By Robert Barry
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Philip Corner, Deborah Walker, Sofi Hémon and Thierry Madiot rehearsing 'Another Long-Line Pièce' by Philip Corner. Photo: Sandra Giura Longo
In 1969, at the height of American involvement in the Vietnam War, composer Philip Corner wrote a piece entitled ‘An anti-personnel CBU-type cluster bomb unit will be thrown into the audience’. ‘Everybody was concerned at the time with how to make a political statement,’ he explains to me in Montreuil, a suburb of Paris, on the occasion of a concert in celebration of his 80th birthday at a club called Instants Chavirés. ‘I just got very dissatisfied with it, especially when it became a cliché of pop music. Everybody was doing a protest song. I realized, it’s just aesthetics. This isn’t stopping the war. It’s not doing anything politically. So I got very disgusted with it. And this was the only thing I could think of to do that would have any kind of a socially relevant charge at all.’
The idea of the piece was that, having announced the title in the concert programme, the performance would consist of its sudden cancellation. Except it didn’t work out that way. Another composer involved in the show threatened to withdraw from the event unless Corner’s piece was removed from the programme beforehand. Corner says he asked the composer, ‘What’s your objection to it?’. ‘I would believe that you would do it,’ the other composer replied. ‘I wouldn’t sit in the audience if somebody said that with all these cockamamie people and craziness going on. Who could not think that somebody might actually do that? I’d get out of the place.’ So Corner withdrew the piece. He won’t tell me who the other composer was. But with a wry smile he does promise that a ‘new version’ of the piece will be performed tonight.
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Philip Corner and Phoebe Neville at Corner’s 80th birthday celebration. Photo: Laura Albiero
Corner was born in the Bronx, in New York, and started playing piano at age 13, for reasons he describes now as ‘a mystery’. Shortly thereafter he ‘somehow got the idea that I wanted to be a composer.’ He attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, and recalls his teachers there as ‘a bunch of narrow-minded, ignorant fuddy-duddies.’ In particular, he mentions one occasion when he was asked to write a rondo for piano and trombone. Halfway through playing the piece to class, the teacher stopped him, insisting, ‘That’s not a rondo!’ Before Corner got a chance to explain how the themes were being developed, the teacher got ‘really hostile. And the other students, they couldn’t care less.’ But as he walked out of class, feeling dejected, one girl stopped him in the corridor to say she thought the piece was wonderful. ‘My whole life’, he tells me, ‘I’ve been playing for that one girl.’
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Félicie Bazelaire of Ensemble Hodos perform at Corner’s birthday celebration. Photo: Jeff Humbert
He would go on to study with some of the most iconoclastic composers of the 20th century: Henry Cowell, Olivier Messiaen and the electronic music pioneer Otto Luening. Since then his work has embraced collage, painting, assemblages, poetry and calligraphy, as well as a wide variety of music from traditional orchestral pieces to graphic scores, improvised or indeterminate works and text pieces.
Returning to the US from military service in Korea in 1961, Corner found himself amongst the milieu that would come to be known as the Fluxus group; though at the time, he says, Fluxus was just ‘one more organization among hundreds of small publishers and self-produced artists and everything else.’ Corner had a Fluxus name card and his Piano Activities was performed at the Wiesbaden Festival in 1962, though he did not attend the festival and his work was never exhibited in George Maciunas’s short-lived AG Gallery, an omission he claims ‘didn’t seem all that important. George doesn’t want my work, well that’s tough titty.’ Corner knew Maciunas well and though he thinks ‘its funny, what it’s come to mean and how it’s blossomed,’ he does grant that ‘the word “Fluxus” itself is a work of genius.’
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Ensemble Hodos. Photo: Sandra Giura Longo
I arrived early for the interview and caught a little of cellist Deborah Walker and trombonist Thierry Madiot rehearsing Another Long-Line Piece for D.W. and T.M. by S.H. from Philip Corner’s Piece for Malcolm Goldstein by Elisabeth Munro. In 1962, Corner had artist Elisabeth Munro draw a long wavy pencil line on an adding machine scroll and presented it as a score to violinist Malcolm Goldstein. The original scroll was lost long ago, but listening to Goldstein’s recording of the piece, French artist Sofi Hémon has produced a new line (in ink this time) for Walker and Madiot to interpret. It’s fascinating watching Corner’s reaction to their playing (‘I could have sworn Malcolm was in the room just then!’ he exclaims at Walker’s cello playing). He is clearly rapt that they have surprised him with this piece, but every once in a while he will very gently suggest one or another point in relation to the interpretation of the graphic score. It’s a very different image of the composer-performer relationship than one gets from the classic image of Beethoven or Berlioz, brow-furrowed and domineering at the conductor’s podium. He tells me that this is ‘really the essence of my music’, which is about a situation in which ‘the composer him or herself might enter into the play and yet a certain amount of freedom is left for the performance.’
