The
1920s and 1930s were a fertile time for experimental music in America.
Composers such as Henry Cowell, George Antheil, William Russell—and very soon
after, John Cage—explored an expanded palette of sounds as well as methods of
musical organization. Percussion ensembles played an important if not always
fully acknowledged role in the development of what Cowell and others have termed
the American Experimental Tradition; Christopher Shultis, a percussionist who
later turned to composition and the study of modern American music in
historical context, was not only aware of the importance of percussion for the
experimental tradition, but through his music and musicology has situated
himself within that tradition.
Shultis
(b. 1957) came to composition relatively late, after having established himself
as a gifted percussionist conversant with a wide repertoire. A professor
emeritus of the University of New Mexico, Shultis became director of the
percussion program there at age 22, and led the University of New Mexico
Percussion Ensemble. Beyond performance, he contributed to furthering new music
through his establishment of a composers’ symposium which took place annually
for thirty years. A neck injury which manifested itself in hand pain forced an
end to his career as a performer; he stopped performing altogether in 1994 and redirected
his energy not only toward composition, but toward American Studies and
musicology, in which field he published a book on John Cage—whom he met at the
1988 Composers Symposium--and the roots of American experimental music.
Realizations
of five of Shultis’s early compositions, dating between 1988 and 1992, appear
on the CD An Illusion of Desire [Neuma 450-115]. Two of the five are centered
on percussion, while the other three are scored for voice and electronics,
theremin, and voice, crotales and piano. All are from what Shultis refers to as
his “experimental period” and consequently are informed by his deeply
cultivated sense of the sound worlds, gestures and philosophy of American
experimentalism.
Oneiro (1988/1992), a work for
percussion trio, and 4-7-3
(1989/2015), for percussion duet and electronics, continue the tradition of the
percussion ensemble as a medium for experimental work concerned with the
enrichment of musical timbre. Shultis wrote the two works to be played by
himself; the deliberately non-virtuosic demands they place on the performer
reflect the physical limitations his injury imposed on his own ability to play.
Both pieces are long, slowly unfolding settings for deliberately-spaced
events—as much clearings in which sounds can be as they are self-conscious
works of art. Oneiro explores the rich
variety of sounds made by struck metals and glass, while 4-7-3, which Shultis rewrote in 2015, incorporates into a new
performance of piano, crotales, percussion and vibraphone a recording of
Shultis on tam-tam that had been made for the work when it was originally
written.
With
their sparse and open textures, both of these works are susceptible to what
Shultis in a 2000 interview in Peer Magazine termed “the inclusion of the
unintentional outside.” They are consistent with that kind of experimental work
that stands at a point of erasure, where the delineation of inside and outside
is at least potentially effaced. This is achieved through a permeability of
texture wherein the work is organized in such a way that outside sounds are let
in, and its relationship to its surroundings becomes part of its internal
meaning. Cage’s 4’33” is an extreme
example of the permeable work, but whether through Cage’s piece or through the
incorporation of non-musical sounds into earlier and subsequent experimental
works, permeability has become an established feature of the experimental
tradition.
Other works on the recording draw on unusual timbres, as does Gesturing Hands for theremin, or explicitly
foreground the process of their making. An example of the latter, Metaphysics, for voice and eight tape
recorders, builds ever-thickening layers of sound from an ongoing system of
accumulation. Starting with Shultis’s speaking voice, it records, replays and
records iteratively until the voice seems to become lost in a forest of its own
echoes.
After
the late 1990s, Shultis seems to have undergone a turn away from a primary
concern with experimentalism and toward more conventional, fully notated
compositions. Much of the later work was
inspired by his encounters with the natural environment of New Mexico; some of
it is collected on the aptly titled CD Devisadero: Music from the New Mexico
Wilderness [Navona NV 5849] which appeared in 2011. The recording includes
works for orchestra and for piano, as well as songs for soprano. The earliest
work, “a little light, in great darkness”
for soprano saxophone and woodwind quartet, is dated 1995-2000 and may capture
a transitional moment bridging Shultis’s experimental and post-experimental
periods. This fourteen-minute-long piece shows a move toward a more
conventionally modernist harmonic vocabulary, but retains the open texture of
the earlier work, often having individual instruments play single tones
bracketed by silences. In its co-situating
of experimental and conventional musical properties, “a little light, a great darkness” embodies what Shultis in the
2000 interview called his preference for “the Janus-face-like nature of the
world”–a world where seemingly opposed phenomena reveal their mutual
dependence.