Ulrich Krieger confering with pianist Lisa Ullén
at Fylkingen, Stockholm
(photo. ingvar loco nordin)

Ulrich Krieger instructing Yann Le Nestour
at Fylkingen, February 2006
(photo: ingvar loco nordin)

Walls of Sound is about what I call static music – music that isn’t semantic, gestured or narrative, that doesn’t move or change atmospherically, and isn’t dramatic or has a development in the traditional European sense. If it changes it does it very slowly. [I – the reviewer - object to this way of seeing it, and I wonder if Krieger really has thought this out. This music ALWAYS changes, albeit on a micro level, and yes, slowly, gradually… and the more you tune your ears and your mind, you’ll discover this ever changing pattern – and if it doesn’t change it has failed, become DEAD, as Steve Reich’s music to a large extent is dead, because it just chews and chews and never changes on any level – except in some wonderful works, like for example Tehillim and the first version – on Deutsche Grammophon – of Drumming. Change is at the very HEART of so-called minimalism. That is the subject of the style; change, but gradual, causing auditive illusions of phase shifts and tilting motion] The emphasis lies on the aural sculpture in which one enters not just with ears, but also physically with the whole body, and eventually with your mind, altering your perception. Inside the sculpture, inside the static, there are endless changing details, variations and microcosms. [Aah! Krieger HAD thought it through all the way. I was just too eager! Sorry ‘bout that!] In a certain way it is a form of trance or ritualistic music without a pre-fixed ritual. The first CD [in this series of Krieger’s, that the present CD is part of] was about drone music: long held tones, and layers of sustained pitches (Niblock, Tenney, Cage, Celli) This second part is about pattern music, generally mostly referred to as Minimal Music; a music that uses as its main technique repeated (modal) patterns, which get varied or shifted against each other, generating audio walls, taking the emphasis and attention away from the original melodic pattern material towards the aural sculpture, the acoustic phenomenon. This is true for the early American Minimalism before 1970, which still was very conceptual and did hold a strong influence from Fluxus (1+1, Pendulum Music) [and still true when Terry Riley recorded Persian Surgery Dervishes in 1971 in Los Angeles and 1972 in Paris. Read about the Paris recording at: http://home.swipnet.se/sonoloco6/composers/Riley/persian.html That is part of a radio manuscript of mine, for Channel 2 of the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation, broadcast in the late 1990s] Riley and La Monte Young had been active on the Fluxus scene. Also Conceptual Art, Minimal Art and Op Art were somehow related to, and an influence for, Minimal Music [Minimalism was from the beginning a term used within the visual arts and regarding sculpture] Often the early Minimal Music pieces were just pure concepts (Pendulum Music). This new music, which saw the light in the 60s in America, was anti- or at least non-European. [I think it wasn’t anti at all. I believe they just didn’t give a shit about Europe, and the influence from the East, i.e. from the West, from the Californians’ viewpoint, was strong too. Just think about composers like John Cage –Yes! He too, and to a huge degree – Harry Partch, and above all, Lou Harrison!] Young American composers were trying to find alternatives away from extremely intellectual European New Music aesthetics, techniques of Serialism, Ultra-Expressionism and Academia. [I don’t believe they were opposing any of those European traditions and trends, but that they, to a large extent, were completely oblivious of those; pristine and fresh like children, without prejudice or heavy burdens of tradition. They just bloomed! Why is it so hard to believe that? Even if they new about the European proceedings in Darmstadt and Donaueschingen, it didn’t touch them, it was irrelevant, alien, like Wagner to Punk rockers] The main influences were non-European and Non-American, mainly Indian classical music (Riley, Glass) and African music (Reich).

This [at that moment talking about Riley’s Untitled Organ from 1966, in fact played on a harmonium] is a kind of music that may seem to be immobile even though there is lot of fast motion in it. It isn’t evolving in any direction. It is static. If one listens for extended durations one’s ears’ sensitivity for details becomes gradually enhanced. One starts to notice infinitesimal shifts of focus and emphasis between tones. One begins to discern how the sound is composed of overtones. After a while you hear many more details than you realized were in place. Therefore I think you can brand this music illusionist. It can cause auditive illusions, like a kind of conjurer’s music. It is no new discovery that repeated, extended sounds can produce psychological phenomena like these. In Africa and Asia alike there are ancient musical traditions that function thus, principally. However, in Western tradition, this music is a rare bird. In fact, it is in direct opposition to terms like question/reply – that a question is followed by an answer – or concepts like dramatic development; that an action leads to another, that there is a continuation. Those are basic elements in Western culture and music, at least for the last 400 years. In this music, however, changes appear, not because they have to, of some inner necessity… right now, but rather as an expression of a feeling that “now it’s enough, now we do it this way instead”. And when this music ends, it’s not because it has reached its goal, some kind of apotheosis…, but simply because… well, it’s got to end at some point. It could happen two minutes… or three hours later just as well. Often this kind of music ends without any special gesture or marking, just ceases. The opinion that this music has a hopelessly primitive – not to say sloppy – form, is of course close at hand, if it doesn’t matter so much when one thing or other occurs. If one feels like that, I’m afraid one has missed the point, like the professor of harmony who thought that classical Indian music was primitive since it stubbornly kept to one tonality and one tonality only, without modulating over into other keys… It’s pretty common that this – illusionist - music gets kicked at, since it keeps to itself, a little to the side of everything else. The academic establishment believes it too simple and daft, while the avant-garde’s more evolutionistic mainstream holds it to be a kind of musical fascism – or populism – to keep so steadfastly to extended tonalities and nagging motoric rhythms and repetitious patterns respectively. The somewhat ludicrous label that this music got in the beginning of the 1970s is Minimalism, and there may be a shade of rejection in that term. On the other hand, this term was imported from the realms of visual arts and sculpture, where it was used for a direction of art that only shows superficial similarities with this form of music. Consequently, I think the term “minimalist music” is unfortunate and misleading. Well, in the West this music first emerged in the early 1960s. Perhaps it’s characteristic that it happened in the USA, where the form of the classical music with its dynamic tendencies of development weren’t as rigidly stated as with the European composers. Even more telling is the fact that it happened in a part of the country that lies farthest off from Europe; California, exposed to a tangible oriental cultural influx. The two pioneers are La Monte Young and Terry Riley, who were fellow students at Berkeley University near San Francisco at the conclusion of the 1950s. […] In principal, there are two ways of creating this kind of musical illusion. One is to repeat a sound formula so fast and often that it lingers after a while, all the while present, i.e., not passing along the temporal axis like music mostly does. When it halts in front of you and sort of just rotates, you have the time to perceive all shifts and micro changes in the repetition. It feels like time dissolves, ascending you into a continuous “now”. Repetition was Terry Riley’s method during the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. The other way is to stretch the sounds for very long durations. This has, for the most part, been La Monte Young’s method. His original instrument is the saxophone, and his beginnings were as a modernist jazz musician in the middle of the 1950s. He had already early on developed an interest in extended sounds – the soughing of the wind, the humming of telephone wires – and as early as 1957 he began composing music building on out-drawn drones. La Monte Young may – perhaps with Morton Feldman – be the real pioneer when it comes to – oh well – Minimalism. John Cage certainly constitutes some kind of prerequisite behind them all.

