Walk into any spot in New York City where guitar nerds tend to linger and you’re bound to hear someone talking about it: minimalist composer (and Visitation Rites astrologist) Rhys Chatham is back in New York for round two of last year’s rained-out performance of A Crimson Grail, and somebody you know–or somebody who knows someone you know–is probably rehearsing for it. Boasting the combined decibel power of 200 electric guitars, 15 basses, and a high hat player, Crimson’s North American premiere presents a monumental orchestral slant on Chatham’s signature cross-fertilization of rock and experimental minimalism–dating back to an ear-opening encounter with the visceral punch of NYC punk in the late 1970s, and culminating in what many now identify as the world’s first incarnation of “noise music.”
Slated to unfold before up to 10,000 spectators–rain or shine–this Saturday at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch park, the ensemble–streamlined into a 4 section orchestra, with 4 section leaders meting out instructions in real-time as Chatham conducts on stage–will unveil what is perhaps a new “mature” phase in Chatham’s career. Maybe we were just looking for an opportunity to drop a massive amount of interview material on you, but Visitation Rites thought it would take the opportunity to travel back to the era when that career first took seed, revisiting one of the early impulses that made him the composer he is today. That impulse is Drastic Classicism, a collaboration between Chatham and choreographer Karole Armitage that premiered at the Dance Theater Workshop in 1981 and was recreated at Kitchen last April.
The following is the complete, (almost) unedited transcript of an interview that I conducted with Chatham in March 2009 for a feature article on Drastic Classicism that I wrote for Tiny Mix Tapes. In addition to providing a little biographical back-story to lean on, I thought it might be inspiring to get a sense of the aesthetic questions that made Chatham tick when he–like us, and many of our readers–was still in his ’20s, scraping his way though an economic crisis, and trying to find his own voice amidst the DIY explosion that we can count on this city to produce whenever the going gets rough.
Emilie Friedlander: Can you tell me the story behind the original Drastic Classicism? When and how did you and Karole decide to collaborate together?
I saw a work that Karole did at the Kitchen in 1979 called Do We Could, and liked it very much. Visual artist Michael Zwack introduced me to Karole and we became friends. One evening, Karole asked for a meeting, so we got together at a restaurant on Thompson Street in Soho and she asked if I would be interested in collaborating with her. I liked the piece I saw, so I said, Yes.
I have a long history of working with dancers, in fact, the way I got my job as music director of the Kitchen was through choreographer Daniel Nagrin at the start of the 70s. He gave dance classes on Saturday afternoons in Soho, which I played music for. Daniel was very interested in improvisation, so after the classes he would have 3-hour jam sessions with his dance company. I was there to provide music and other musicians came to join us from time to time. One Saturday, we had Woody and Steina Vasulka come to play. In fact they were video artists, but also played music; anyway, I met them through Daniel and they later founded the Kitchen when it was on Mercer Street and asked me to program music there – the rest is history.
When I was a teenager I had seriously considered becoming a dancer after seeing performances of Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and Meredith Monk. But then I took some dance classes and decided that I had a LOT more talent as a musician. Nevertheless I retained my love for dance and worked with dance as a musician whenever I could. After working with Daniel, I collaborated with a number of choreographers; Kenneth King was the best known of them. I even ended up in Meredith Monk’s dance company for a time, albeit as a musician, not as a dancer.
All to say that I had a long history with dance by the time I met Karole.
Our first piece was a duet called Vertige where I played a version of Guitar Trio for one guitar and Karole danced. I would like to put our working together a little bit in context, as this work with Karole wasn’t just a story of me doing music for yet another choreographer, this was something really special.
First of all, our collaboration was happening in the midst of the punk explosion in New York, just during the time when it was reaching out to a larger audience and receiving a large amount of attention in the local media. It was generating a lot of excitement, and the Soho art community was affected as well.
When this punk explosion happened, I was essentially a composer who was a hard-core minimalist, who had heard the Ramones play at CBGB’s in 1976, and decided that I had a LOT in common with this music, so I picked up an electric guitar myself. It took a year of developing my own voice on the instrument, but finally I arrived at a piece that drew upon everything I was as a composer and a musician, but also worked in a rock context. The piece was, of course, Guitar Trio.
