The Vocal Constructivists
Walking Still
innova 898

1 Mark Applebaum - Medium (2008) 10’08
2 Ronald Kuivila - A City of No Allusions (2012) 8’36
3 Pauline Oliveros - Sound Patterns (1961) 3’58
4 Lauren Redhead - concerto (2011) 6’41
5 Michael Parsons - Nevrazumitelny (2013) 8’05
Cornelius Cardew - Treatise (1963–67)  
6 Treatise  ‘movement 1’, pages 18-45 8’51
7 Treatise  ‘movement 2’, pages 111-135 7’05
8 Treatise  ‘movement 3’, pages 145-166 7’30
9 Treatise  ‘movement 4’, pages 174-190 5’40
Total  66’34

Sopranos: Jane Alden, Stef Conner, Alison Cross, Iris Ederer, Rebecca Hardwick, Penny Homer, Celia Jackson
Altos: Barbara Alden, Linn D., Rachel Hewitt, Jill House, Celia Springate, Ali Warner
Tenors: James Bull, George Chambers, Charles Céleste Hutchins, Simon Walton
Basses: Aubrey Botsford, Peter Johnson, John McLeod, Kevin Raftery, Stephen Rice, David Till
Production: Antony Pitts, Erik Nyström
www.vocalconstructivists.com 
twitter @constructivists

Walking Still brings into dialogue three British and three American composers, from generations born in the 1930s, the 1950s/60s, and the 1980s, who share a distinct approach to experimentalism. Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise (composed between 1963 and 1967) remains one of the most iconic graphic scores ever written. Its 193 pages include a variety of shapes, symbols, numbers, lines, and elements of traditional musical notation that have been extended, truncated, and fragmented. Cardew provided no key to decipher the notation, requiring musicians to devise their own methods and means of interpretation. Precise pitches, rhythms, tempi, registration, style, and instrumentation are all left for the performers to decide. The general character of the work is given in the title: this piece is an exhaustive investigation, or ‘treatment’, of a number of related topics.

Walking Still offers the first recorded choral performance of Cardew’s Treatise. The fact that this monumental work has not hitherto attracted the attention of choirs is surprising, given Cardew’s own choral background (as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral), and his biographer John Tilbury’s suggestion that anthropocentric interests motivated Cardew’s exploration of indeterminate notation. But performances of experimental music still tend to be dominated by instrumental rather than choral ensembles. The Vocal Constructivists made history by giving the first ever sung performance of Treatise, in the South London Gallery in 2011. 

Among the many influences on Cardew’s Treatise was the Fluxus movement and its interest in everyday activities, such as walking, transposed into a performance context. Our album title, Walking Still, makes reference to Michael Parsons’ Walk, a piece of visual counterpoint written for the Scratch Orchestra in 1969. The contradiction implied by ‘walking still’ also refers to the interpretative challenge of performing historical works. The Vocal Constructivists walk the fine line between the past and the present by connecting the older pieces on the album to the more recent compositions, exploring the differences as well as the commonalities between the two musical eras.
Parsons wrote Nevrazumitelny for the Vocal Constructivists in 2013, based on a poem by Wendy Mulford. The title is Russian for ‘unreadable’. The poem juxtaposes complex, fractured imagery from diverse sources—walking the coast path near Land’s End, harsh working conditions in the Cornish quarries and tin mines, telescopic vision, and distancing, the poem as framing device, writing as a way of coming to terms with the passage of time. This setting for voices and percussion sounds (made using stones) selects words from Mulford’s poem and also uses phonetic transformations derived from the text. 

The title of Lauren Redhead’s concerto, which connotes ‘traditional’ and historical approaches to music-making, might seem at odds with the open notation of its score. As a concerto, the performance highlights both the individual roles of the performers and the group relationships within the ensemble. This devised performance was created by the Vocal Constructivists in ‘collaboration’ with the score. As a response to notation, the performance invites consideration of all of the social activities and relationships connected with music, including composing and performing, but also listening, moving, thinking, and discussing—what Christopher Small calls ‘musicking’. This work makes a concerto of the relationship between notation and individuals.

Pauline Oliveros’ Sound Patterns won the Gaudeamus International Composers Award in 1962. Constructed of phonetic sounds chosen on the basis of their timbre, the piece is precisely notated, with only one measure of controlled improvisation. The sounds, possibly reflecting Oliveros’ then nascent interest in electronic music, can be grouped into four categories: white noise (the consonants and phonemic clusters sh, s, z, wh, p, t, h, ct, d, ch, th, k, and sw), ring-modulated sounds (rapidly changing vowel content), percussive envelopes (lip pops, tongue clicks, finger snaps, and lip flutters), and filter techniques (muting by covering the mouth with a hand, humming, or singing through clenched teeth). Sound Patterns was written around the same time as Dieter Schnebel’s Glossolalie (1959–61) and slightly predates Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Momente (1961–62, revised 1965) and György Ligeti’s Aventures (1962) and Nouvelles Aventures (1962–65), which incorporate similar sounds. 

