Mike Heffley's lecture on Anthony Braxton, delivered at New York's The Kitchen over a background of selected recordings

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of the Tri-Centric Ensemble, I'd like to welcome you to our three-night celebration of large-ensemble music by Anthony Braxton. I've conceived and designed my talk as a sort of summary review of Mr. Braxton's role in and contributions to our musical culture. As the music to come will declare, the word "innovator" might easily jump to mind in describing its composer; the word "tradition" might occur only in opposition, or as an afterthought, or not at all. I hope my take on both words will ground us somewhat in a context that will put a fresh and yet familiar spin on the lectures and concerts to follow.

Imagine yourself, if you will, to be a person who is basically happy with life. You have your problems and challenges, but what is on your plate is essentially good. You're comfortable with your age, your gender, your race, your nationality, your job or profession or calling, your family, and with all the ways your world goes. You look out on the past and see a long and happy, interesting prelude to your present, and your future looks equally exciting and engaging. You're bursting with your plans and dreams, full of hope and fire, and your world is full of opportunity to match. If you are young, imagine yourself feeling like you'll never be old; if you are old, imagine yourself at peace and ready for death, even curious about it. If you are married, imagine a long and good marriage, with children and grandchildren to carry on all you started, and to care for you. Imagine your fellow human beings, above all, full of understanding, recognition, and respect for you and your work with them.

Now call all of this happy state of vital joy and connection to your world and your physical, psychic, and most transcendent self TRADITION.

Now imagine yourself suddenly thrown into crisis. Imagine your world turned upside down. If you're young, imagine suddenly feeling that your childhood is ashes in your mouth, and that you are facing a terrifying void, the beast in the wilderness, your initiation into adulthood--which is just another word for survival, because you know you won't survive as the person you were. If you're old, imagine that death is no longer the sleepy friend off to the side, but now a howling monster whose time has come and whose food is you . If you're in love and friendship imagine wife, lovers, family and friends suddenly turning on you, away from you, strangers and enemies. If you're a student, imagine all your teachers failing you, denouncing your work; imagine your enemies embracing you as one of them. If you're a woman, imagine feeling sick to death of what was your bliss yesterday; if you're fond of your country and people, imagine yourself now filled with loathing and restlessness. Imagine yourself thrashing and thrashing and flailing wildly and blindly but then gradually noticing certain patterns in your reflexive chaos, certain strategies that you can begin to recognize and control. Imagine yourself finally coming to terms with your new horrible situation, and slowly but surely beginning to prefer and enjoy it. Beginning to see where it might be taking you beyond mere sheer survival, and how it might relate to everything you've lost, and even bring it all back somehow.

Call all this terrible and exhilarating freedom that engenders discipline INNOVATION.

Now that you have that general abstract sense of those words, let's calibrate their focus as lens onto our subject. Imagine yourself to be a music lover; the music you love offers you both of the above experiences of tradition and innovation, like your own body offers you two of everything important (eyes, hands, ears, and the rest)--just as your world offers you night and day. The music you love is someone's "tradition"--someone's self--whether it's a thousand years old or yesterday's new song, it's a timeless source of stability and familiar affirmation. At the same time, it is someone else's "innovation:" a total shock and challenge and alien threat, feathering into something more friendly but no less tame. Being, as you are, a late-20th-century, post-baby-boomer person, with access to music from all over time and space, imagine yourself accustomed to moving in and out of the myriad of musical universes available to you. If you're an inner-city South Side Chicago kid with little day-to-day contact with anything but your immediate world, you nonetheless have an imagination and a knack for music that can light on, say, Louis Armstrong's storming of high-society "sweet" music for dancing and schmoozing with his "hot" New Orleans style, so unapologetically and boldly African in its aesthetic that it not only fights its way into the scene like some scrappy runt of the litter, but actually assumes the leadership role in the music, having mastered the West European terms of the previous administration and redirected them, regrounded them in their African source. Or your imagination could light on the music of someone much farther from your world, as an exotic and beckoning, promising alternate universe--say, Paul Desmond, with a cool, clean, laid-back aesthetic that contrasts with and complements the other pleasantly, nutritiously, as air does fire.

