new to you?
A I don't know how to express what we're talking about on this level, outside of saying it was a revelation to me to have the opportunity to experience the drama come to life, and to actually be able to be separate from it and to experience it. But I don't know if that is a real answer to what you're asking.
M Because it seemed to me, for instance, in the second act with the scene with the family? They were all pretty much enacting what the script put forth, of a family in a kitchen, you know. The words expressing tenderness and things like that…
A Yeah, well, so it's a story, a definite libretto, but it didn't relate to the European mythology, nor the African-American mythology, it was a modern family dealing in real time with the kinds of things families deal with.
M It could have been anyone anywhere.
A Right. You picked up on the chance fact that the couple was interracial in that casting, suggesting that issue was in my story, but the story doesn't have anything to do with race, just with a man and a woman dealing with one another in that situation. My intent as a composer, then and now, is to look for universal kinds of situations, where people can express themselves, within that context.
M And that kind of goes to your actual use of language, the way you express things in sort of general, vague terms rather than have an agenda for what you're trying to have expressed.
A I've tried to create a language that satisfies my understanding of communication, which was three-dimensional. Because as you know, when we express ourselves, many different levels come out, and not everybody can hear every level, because it's not even about that. But some people are able to hear more levels and have more of a connection than others; but even with that, we're all coming from our individual circle, and I wanted Trillium to be open to that in a way that would be very different from, say, Wagner.
By the way, the Trillium operas are post-Wagnerian operas, as opposed to, say, post-Stockhausen, or Schoenberg operas.
M In what sense do you mean?
A I think what turns me on about Wagner is how deeply he gets into human psychology, and he's not afraid of feeling, and men and women. We were talking on the way here, and I mentioned "Tristan and Isolde." It just wiped me out; I was on the ground, laughing, screaming, because he was not afraid to use creative music to demonstrate the emotion and the psychologies that happen between men and women; he portrayed it in his context. "Tristan and Isolde" talks of life and darkness in a polarity. For me it's an incredible opera.
But Trillium is tri-centric; an individual brings his own life to it, because it's not referring to anything, aside from the individual applying himself to that given context. It's not a story that goes anyplace.