It was very important to me then that any rock-influenced piece I did not be merely appropriation, or a sampling of a conservatory-trained composer’s distorted view of what rock music was. I wanted it to work in a rock context as well, which is why we played the piece straight away in clubs like CBGBs and Max’s. However, even though I played the piece in rock clubs, I did not consider myself a rock musician, in the sense that I had too much respect for the form. I considered myself a minimalist composer, i.e. someone conservatory-trained who had played already in an art context in both La Monte Young’s as well as Tony Conrad’s ensembles, which is about as hard-core minimalist as one can get!
By the time Karole and I started working together, I had been playing G3 out in the clubs as well as art spaces for two years. On Karole’s side, she had already used rock music in her first piece, Ne, by The The. So she was used to working with loud volume.
On the other hand, working with a minimalist composer who was playing electric guitar in a rock context, whose entire performance on the guitar consisted of playing literally one chord for hours at a time, listening to the overtones and considering them to be the entire melody, was something that had not been done by anyone, certainly not a choreographer, and was, at the time, unique to our collaboration, although others were soon keen to follow.
There was another aspect of our collaboration that was unusual. Usually, the way things work is that a choreographer decides to hire a composer to do music for them. The piece is done in a dance space, and it is strictly the choreographer’s show, with the musicians accompanying the dancers. I had worked this way many times before with other choreographers.
Karole and I decided that in our case, our collaboration would be equal, and that we would perform the work in rock clubs, integrating the musicians in as much as possible visually with the dancers.
Our first performance of Vertige was, suitably enough, in a really cool rock club called Tier 3, which was in Tribeca. We did a 3-night run and it caused quite a sensation. We went on to tour Vertige in France, Switzerland and the UK.
Encouraged by our success with Vertige, we attempted a larger work.
A bit more background: In the early seventies, I earned my living as a harpsichord tuner. I had studied with William Dowd, who was the Steinway of harpsichord builders in the USA. So naturally my interest in tuning and my work with La Monte and Tony, both of whom were working within the framework of just intonation; had the effect of inspiring me to use alternate tunings for the electric guitar straight away. The original version of G3 had two of the guitars in just intonation, and I had the idea to have one of the guitars tuned to all low E strings, in order to reinforce the overtones.
With Drastic Classicism, I took a different approach and put my guitar in a highly dissonant tuning, and went even further by tuning the other four guitars in minor second intervals with respect to each other.
We tried out this tuning at a rehearsal studio, and the result was amazing. Far from being an opaque wall of sound, it sounded like a tornado of voices, all of them singing at the same time. This is what I was working on when Karole and I decided to do Drastic, and it became the main section of the piece.
What do you remember about your experience performing Drastic in the original 1981 choreographic production? In what ways was performing your music in the context of a dance performance different from performing it in a rock club or concert hall? Would you say that there was already a strong performative/choreographic element in your work at the time, and in the No Wave music scene in general?
We couldn’t mount Drastic Classicism in a rock club because there were too many dancers involved, and in general rock clubs do not have suitable floors for dancers to work with. In terms of lighting setup, having a decent floor and needing dressing rooms for changing costumes and makeup, it was just easier to do it in a dance space.
So Karole and I mounted Drastic Classicism at Dance Theater Workshop ( DTW) in 1981. We played Drastic there every Monday for a month. Because it was at DTW, the audience was primarily a dance audience, and it was a complete shock to everyone. There were a number of reasons for this.
On a musical level, in an art context (e.g. the Kitchen or Artist’s Space), people heard Drastic as a new, uncompromising form of minimalism. When I played it in a rock context, people heard it as a wall of noise, and I can say with considerable pride that Drastic was one of the pieces that started the noise rock movement.
When we played it in a dance context, there a number of things to keep in mind: First of all, Karole was still a Cunningham dancer, i.e. currently in his company, and two of the other dancers were also star dancers in Cunningham’s company, which is to say she had truly fabulous, technically superb dancers working with her. Secondly, no other choreographer ever had the courage before Karole to work with the intensity of sound that I was using. It wasn’t just a matter of a dance company working with rock music, or even no wave music, for that had been done before. She was working with a crazy minimalist composer who had scored a piece that wasn’t so much rock as pure unadulterated noise; or depending on your background, a viscous, gelatinous sphere of screaming overtones being played in a relatively small room! It really took the dance audience completely by surprise as they were used to music taking a more supportive role in the context of the modern dance world.