Let your imagination go as far as science-fiction might take you, not only out of your inner-city or white suburban world but out of your time and place completely say into turn-of-the-century Vienna, where Arnold Schoenberg is glorying in the post-Wagnerian, post-Mahlerian dismantling of half a millenium's worth of Western music theory, rearranging the entire cultural hierarchy expressed in tonality; or, later, where Webern and then Stockhausen are rearranging that out of fixed system altogether and into acoustic and then electronic sound masses plotting and thrashing their own new ways into a theoretically endless succession of new systems, sounds, and pieces themselves. Imagine going from your primal Baptist church transplanted from the deep South into Chicago's Catholic churches for your first taste of the Medieval Western legacy of chant (even if you went there mainly to see the girls, as a teen-ager); moving from there into the reclaimed masterpieces of the Medieval woman composer Hildegard of Bingen and being totally moved; coming upon the Connecticut Yankee Charles Ives and his clashing worlds of the New England hymnodists, John Philip Sousa, and the Harlem Stride pianists that fed his lush, crackling, humorous scores as he worked between Central Park and Hartford. Move from there up through Harry Partch, who reclaimed nature as an instrument; then John Cage, who reclaimed silence and synchronicity as music; then take all that, now seared across your soul while still in youth, back to your own more immediate world of American bebop: Charlie Parker opening up the chromatic and polyrhythmic pallette only implicit in what Armstrong and Duke Ellington started; Sun Ra turning Fletcher Henderson inside out into ancient Egyptian myth and interstellar space; Miles Davis reconnecting with the ancient and global modal approach to musicmaking, John Coltrane moving through that and bebop both into sheer avalanches of sound, Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor riding those avalanches like glacial surfers, Ornette Coleman going back past the Blues into an evocation of a Morroccan civilization predating the slave trade, when Medieval West and Arabic and North African cosmopoli comprised the center of your historical world.

Imagine yourself, again, at a still more specific crisis point. You are not only a lover of all this music, but are now compelled to participate in making it. Saturated as you are with these influences, totally, engaged, you find yourself itching not only to play an instrument, but to learn the theory necessary to improvise rather than merely interpret; and to compose, and to learn and understand the theoretical principles necessary thereto. Not only generally, but in those specific contexts--you are driven to find your own original voice and contribution, and it has to be one that will draw on elements of everything that has won your heart. This is as important to you as if you were trying to find the common ground for a family of yours that was full of extremely diverse and often mutually hostile members, all vying for dominance as a way to their rightful place in the sun.

Now imagine yourself struck with the impossibility of this but relying on faith far beyond your own means and inner and outer resources to pull it off. You start where you are: on the single-line instrument you have a knack for, and set off to reach for your highest goals as if you had all the training and skill and traits and understanding and support you need. You put yourself out on the limb of this dream--but fast find yourself lost in space, with all the steps you hoped would unfold for you being suddenly one long freefall into the void.

At this point all thought of going back, or of going forward in the way you had hoped is gone. You are rather forced to put one foot carefully in front of the other in midair as though it were solid ground. Imagine yourself, starting so, to come up with something like this:

You are an alto saxophonist who has been well schooled in both European classical theory and practice (through private lessons and public schooling throughout childhood and adolescence) and jazz (through the recordings, books, and live performances and personal contacts of your most immediate cultural time and place, including your own novitiate professional experiences therein). You are about to pick up your horn and practice, as you have for some ten or twelve years, since first touching it in childhood. Now, however, for the first time, your consciousness is split; not only do you want to warm up, have fun, get engaged and interested, walk away satisfied, as always--you also want to observe and reflect on every moment of that process and experience as it unfolds. You want to leave behind the rules and conventions and models you took in as a means to learn your instrument and craft; you feel it is time to explore your own potential as a shaper rather than a mere interpreter of such things. More: you want to chronicle and chart it in such a way that you can convey it both to your own future self, to stay mindful of it and to develop it further, and to other interested parties (students, fellow musicians, scholars).

