These notes are from Phill's 1994 CD, Early Winter, consisting of two long works performed by the Soldier String Quartet. His music uses loud drones with that produce notes and melodies that aren't actually played.

At a recent concert, Phill played a tape piece of warm synthesizer-like sounds, suggesting fast-moving arpeggios and distant thunder storms. I told him the sounds were moving, what was the piece? I was embarassed to find that it was one I had recently recorded, Five More String Quartets. In that room, under those conditions, I couldn't recognize the sound of the strings or the music's slowly-evolving structure. But in other rooms, at a different volume, it sounded precisely like an overdubbsed string quartet with pitches moving irrevocably toward unison.

What gives each Phill Niblock work its own identity? Unlike any other composer's work I know of, the personalities of Phill's compositions depend crucially on how the recorded music is played back, the volume, and the sound of the room. This is because sustained pitches promote audible rhythmic beats and high and low tones (sum and difference tones). In Phill's work, these are never played by the performers, but come from the interplay of sound waves during the recording, in the speakers and in the room where you listen, and in your ear. In the string quartets, sounds that are strikingly heard but not played are rhythmic patterns in the cello and thick chords about an octave above the highest violin notes.

That Phill's music can sound different if you move into the hallway or a different part of the room, or even cock your head, must underlie something unusual that occurs when we perform Phill's pieces live. Someone in the audience realizes that the difference tones and other aural phenomena change as one moves. This encourages a few others to move around and after a while the concert hall lookls like it has been invaded by extras from a George Romero zombie movie.

Exactly what are the unplayed pitches that you might hear in this music? The highest pitch played in the String Quartet is roughly a G-sharp resting on the top line of the treble staff. The lowest note is played by the cello, around a G-flat at the bottom of the bass clef. If you hear higher or lower pitches (or pitches in the middle that are not centered around G-natural) and are listening with a good, distortion-free speaker and amplification system, you are hearing genuine auditory hallucinations that are produced in your ear. These pitches, called sum, difference, or combination tones, are determined by the played (fundamental) tones. For instance, if a violin is playing a pitch close to a G-sharp, say 420 Hz (cycles per second), and a viola plays a flatter pitch an octave lower, say 200 Hz, the sum tone is f1 + f2 = 620 Hz, the difference tone f1-f2 = 220 Hz, and the combination tones derived from harmonic frequencies, for example 2f1-f2 = 640 Hz. These auditory hallucinations are audible at sound pressure levels from about 20 dB to 65 dB.

Some of the physiological mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are understood. The fundamental pitches stimulate mechanoreceptive cells, the so called "hair bundles" in the cochlea of the ear, by deflecting a mechanically sensitive area on the cell. This mechanical force results in the opening of electrical ion channels. The changes in cellular voltage produces a vibration of the bundles. Stimulated at a single frequency, a hair bundle will normally vibrate only at that frequency and its first harmonic (the octave). However, since the ion channels jump back and forth from open to closed states and their conformation is one of the components that affects the hair bundle's movement, there is a nonlinear relationship between the auditory stimulus and the hair bundle's movement.  With the addition of a second frequency, the cells also vibrate at the frequencies of the sum, difference, and combination tones. This does not occur after a similar stimulation of an inert object such as a glass fiber; the extra pitch hallucinations are apparently the result of the opening and closing cellular ion channels. The hair bundle's vibrations are transmitted to the ear's basilar membrane and, eventually, to the cortex which appears to be responsible for pitch perception.

- Dave Soldier 's day job is as an assistant professor in the Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University.

These notes are from Otto's (only) orchestral CD, Otto Luening: Orchestral Works Newport Classic, recorded by the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, Richard Auldon Clark conductor, in 1993. Otto was 93 at the time, and it was a chance to thank him for being a mentor. Incidentally, following Schoenberg's lead, he didn't charge for lessons.

Otto Luening has a quality in greater abundance than any other working composer, and perhaps the best name for the quality is perspective. Through times of optimism and eras of social and personal tragedy, Luening continues on an astonishing path to rediscover himself. The orchestral works performed here range over seventy-five years from those by a Luening in his late teens under the spells of Richard Strauss and his mentor Ferruccio Busoni, to a Luening in his nineties with a tremendous formal and stylistic breadth. But more stunning than the length of this journey is the realization that this composer of incomparable experience chooses now not to write in some easily digested style for a mass audience, but to write some of the craggiest, most challenging work of his career. One suspects that Otto is telling us that the greatest gift an artist can bestow is not something smoothed over or simplified in an attempt to be universal, but to give one's own singular honest view of the world.