Now, in dance spaces, musicians usually play in the orchestra pit or off to the side. However, since the way Karole and I planned it was as equal collaborators, Karole had the musicians right on stage with the dancers. Karole, bless her, even had her dancers manhandle (or womanhandle, as the case may be) us, kicking and jumping on us from time to time. And of course, we musicians were dancing, too, in our own way, each according to his or her ability.
Anyway, the piece caused a sensation in the press. And articles kept coming out during the entire month we were performing.
What made you and Karole a good match, artistically speaking? Do you think there were any parallels between what you were doing in music at the time and what Karole was doing with dance?
Oh dear, this is a difficult question. Surprisingly, no one has ever asked me this before.
Both of us were very much a part of the no wave scene back then, Karole as a spectator and me playing in the clubs. She had a kind of punk look and even got in a bit of hot water while working with the Cunningham company for looking too extreme. I suppose we both had a similar mind set of taking things to their limit and being as extreme as possible in our art, our look and general comportment. She had her own technical issues, of course. Cunningham technique really leaves a mark on those dancers who were immersed in it. I believe what Karole was doing with those early pieces was finding her own voice as a choreographer, separate from that of Cunningham, which she certainly had done by the time she finished Drastic, if not with Vertige.
For members of the millennium generation, the idea of a collaboration between a rock composer from the East Village and a choreographer who danced with the likes of George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham is almost unimaginable…
Hmmm… actually, I lived on MacDougal Street in Soho during this period… and, as I mentioned earlier, I did not consider myself a rock composer, but that is splitting hairs. This distinction was important to me back then, it isn’t now, as at this point I have probably played more often in rock clubs than concert halls, and I certainly prefer rock clubs these days.
Were cross-disciplinary collaborations of this kind common fare in New York in the 1980s?
No, they weren’t. Not of this kind.
One other formative thing I could mention: I studied composition with Morton Subotnick in the late sixties. Morton, back then, was “Mr Collaborate-with-other-media-people” and was composer-in-residence at the NYU Intermedia department, which was focused on his collaboration with visual artist Tony Martin, who had done the light show at the Electric Circus in the East Village.
So whenever Morton performed, he would have Tony do a light show. I was at all these performances, of course, often assisting in them. While I was at NYU, I collaborated with many other students there. We were in the film building, so kids would come down to the electronic music studio we had there and listen in and ask if we composers could do music for them. I gained a lot of experience this way. Later we moved into the dance building, which was on 2nd Avenue in the East Village, and I met and worked with many student dancers and choreographers while I was there. That’s were I got my training to work with artists of other media, at any rate.
While I had worked with many choreographers and filmmakers, I had never worked with visual artists, that didn’t come until the 80’s, when I collaborated with Robert Longo. After Karole and I did Vertige and Drastic, I noticed that there were a number of other choreographer/no wave scene musician collaborations that began to happen. I think Karole gave other choreographers the courage to ask these musicians to work with them.
Where does Drastic, musically speaking, fit into your evolution as a composer? You wrote the piece four years after penning Guitar Trio, when you first began combining your study of minimalism with rock instrumentation à la CBGBs. What were some of the musical and aesthetic questions you were grappling with in 1981? How does Drastic differ musically from a piece like Guitar Trio?
Keeping in mind the things I said earlier, with Drastic I wanted to work with an alternate tuning that was quite complex. While the original G3 was tuned in just intonation, the intervals involved were very pure and relatively simple. I wanted to try something more complex in terms of tuning and compositional structure with Drastic.
And now, I’ll tell you something, which I think very few people know:
In 1971, I had written a piece called Two Gongs. It was a 63-minue piece with beautiful overtones, truly recalling at times choirs and choirs of singers. With Drastic, I wanted to try to emulate the sound of these two gongs with 4 electric guitars and a backbeat driving them.
