in memoriam J. K. Randall 16 June 1929–28 May 2014 JIM RANDALL: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY IM RANDALL WAS ALWAYS a huge creative-music-intellectual revolution waiting to happen. And it did happen, though—necessarily given its deep and complex nature—it happened in a small bubble, an intense but publicly obscure subculture lodged firmly, vibrantly, restlessly, sometimes obstreperously, in Princeton. I actually first knew of Jim several years before I ever met him, when I was immersed in the music department of UCLA, where my office-mate was Bill Malm—the ethnomusicologist who was writing a landmark book on Japanese music— who had been at the U.S. Naval Conservatoire with Jim (and Bill Evans, and Robert Hickock—coincidentally one of my principal undergraduate music professors). Bill showed me music of Jim’s that had impressed him and whose scores he treasured—pieces that Jim composed scrupulously, working out of Hindemith’s theoretical prescriptions in The Craft of Musical Composition—sparse, straight and to the point music that clearly was passionately interested in thinking clearly and deeply rather than mugging, flirting, or seducing. That was 1957; in 1959 Milton brought me to Princeton, for the Seminar and beyond: Jim in the flesh was there, as were David Lewin and Godfrey J 10 Perspectives of New Music Winham; Jim was on leave, preoccupied with the recent birth of Ellen, but came to hear the great men (of course men!) and join the conversation with stunning force: see his vignette of Stravinsky in the Perspectives memorial issue; and—prepared with a comprehensive analysis of Elliott Carter’s First String quartet’s pervasive pentachord structure—he succeeded in eliciting from Elliott an indignant denial that he had had anything “serial” at all in mind. And from the first moment—of infinitely many more—that I sat around with Jim shooting the breeze I was amazed to find an almost uncanny shared sense of what we cared about, responded to, valued in music—and creative thought generally. Powerful enough to propel a subsequent lifetime of inter-engagement on every level of being and thinking that you can imagine. Historical, political and social consciousness were inseparable aspects of this conversation, as were a radical critique of music pedagogy , a radical openness to every mode of creative expression, and a radical relativism about perception and interpretation. This was the time of the Taneiev review that Richmond Browne dared to allow into the Yale Journal of Music Theory; of Pitch-Time Correlations and the logical construction of the tonal system, liberated by the example of Milton’s exuberant Positivism, and constrained by the severe moral rationality of Godfrey looking over Jim’s shoulder and teaching by example. Jim was the one who had the unblinking courage of all of their convictions—and an uninhibited entitlement to articulate those convictions in force, in public, and with an authenticity of voice that we had never heard before in the preternaturally cautious and evasive rhetorics of academic discourse. And then Perspectives of New Music came into being, and the American Society of University Composers, and Compose Yourself, and—finally— Open Space. But discourse was the periphery; the center was always creative composition and wherever that led; inexorably it led first to the creative liberation of computer sound synthesis—to Mudgett, to Lyric Variations, to Eakins, recently to the garland of csound—to the constant refinement of language by way of music—to “Soundscroll,” to “Depth of Surface,” to “Intimacy”—and to the expansion of the ways that music goes by way of how language—poetry, story, utterance— goes. The piano music for Godfrey called “such words as it were vain to close”—immortalized by Elaine Barkin’s textpiece—was originally called “a long story.” And expanded further to the creative liberation of realtime interactive time-making, in sound, oftentimes of a musical character, but also in modes of social and material configuration that could only deeply be perceived as rooted in music and the awarenesses that music uniquely accesses. The work of that time, inscribed in the Jim Randall: An Autobiography 11 Inter/Play series, including an amazing set of thirteen duo-keyboard sessions we played alternately at Jim’s...
Read full abstract
Apr 1, 2016
Frans-Willem Korsten + 1
Open Access