Before you make a sound, the process has begun. In your mind you notice it, a preparation for that first sound. What will its "architecture" be? a single-tone drone? a furiously fast, rhythmically complex line? one following the other? both juxtaposed together (imagine other players there with you, at your command)? "Philosophically," what is its nature? Is it coming from a spirit of peace? of rage? of oneness, or multiplicity? harmonious or contentious? what is the worldview, the psychology, the intent behind it, in you and in the world with which you associate it (in others anywhere and anywhen from whom you might feel it projecting to you)? "Ritually and ceremonially," where and how do you imagine its function in spacetime? on a stage in a concert hall? on a recording? on the street? alone in the woods somewhere, or in your room alone? for the masses, for posterity, for your lover's birthday, for your child's graduation ceremony or football game? Is it something you want to be fixed into notation exactly as it is played, to be played again exactly so? or to work as a suggestive generator of other sonic events? or simply to skip like a stone over the riverwater of time and forget? Is it something you experience as private as your own unutterable dreams and thoughts, or do you feel it somehow entrusted to you to share as widely as possible? How does the exact same music become different solely through contextual changes of time and place?

Having fixed these questions in your mind for reflection, you make your first sound. You did not consciously, rationally determine and then will it so much as simply made what you felt like making without thinking about it. It is a long sound; it serves your physical-mental state to repeat it, to work it, warming up your horn, attuning your organism to the feel of it, savoring and enjoying it. It takes on a little throb, a pulse, shaped by your breath; you oscillate between control and surrender, inhale and exhale. After a few moments it seems to have a life of its own which you are feeding, tending, observing, much more than willing or generating. Gradually you lose yourself in its flow, lose consciousness of what you are doing to generate it.

Suddenly this flow of sound in time is interrupted by a vivid memory of the dream you had last night, or perhaps ten years ago, or in your early childhood, a memory you had forgotten you had. Or, perhaps, a visualization of the sheerly sonic drone pops before your mind's eye--perhaps an ideal geometric line, perhaps an ocean, or a sky, or outer space. Or maybe you simply feel like you have had enough of it, or you experience it as a prelude to the next thing you are about to do, you know not what.

One possible trajectory, then, is this: __________________ = long sound ----> drone state ----> dream

After you write it down you continue to explore your horn, your physical-mental experiences through your practice sessions. Eventually you come up with eleven more "sonic units" to which you prove drawn, each capable of being developed through any one or more of thirteen distinct "geometric schemes" into any one or more of twelve distinct "identity states," all originating out of the three different aspects (you call them "architectural," "philosophical," "ritual and ceremonial") of potential. Each of these you experience and generate as personal truth ("individual recognition"), collective truth ("group recognition"), and/or cosmic, or physical truth ("vibrational recognition"); you do so by means of composition ("stable logic"), improvisation ("mutable logic"), and/or a synthesis of the two ("synthesis logic"); and you do so as a solo artist (music as individual expression/tool), in ensembles (music as social event), or in a mix of the two ("combination logic," reflecting the relationship between the individual and the collective).

(The symmetry of the number of elements--three sets of twelve musical aspects generated by a twelve-aspected set of potentialities pleases you too, because you did not seek or will it, you simply stopped your lists when you felt they were sufficient to your needs and possibilities. You half note, half marvel at their symmetry's synchronicity with other musical and mythical elements that have fascinated you throughout your life--the mystical expressions of Unity, Duality, Trinity and Quaternity in philosophy and theology, mythology and folklore, and their prevalence too in nature. You think similarly of patterns of twelve: the houses of the Zodiac, the hours of the day, the months of the year, the notes of the chromatic scale, the Christian Apostles. Your chart points out to you some deep resonance in your own biological clock and psychic imagination with these numbers and their recurrences in such things, and you begin to understand them all much more personally, and yourself more transpersonally.