You mentioned earlier in an email that it was especially interesting for you to revive Part 1 of Drastic using Kevin Shea on drums, rather than the original drummer, David Linton. The guitar part of Drastic clearly has a slight improvisational element, with the guitarists free to choose which frets to strum on—and, at points, which rhythms to play. Is there an improvisational component to the drum part? How much does it change depending on who’s playing?
In my rock influenced non-notated pieces like G3 or Drastic, if I work with a drummer it is because I like the way the drummer plays. Some drummers hit the drums hard, some play more poetically.
John Coltrane always liked to play with a drummer who hit the drums hard, which is why he worked quite a bit with Elvin Jones. G3 and Drastic also need strong drummers. David Linton was the first drummer to play Drastic, and he was a monster, as can be heard from the recording. Later, we had Jonathan Kane, who was a co-founder of Swans. If the guitars were the fire, Jonathan was truly the wind that powered the fire.
No matter which drummer is playing Drastic, he needs to hit the drums in such a way as to give the guitarists energy. I like to hear lots and lots of fills in G3 and Drastic, and lots and lots of crash and ride cymbals. With drums, my formula is the noisier and the more driving rhythms and fills there are the better, as far as I’m concerned.
By contrast, there are some compositions where the drum parts absolutely have to be notated. In another composition I did for Karole, Massacre, on MacDougal Street, Anton Fier (of Feelies and later Lounge Lizard fame) did a 120-bar solo that sounded a bit like martial music. So at a live concert on another piece, I had him and James Lo (of Live Skull) try to improvise martial music. It was a total flop due to the precision needed when one has more than one drummer playing flams, tap 5s and tap 7s and the like at the same time. I ended up having to write out all the parts in a piece that eventually became Waterloo, No 2.
But for G3 and Drastic, the drummers I use work within the structure of the piece, and bring their own style to it. I wouldn’t call it completely improvisation, what the drummer does, even though the drummer’s part is not fully notated. Because of the fixed and pre-determined structure of Drastic, a drummer will tend to play the same way each time, e.g; a straight backbeat during this section, lots of fills during that section, although admittedly, some performances are more inspired than others, depending on what side of the bed they got up on the day in question. 
Kevin Shea has a radically different style than most of the other drummers I have worked with. I hesitate to say that it is coming out of jazz, in that Kevin’s style is unique even within a jazz context. I suppose we could say that Kevin can hit the drums hard when he needs to and play a backbeat and all that, but even when he is playing a hard, driving backbeat, he embellishes the basic beat with oddly placed drum rolls and accents which perhaps owe more to jazz than to rock.
I had played with Kevin in the context of his noise duo with Matt Mottel, Talibam! We got together one time while I was in New York and we jammed with me on electric trumpet, so that is how I became familiar with Kevin’s way of playing. And I liked it, a lot.
Shortly after this, Kevin found himself in Paris, so we got together to play and made a recording of the first section of Drastic for Karole to work with. He played in his unique style and I thought it worked quite well, although it was very different from the way David played it. I was a bit worried that Karole would freak out when she heard the tape, but I should have known better, for Karole is made of stronger stuff than that! She quite adventurous in her musical tastes and she loved the recording when she heard it.
What is the significance to you of recreating the piece using personalities from what might be called the new “downtown” scene (now relocated to Brooklyn, of course), instead of the original players? I know that it was Karole’s idea to restage the piece with performers who are around the same age as you were at the time of the original production, but I believe you were the one who selected the actual musicians. What made you choose Sarah, Steve, Paul, Tom, Kevin and Matthew? Do you feel like there is a special resonance between what these six musicians are doing now and what you and your collaborators were doing back in the 1980’s?
When Karole first approached me with the idea of reviving Drastic, I immediately thought of using the original guitarists who played in it, i.e. myself, Nina Canal, Scott Johnson and Ned Sublette, all of whom are still around and kickin’.
However, Karole had the idea that it would be interesting for the revival to use musicians and dancers who were the same age as Karole and me when we made the piece, which is to say mid 20s to early 30s.
