CDOTD 5/8/2023

 Anthony Braxton: Piano Music (Notated) 1968-1988 (hat ART) discs one and two

Purchased on sale from Cadence/North Country

I was frustrated for a long time with the meaning of Braxton's pictographic titles. What was the purpose? How were they related to the works? Was something deeper going on?

(This assumes the reader knows about this. Anthony Braxton gives the titles of each of his work some sort of picture or diagram as a title instead of the traditional words.)

Eventually I figured some things out, made some realizations. 

What do you name something when you aren't drawing inspiration from anything extramusical, and there are no lyrics involved? I have to deal with this often. One of my solutions is to lean towards the absurd: pieces named for tools ("Power Strip", "Scroll Saw", "Torque Wrench", "Duck Bill Hammer") or elements and compounds ("Boron", "Carbon 60", "Ammonium", "Magnesium").  The Braxton pictographic titles take this idea much further, removing extramusical meaning altogether (at least in his early works). 

I'm sure in some cases, the titles are an intuitive response to the energy and shape of each piece. Anthony himself I think would say there's a connection, but I've studied enough of the works to say that I don't find a direct connection with the forms and the visuals. 

Once he started creating the titles, I think it became a system unto itself. That is, what makes an Anthony Braxton work? One thing is that he titles his pieces in a novel manner. If you make a title of a work that looks like a diagram, it inherently refers back to Braxton.

The titles themselves have developed over time, and sometimes you can tell approximately the time it was created by the appearance of the title. The earliest as spare, a few letters, numbers, connecting lines, and such. The graphics of the titles became more elaborate in the 70s and 80s, taking on simulated 3D qualities. This later led to works that looked like an illustration, and were connected to some sort of actual narrative story. In the 1990s during the era of the first Ghost Trance Musics series, he started cutting out pictures and collaging them into the titles. It's an ongoing story.

And then finally, why not? Why not title pieces in this way? Why do titles have to be words? And why did it bother me at one time that I didn't understand it? There's actually not that much to understand. 

I bought this when there was a big clearance sale of hat Art CDs from North Country. They were generally a new-jazz label, often focusing on European artists. For a time they were releasing classical/avant-garde recordings: a lot of Morton Feldman, Giacinto Scelsi, John Cage, the "Bad Boys" (Ornstein, Antheil, Cowell), all very high quality. I don't know, maybe they didn't sell well, and then they funding from UBS Bank dried up. 

This four CD set collects Braxton's piano-specific compositions, three pieces from the late 1960s, four from the mid 1970s, and a single piece from 1988. The earliest is in fact his Opus 1, the only work in his catalog without a pictographic title ("Piano Piece No. 1") from 1968. These early works (#s 1, 5, 10) find Anthony using elements of modernist language, but his methods are not methodical in the manner of someone like Milton Babbitt. There's no tonality, fleeting suggestions of melody only to be wiped away, often many wide intervallic jumps. While they are compositions in a fixed state, they resemble improvisations that have been captured. 

Composition 16 from 1971 is set for four pianos. I don't know the score, but I doubt it's traditionally notated. Braxton moves further away from the idea of lines here, and more towards textures and densities. There are areas of group trills/tremolos, some percussive sounds, some inside the piano playing. 

The second disc and most of discs three and four are taken up by the mid-70s piano works, compositions # 30-33. I'd have to look up Anthony's mission statement regarding his music, but he has in so many words say, any piece may be played by any instrument, any speed, in any combination or separately. If you know his body of work, this idea works much more effectively than others: his relatively famous march from the Creative Music Orchestra 1978 where this wouldn't so much be the case. I don't know when that statement was made, it seems made for these piano pieces. Indeed, Marilyn Crispell frequently used the as collage materials in the great mid-80s quartet. 

It's hard to say that there's an essential difference between compositions 33 and 30 on disc two; there's a high emphasis on tone clusters throughout the 30 piano series. 30 seems to be more difficult (I'd even say very difficult to play correctly), higher energy, more virtuosity. But they're of a similar nature in general. 

I'm happy this document exists, and yet, forty-two minutes of composition 30? And 31 taking up all of disc four? It's more than anyone needs as a standalone performance. But there it is. Here is Braxton the composer, in his unfettered form, take it or leave it. Another piece of the puzzle filled in.