Ulrich Krieger discussing Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music
with Peter Bryngelsson and others at Fylkingen
(photo: ingvar loco nordin)

Right at the beginning of the 60s I got my first American friends; musicians and theatre people traveling Europe. They were composers like Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley and Morton Subotnick, theatre people like Ken Dewey and Anna Halprin. They had fantastic tales to tell, especially about what happened on the West Coast, at the time totally unknown in Europe. It sounded like fairytales. They spoke about illustrious mixed forms of theater, stage design and music, like The Tropical Fish Opera [...]. The tape recordings I got to hear confirmed the impression of flowing fantasy and a liberating irreverence. All this differed pleasantly from the European avant-garde of the day, as it emerged from summer courses in Darmstadt and mighty German radio stations, where the music – with few exceptions – felt very rigid and conceited. It veiled itself in a quasi-scientific jargon, and oftentimes you got the impression that the analysis was more important than how the music sounded. The new American signals constituted a real contrast to that attitude.

Ulrich Krieger with GLO's artistic leader Leif Jordansson (standing, left)
and sound technician Lilja at Stockholm's Culture House
in February 2006
(photo: ingvar loco nordin)

No instruments are specified in the score. The original first recording was done with an electric organ and 2 soprano saxophones. This is my version for 6 saxophones with circular breathing. There is a constant eighth-note pulse, and everything runs in parallel fifths. The rhythmic pattern development itself is an additive process.

This is a conceptual phase shifting piece for four or more microphones swinging above loudspeakers. Very slowly they swing out of phase, creating changing repetitive rhythmic patterns and different feedback pitches, until in the end it becomes a slightly shifting low drone.

Dorian Reeds is a saxophone original. This is my transcription of Riley’s own first recording, done with his permission, using modern delay technique. The piece consists of a series of various patterns. There are two main groups of patterns: shorter sixteenth note patterns and longer staccato or sustained note patterns floating atop the sixteenth pulse. Each pattern gets repeated and enters into a delay system. Through the overlap we constantly get shifting summery patterns.

Ulrich Krieger, Lilja and Leif Jordansson at rehearsals of
Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music at Stockholm's Culture House
with The Great Learning Orchestra
(photo: ingvar loco nordin)

1 + 1 is a very conceptual rhythmic piece, and the essence of Glass’ early music: strictly additive and subtractive rhythms knocked on a tabletop. A first try to find an individual way of working with Indian music influenced additive pattern as a result of Glass meeting Ravi Shankar. The table is amplified with a contact microphone. The constant, fast, rhythmic knocking creates a low, rumbling drone from the tabletop: something like a primitive industrial tambura.

Reed Phase is also a saxophone original and was the first instrumental phase shifting piece after the tape pieces, and the most straight ahead he ever did. A very conceptual, very reduced piece, but that’s its strength. It consists of only one pattern throughout, therefore the phase shifting result and effect is best audible here.

As for the 'anti-European': you are right and wrong. At least Glass' 'Music in Fifths' was a direct result of him studying in France and was a reaction to the 'don't-use-fifths-and-octave-law’ in European New Music, which was even taught in the courses he took, and so he tells that he wrote this as a reaction to this academic law. He also says that his very early student works were in the European New Music way, but he was very unhappy with this and was looking for something else but didn't know what. He stumbled upon it when he met Ravi Shankar for the sound track of 'Chappaqua'; the film by Conrac Rooks. Originally Ornette Coleman had recorded a wonderful soundtrack for this film, but Rooks had the feeling that the music was too strong, taking attention away from the film (one of my favorite Coleman recordings!). So Rooks asked Shankar to do another soundtrack and Glass was the recording engineer for this - at least this is the story I know... Also a similar story is told about Reich being unhappy, unsatisfied with what he learned in university about new music, looking for something more direct, less abstract. The case with Terry is different of course... Ulrich Krieger