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Guy-Franck Pellerin. Photo: Laura Albiero
Corner’s wife and frequent collaborator, the choreographer Phoebe Neville, is in the room as we chat and at her prompting, he tells me a story about a similar thing that happened in Madrid 30 years ago. In the midst of a two-month residency there, Corner was working with the Orquesta de Las Nubes on a performance of his piece Gamelan II. The text score requires each successively lower pitch to play one more beat to the bar than the last. The group were playing the piece for a set of roughly-tuned ceramic plant pots with each player hitting two pots, one for each hand, such that some were playing fiendishly difficult rhythms, like 13 beats on one hand and 17 on the other. After some practice they finally got all the different rhythms phasing properly against each other, but somehow the piece just sounded flat. Finally, the thought struck him: ‘I stopped and I said, look, it sounds like an exercise, what would it be like if it were music?’ He can’t help laughing as he retells the story. ‘And they started up again and it just transformed itself!’
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Sandra Giura Longo and Dario Lo Cicero playing “T(h)rill” by Philip Corner. Photo: Deborah Walker
The benefit of writing scores in words as opposed to notes on a stave, Corner sums up as the possibility of giving performers ‘a generic, not a specific’. This drive towards inclusiveness reached a kind of zenith in the mid-1960s with a piece summed up by a title which is simplicity itself: One Note Once (1964) existed first as a trombone solo, later for almost every imaginable instrument. In 1968, on the occasion of Charlotte Moorman’s fifth annual Avant-Garde Festival, Corner figured, ‘If you can do it with a note, you can do it with a noise’ and the sound of James Tenney’s car starting up became a loop blasting out of a sound truck, driving up and down Central Park West. Though he forgets what he named this performance at the time, Corner looks back on it now as the first ‘Piece of Reality’. It opened worlds of possibility. After all, ‘if you can do it with a noise, then it’s just any object.’ Since then, the series ‘Pieces of Reality’ has expanded to include any number of found objects that happened to appeal to Corner at the time, from stones, broken drumsticks, a mirror, often – though not always – placed in a box or a frame. Recently, he tells me, he’s done a whole set of tangerine peels. ‘Of course, you know, people can just peel it and throw it,’ he says, ‘but if you make sure that you peel it so there’s a circle and the thing comes out well, you might say, oh, I’ll keep that on the table for a few days. I like to look at it. Then maybe I’ll glue it onto a piece of paper or something.’ His favourite restaurant in the small Italian town of Reggio Emilia, where he has lived since 1992, is now entirely decorated with these framed tangerine peels.
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Valentine Verhaeghe. Photo: Jeff Humbert
Recently, however, he tells me he’s been ‘trying to wind down the stuff. To make a call up there and tell my muse: “I don’t want anymore!”’ Still, he continues to perform and to release recordings (three this year alone). ‘Every once in a while I still get an idea,’ he confesses. The latest was an addition to another long running series of works called ‘As A Revelation’. This started at a concert in 1969 when he took just six measures of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C minor (K.491), slowed them right down and played it over and over again. He has since applied the same basic approach to Chopin preludes, Erik Satie’s Sonneries de la Rose-Croix, and now Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. ‘It came out of practising,’ he says simply, ‘when you have to slow things down.’ But it’s evidently grown into something of a philosophy. ‘Western music is so impatient,’ he says wearily. ‘It’s music for people who don’t really want to listen to music.’
Later that night, at Instants Chavirés, a performance by flautist Dario Lo Cicero of Corner’s Another Tunings (2005) comes to an end and the composer stands up to embrace the performer warmly. The next item on the programme reads ‘Philip Corner – Last Political Piece.’ Cellist Deborah Walker bursts in from the back of the room, yelling, ‘Philip! An urgent message has come for you. The concert will be attacked by an SSW drone in two minutes!’ Corner looks shocked and barges through the crowd and out the back door to the general bemusement of those in attendance. A few minutes pass before he re-emerges, ‘Deborah, that was great!’ he says, ‘but no-one believed it.’ ‘Well’, she replies in lackadaisical French, ‘that’s the 21st century.’
Robert Barry is freelance writer and composer, based in Paris. His music can be heard at littleother.blogspot.com
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