Most of the "sonic units" to which your relationship with your horn draws you are common, simple and conventional and can be described with such terms; a couple you describe with your own graphics and words: "gradient formings," those in which one or more musical elements--volume, tempo, pitch, timbre--gradually changes; and "sub-identity formings," in which something begins as a part of something else, then digresses into an independent identity--for example, a snatch of some familiar tune that develops as a submotif out of your "diatonic formings," ends and then yields to the latter; or a section of trills set within a piece primarily comprising long tones. Your "geometric schemes"--the kinds of patterning that develop as you play and work with these sonic units, following your intuition of their innate tendencies and potentials, the directions they suggest to you, the flows in which they comprise the moments of the "sonic units"--prove more idiosyncratic and peculiar to you than do the sonic units. "Drone state" and "line formings" (such as Indian vina and sitar players, respectively, or bop bassists and trumpeters make), "rhythmic logics" (such as you associate with pan-African drumming, including jazz), "multiple logics" (such as you enjoy in the different juxtapositions of rhythmic patterns and melodies, tempos and meters you hear in parades, or, again, West African drumming, or early Western polyphony, or recent composers such as Stravinsky or Ives), and "intervallic logics" (as crafted by the choices of composers or improvisers eschewing the tonal system, such as Webern, or Cecil Taylor) are all fairly obvious strategies, and come with little forcing. Others as obviously yield results more unique to your mind: "sequential logics," the ways you choose to, or unconsciously, repeat pitches, phrases, forms spread over time; "schematic logics," stabilizations of musical flows into scores, written or internalized mentally; "pointillistic logics," events you construct by dotting time and silence with sounds you experience as random, unrelated; "gradient logics," an extension of gradient formings from fleeting gesture to fullblown event; "corridor logics," something devised specifically to link two "identity states;" "sound mass logics," your versions of aesthetics explored by composers or improvisers such as Stockhausen, Coltrane, Ligeti, and Penderecki; "directional logics," ways of moving a piece in a certain direction (high to low, loud to soft, etc.); and "change state logics," something quicker and more developmental than corridor logics, and trickier, craftier (like a modulation) than directional logics.

All of these strategies are processes that produce "identity states." Some, again, are conventional, however peculiar in substance (sonic units) and form (geometrical schemes) to you: melodies, idiomatic (blues, bebop, a serial piece), "target sonic " (the big band sound, the string quartet sound), "trans-idiomatic" (a synthesis of cool jazz and chant, Ragtime and North Indian music, in your voice), "iconic sounds" (dog barks), "sound imagery" (simulation of a rainforest, an ocean beach, or outer space), dreams (your own inner visualizations, those you postulate in your listeners). "Sub-identity" is the end result of sub-identity formings, "summation identity" the conclusive emergence of actualizations of tendencies experienced as potential evoked by the sonic units and geometrical schemes; "defined," "undefined," and "partially defined" states describe your own intuitive feeling about a musical event as you conclude it. (You note with interest the progression from top to bottom of your three "sounding" columns as one from simple to complex elements and concepts.)

So: these are your subjective principles, fished out from deep inside yourself as well as from the world, named with your names and ordered for your access; they are the patterns that trigger and interrelate and codify your creative process, give you something to hold fast to from within yourself to replace the fixed "imported" logics and rules of all your initial influences and to honor them as such at the same time.

As you proceed through such experiences and reflections, imagine periods of success and failure on several levels. Imagine the music industry and community and press at times treating you like their darling and at others like a dog. Imagine encountering the politics of such a sifting process of allies and friends and enemies--racial, cultural, gender, and social and class and personal dynamics determine the lines drawn by this process even thought to you it's all primarily a musical exercise and adventure. Imagine progressing through your adult life on such a path with little or no profit until well into midlife and beyond. Now imagine reflecting on what you've done musically, and how it relates to the place and history into which you were born and moved.

Imagine then feeling you were basically happy with what you had done, on the terms you originally set for yourself. You had opened up a few simple premises, expanded a few others, and broken down some walls that had been barriers and dividers. You had helped change the class politics of genres, of instruments and orchestration, freeing up a myriad of new situations and opportunities for future musicians. You had helped expand the aesthetic for improvisers (and composers/arrangers for improvisers) from the diatonic American pop songbook into the farthest reaches of what Western culture had to offer. You had helped break down prejudice and tension between men and women, old and young, between races, between "stars" and "unknowns" in music practice; you had helped expand the African rhythmic field from the hierarchy of polyrhythms over simple basic pulse to a concept of pulse appropriate to the freefall of the Space Age, and shown it its place in relation to the musical universe around it.

Most of all, you had survived, had fun, and come to understand the truth of a couple of verses of the great poet Charles Williams:

Whether you end up in heaven or hell
the trip will surely break your heart
and quite likely your neck--

and

Flesh knows what Spirit knows, but Spirit knows it knows;
flesh tells what Spirit tells, but Spirit knows it tells.

Having imagined all this, imagine my immense pleasure and pride in introducing to you--Anthony Braxton and the Tri-Centric Ensemble.