Improvising Compose Yourself

Abstract

The post-World War II era in the USA saw the emergence of an intense new strain of composing music, begun by Milton Babbitt (1916-2011) and students collected around him, at University. This high-modernist project also produced writings about music aspiring to the verifiability or corrigibility of scientific discourse, embodying the then-latest developments in science, philosophy, and linguistics. By the 1960's was the American center of avant-garde music composition, or, by extending to include electronic music and certain geographical imagination, and Columbia Universities and uptown Manhattan--comparable to Darmstadt in the cultural imagination. Supporting the composition was the theory and discourse purportedly rid of subjectivity, and projected through the journal Perspectives of New Music (1962-current). The notion of there being such thing as Princeton Theory, as distinct from other forms of music theory, has been with us for many decades, for Kerman (1963: 152-4) defined and problematized Princeton School; Blasius (1997, 2) reports Godfrey Winham's (1934-1975) unfortunately undated response to a prospective 'Princeton issue' of the Journal of Music Theory; and Kerman's (1985, 60-112) critique can be read largely as response to the composer/ theorists working at Princeton--Kerman's own alma mater. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Theory's writings for vigorous engagement with the image of music (theory) as science, with musical discourse purified of incorrigible personal criticism, hermeneutics. But around 1970, something happened. The sustaining premises of music theory as scientific pursuit were challenged by some of Babbitt's own students and writers for Perspectives of New Music: prominently, Elaine Barkin, Benjamin Boretz, J. K. Randall, and, eventually, some of their students. A drastic Turn occurred, Turn away from the scientific ideals of the previous discourse, from Enlightenment rationality, and towards phenomenological discourse; motion towards first-person narratives; towards pragmatism; towards the feminine, queer; towards language as music; towards leveling of the distinction between creation and criticism; towards improvisation; search for poetics; towards, in short, the experimental. Perhaps the single most decisive moment in the Turn was J. K. Randall's publication of the first few sections of Compose Yourself--A Manual for the Young ([1972] 1995) serially in Perspectives of New Music from 1972 to 1973. A highly experimental document, Compose Yourself includes kind of poem of coming-into-being; phenomenological yet didactic reading of scene from Gotterdammerung; study of computer generation of phonemes across world languages; kind of extended memory of train ride; discussion of multiple theoretical contexts for baseball game; and trippy script for television show probing the boundaries of music composition's role in the potential revolution. What follows takes place in two parts: the first offers transcription of portions of Randall's drafts for Compose Yourself, housed at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and quotation by Randall from DVD interview with Dorota Czerner, also housed at the NYPL. Drafts have never been published, and they show less abstract, more concrete, conception of Compose Yourself. The interview excerpt is crucial because, to my knowledge, it is the only time in recorded medium that Randall has himself offered an explanation for Compose Yourself and his experimental writings. During the longer part two, I offer my own improvisatory, experimental analysis or close reading of sections of Compose Yourself. The goal, as always, is to encourage readers unfamiliar with this work to explore it and other writings by Theorists after the Turn, and to shed further light on an important document in the history of American experimentalism. …