One of the perspectives from Luening's vantage has to do with the silliness of identifying oneself by ready-made labels, like "experimental" or "conservative" composer. During some periods, Luening has been portrayed as America's most experimental composer. For example, in collaboration with Vladimir Ussachevsky, he produced the first electronic pieces on this hemisphere, developed means to combine acoustic and electronic instruments, and helped form an audience for electronic music; he knew Benny Goodman, "Fatha" Hines, and other members of the Chicago jazz school in the early twenties and wrote a large scale concert jazz piece with Ernst Bacon, Coal Scuttle Blues, before Ellington or Gershwin; became immersed in Vedic philosophy nearly seventy years ago, and as a result wrote the Trio for Flute, Violin, & Soprano,  as Henry Cowell stated, the first aleatoric concert work; performed as a pianist/composer for the original Dada events with Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara in Zurich in 1917; wrote some of the first music based directly on the overtone series as explored by the German polymath Helmholtz; studied Schonberg's Harmonielehre when he was twelve years old; and was a close confidant of Edgar Varese, Cowell, Carl Sandburg, Martha Graham, and Harry Partch - in fact, Partch thought that Luening, who arranged his first New York concert, first financial backing for his work, and critiqued his theoretical works, was his earliest major supporter in the musical world and asked him write the introduction for Genesis of a Music.

But Luening's music also comes from Wagner, with whom Otto's father closely collaborated, Richard Strauss, and his teachers Busoni and Philipp Jarnach. He says that he  became hooked on music by singing folk songs as a small child on the farm in Wisconsin. Like Bach, Brahms, and other musicians of the European "classical" tradition, he practiced music from different perspectives; as conductor, composer, a performer on flute, piano, organ, and percussion. His experience as a conductor alone is astounding; after working under the greats of the early part of the century (he maintains a particular fondness for Arthur Nikisch and Strauss), he conducted in Zurich, in vaudeville, on Broadway, for the first opera company devoted to American opera and opera orchestras formed by the W.P.A., premiered Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All and Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium, revived Paisiello's Barber of Seville, and led a Croatian folk choir based in a Chicago tavern. And in his seventies when he noticed he had begun to lose some of his amazing power of memory, he reversed the decline through daily memorization of a new movement from Haydn's piano sonatas. (Otto will read through your orchestra score and later quote to you what the French horns are doing on the two hundredth measure.)

All this makes Luening an uncomfortable subject for music writers and musicologists, who need to invent categories and hierarchies to try to make sense of a complex real world. Luening says that he has long felt justified in using any style to make a musical statement and that he will tailor the style to the temperament and specialties of a particular performer. Still, one of his favorite pieces of advice for the em-erging composer (Otto now refers to himself as a sub-merging composer, and feels a great kinship between the two) is "Don't let them tell you who you are. You tell them who you are."

Luening's perspective on the history of the culture can be a bracing tonic. Recently we discussed cocaine abuse in New York. He said, "This is the third cocaine epidemic I've experienced. The first was in Wisconsin, when some of my father's university students were addicted to cocaine sold as patent medicines in pharmacies. The second was in Zurich during World War I, when many of Jung's followers and the Dadaists developed a habit." Indeed, one can be quite intimidated knowing that the man to whom you are speaking followed Lenin and his entourage as they boarded the train on their return to Russia following the Bolshevik revolution, that he attempted to visit the Dachau concentration camp in 1936, that he investigated the musical foundations of Irish-spoken English with James Joyce during the period Joyce was writing Ulysses, that he knew the traditional culture of the Bavarian peasants as a participant. Whenever one demonstrates something one thinks is a new musical idea to Otto, he will say "Well, you know this direction was explored in detail by such and such fifty or several hundred years ago. You really should study the scores of Byrd, or Carpenter, or Debussy, or Ziehn, or Varese, and see how they did it." I find that Otto is always right about recommending these unexpected sources and suspect that the innumerable composers and performers he has supported over the years have found the same thing.