At first I wasn’t sure about this idea, but then when Karole assured me that she wouldn’t be dancing in it herself, I felt better. Karole was and is a brilliant dancer and could pull off dancing in Drastic today just as easily as I could play guitar in it. So rather than feel slighted, I came around to her idea and really got into it. What Karole wanted was not a reunion concert, but rather a recreation of the original concert.
The problem with reunion concerts is that one often ends up comparing how the people look now as opposed to how they looked then… Asking people to participate who are the same age that Karole and I were when we made Drastic avoids this pitfall.
How did you select the musicians?
Kevin and Matt I knew of course from playing with them as a guest in Talibam!.
When we were choosing the guitarists, it was the week after the rained-out Crimson Grail 200 electric guitar performance at Lincoln Center Outdoors (August 2008), so I was already in touch with a lot of local musicians. I got together with John King, who was conducting one of the sub-orchestras in Crimson Grail, and we decided to select for the most part from people who had played in Crimson, as well as other people that I knew who were on the NY scene.
The guitarists we chose didn’t know each other prior to playing in Drastic, but what they have in common is that they are roughly the same age and that they all live in Brooklyn, and they all are movers and shakers in their respective fields. However, it must be said that our primary criteria in choosing the guitarists wasn’t that they were scene people (even though it happened to work out that way…but that they were technically capable and that they already had experience playing my work.
Sarah and Paul had played G3 with me already in other contexts and so I knew they were familiar with my sound and into doing it. Steve I knew by reputation. I figured that since he had played in Crimson he knew my sound, and I knew from listening to his music that he wouldn’t have a problem technically. Also, we are about the same height and on a physical level I thought he might be good to play the part that I originally played, as he looks vaguely the way I did when I was in my twenties, in terms of his aura, at least.
Looks were a factor in our selection because Karole wanted to make the look as close as possible to the original performance on a visual level, her being a theater director these days and all.
Paul is very tall, so we gave him the part that Ned Sublette played, since Ned is from Texas, thin as a reed and tall and so is Paul. Paul is not from Texas, sadly, but he is from the south, so we figured that was good enough!
Sarah got Nina Canal’s (of Ut fame) part. And Tom got the part originally played by Scott Johnson.
How would you describe your musical relationship with John King? Why was he such a great choice for the role of musical director?
I’ve known John since the late seventies and we have worked together in many contexts. We even both studied under the same composer, Morton Subotnick.
I live in Paris, and Karole needed someone good to be the musical director of all the pieces for her performance, not only mine, but also David Linton’s music and another composer (I forgot the person’s name).
I thought of John to fill this bill immediately because he is a fantastically talented composer and musician who has also worked extensively with such choreographers and Merce Cunningham and Robert Kovich. Karole ran the idea of working with John by David Linton, who also knows John quite well, and David was pleased with this choice, so that was that. John is very busy, so we were lucky that he was available.
Another reason I was relieved that John would be the music director is that John is a guitarist; he’s played many times in my performances and knows my music quite well. He also has had vast experience as a professional guitar teacher and works really well with people.
In your 1990 essay, “My Own Musical Adventure of the Eighties: A Ten Year Project in the Field,” you describe the original “Guitar Trio” and “Drastic” ensembles as a “representation” of a rock band, rather than an actual rock band–much in the way that your collaborator Robert Longo might describe his work as a “representation” of electronic media. Would you still qualify your work in this way?
I just want to mention, that, today, I, too have my doubts about this! ?
At this point in my life, I have probably played more in rock clubs than I have concert halls. Rock clubs are certainly my preferred place to play. Today my feeling about G3 and Drastic would be, of course they are rock! They are music coming out of minimalism also, of course, but for a long time now I have not worried about the distinction, and neither do most other people.
However, back in the late 70s and early 80s, the distinction was highly important to me. I thought of myself as a minimalist composer working in a rock context, and the work I was doing as being a “representation” of a rock band. I picked up this language from my visual art friend Longo and Cindy Sherman in order to have, I suppose, a link between their work and mine. Thinking of myself as not a rocker also had the happy effect of allowing me not to overly worry if whether what I was doing was really rock or not. As long as people liked it at CBGBs, that’s all I cared about.
After 1990, I stopped worrying about these distinctions.
Tags: A Crimson Grail, Drastic Classicism, Karole Armitage, Rhys Chatham