Luening's perspective also provides the foundation for an amazing iconoclasm in taste. For instance, during my last visit he was rhapsodic in praise for the contemporary composer/flutist Robert Dick and the singer/composer Mary Jane Leach. These opinions are startling not because Luening has more than fifty years of experience over these musicians, but because he doesn't feel any need to be cautious and wait until their work has been established into some hierarchy. One comment he made was "People say that Leach's music is hard to listen to. Well, Beethoven's music is hard to listen to - at first." He has also expressed enthusiasm to me for works by the Bulgarian Woman's Choir, Gil Evans, Gyorgi Ligeti, and Frank Zappa.

Luening's interest in creating a climate for others to make music led him to cofound artist's cooperatives including the American Music Center and CRI Records. This selfless support of those who would be creative musicians continues, and he is currently coaching a composer just out of college, Dan Cooper. Dan joins a list of such stylistic breadth that only Otto could understand it, including Harvey Sollberger, Gil Goldstein, Partch, John Corigliano, Ezra Laderman, Nicholas Russakis, Malcolm Goldstein, William Hellerman, Charles Wuorinen, Alice Shields, William Kraft, and Wendy Carlos. Yet despite the fact that these people and the many others may feel as if they have nothing in common, they seem unified in following some of the specific lessons that Luening teaches. Among these are 1) Pay attention to register, since counterpoint changes according to the audibility of overtones, a point he thinks neglected in musical education. He also feels that careful study of counterpoint is important no matter what one's style, and that even if one's writing is not contrapuntal, all good composers are united with a foundation in contrapuntal hearing. 2) Pay attention to dynamics and phrase markings, parts of the language of written music that also feels are usually insufficiently addressed. 3) Acquire real life experience as a performer, whether as an instrumentalist or conductor. 4) Study cultural history, because "what is old is new". He also repeats Busoni's maxim that every experiment needs to result in a piece with a beginning, middle, and end. 5) There is no handed-down path for a composer, and everyone must try to figure it out as an individual. This point seems to grow out of Luening's lifelong personal motto and koan, "Know thyself, physician heal thyself."

Beyond his concern for the artistic development of others, Luening continues his own musical odyssey. For the latest addition to his canon of over fifty orchestral works, we thank the wonderful young conductor Richard Auldon Clark and his Manhattan Chamber Orchestra. Luening tells me that he would like to continue in this direction, particularly in writing shorter orchestra pieces, but is somewhat concerned about the costs of copying parts. Frankly, this country should not allow such a situation and one hopes that the evidence on this recording will generate support for Luening's continued orchestral compositions. Still, just as he would advise emerging composers, he is currently writing for smaller forces, setting poems from James Joyce's Chamber Music for voice and piano. Although others can set these poems to music, only Luening was a member of Joyce's theater troupe, The English Players, in Zurich during the second decade of the century, and only Luening was coached by Joyce in his approach to words and diction. This return to a singular personal history tempered by a tremendous journey of development in discipline, achievement, and reflection, results in the individual perspective that makes the work of artists like Joyce and Luening so important for the wide world.

“She’s lightning when she smiles” – Transcriptions of recorded blues 1926-1966

I began transcribing and arranging old records after listening to Robert Johnson's If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day. The performance gave me the feeling that Johnson, who I later heard was a Count Basie fan, was thinking of a big band orchestration even while playing the parts on solo guitar. When I wrote a big band arrangement of this piece and some Skip James songs for a concert at Gorgio Gomelski's club Plugs in 1983, my eyes opened to how deep and complex the music really is. The polyrhythms and microtonal intervals of the originals are so unforced and natural that listeners are unaware of them. The goal I've set is to try not to smooth over the weird patches and keep all of the strange pitches, rhythms, and phrasing that I can understand. As I continued to transcribe and arrange the work of great blues musicians, it became a school, and although I'm not a rhythm and blues performer, it has been a place from which in part my own compositions have grown. An invitation from Art at St. Ann's to perform a concert of blues transcriptions gave me a chance to pay tribute to this music. Some of the musicians are considered classics by millions of listeners while others are mysteriously ignored and seem to live on by altering the course of those fortunate enough to encounter them, the way that I suspect Robert Pete Williams helped beget Captain Beefheart.