Ronald Kuivila wrote A City of No Allusions for the Vocal Constructivists in 2012. The title refers, somewhat self-contradictorily, to Buffalo, NY (which has been called, with affection, the ‘city of no illusions’). The piece focuses on interference patterns in the overtones of softly singing voices. Singers move through the circle of fifths at various rates, in order to create a sense of harmonic suspension within which to focus on the activity of the overtones. They are instructed to sing each new pitch as accurately as possible, but make no attempt to correct if it drifts slightly sharp or flat. Reference singers slowly outline the circle of fifths, and are mirrored and followed by text singers, who very slowly declaim each phoneme of the text, taking care not to get more than two transpositions ahead of or behind their reference singer. The text is taken from an interview with Morton Feldman. Unvoiced consonants are audible only at the beginnings and endings of lines. 

Mark Applebaum’s Medium is a musical work for any four instrumentalists or vocalists (here performed by fifteen singers) who rigorously interpret its mercurial spray of pictographs. Medium was originally commissioned by the Quiet Music Festival, in Ireland. The score consists of a number of separate leaves—pages hand-drawn, using pens, drafting templates, French curves, and straight edges. Some of the leaves serve as accompaniment figures while others are arranged in any order and function as ingress and egress canons during which players enter and exit the stage. The main section of the piece is its ‘quartet’, a series of sixteen bound pages that suggest a continuous musical discourse. The score does not invite improvisation; players are charged with the task of predetermining ‘a thoughtful means to sonify (with exactitude) an inferred musicality’. There are several mediums at play: the work is multi-media (moving between visual art and music); the score is a medium, presenting a conceptual substance through which the expressive energy of musicians must pass; and, as a non-standard notation presented to imaginative, inventive performers, it is as much a musical filter as a musical prescription. And lastly, the work represents a middle state between spatial right and left, between the ceremony of performance and the routine of not performance.

Composer biographies

Mark Applebaum (born 1967) is Associate Professor of Composition at Stanford University. His solo, chamber, choral, orchestral, operatic, and electroacoustic work has been performed on six continents, with notable premieres at the Darmstadt summer sessions. His music can be heard on the Innova, Tzadik, Capstone, and SEAMUS labels. Many of his pieces are characterized by challenges to conventional musical boundaries: works for three conductors and no players, a concerto for florist and orchestra, pieces for instruments made of junk, notational specifications that appear on the faces of custom wristwatches, works for an invented sign language choreographed to sound, a chamber work comprised of obsessive page turns, and a 72-foot long graphic score with no instructions for its interpretation. Applebaum is also an accomplished jazz pianist and builder of electroacoustic sound-sculptures.  

Cornelius Cardew (1936–1981) was a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral School, studied piano and cello at the Royal Academy of Music, and electronic music in Cologne for a year before becoming Karlheinz Stockhausen’s assistant (1958–60). Returning to London, he pioneered performances of Cage, Feldman, Stockhausen, La Monte Young, Riley, Wolff, Rzewski, and others. He studied graphic design and worked intermittently as a graphic artist/researcher. In 1966, he joined the free improvisation group AMM. While teaching an experimental music class at Morley College in 1968–69, he formed the Scratch Orchestra together with Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton. 
In the 1970s, Cardew became more directly involved in politics, joining People’s Liberation Music, the Progressive Cultural Association, and was a founder member of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). He published Stockhausen Serves Imperialism (London: Latimer New Dimensions, 1974), which included a critique of both his former work and that of Stockhausen and Cage. He had just initiated work in Britain on the RCPB(ML)’s Second International Sports and Cultural Festival, which was held during 1982, and had begun a Master’s degree in Theory and Analysis at King’s College, London, when he was tragically killed by a hit-and-run driver near his home in Leyton, East London. 

Ronald Kuivila (born 1955), University Professor of Music at Wesleyan University, composes music and designs sound installations that revolve around the unusual homemade and home-modified electronic instruments he designs. He pioneered the use of ultrasound (In Appreciation) and sound sampling (Alphabet) in live performance. Other pieces have explored compositional algorithms (Loose Canons), speech synthesis (The Linear Predictive Zoo), and high voltage phenomena (Pythagorean Puppet Theatre). Kuivila has performed and exhibited installations throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. 

Pauline Oliveros (born 1932), Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is a composer, performer, musical pioneer, and humanitarian. Acclaimed internationally, over the last 50 years she has explored sound, breaking new ground for herself and others. Through Deep Listening Pieces and earlier Sonic 
Meditations, Oliveros introduced the concept of incorporating all environmental sounds into musical performance. To make a pleasurable experience of this requires focused concentration, skilled musicianship, and strong improvisational skills, which are the hallmarks of Oliveros’ work. Oliveros has been celebrated worldwide: her two-channel tape composition Bye Bye Butterfly (1965) was described by John Rockwell as one of the most significant works of the 1960s; in 1970, Oliveros represented the US at the World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan; in the 1980s, she was honored with a retrospective at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC; she received a letter of distinction in the 1990s from the American Music Center, presented at Lincoln Center in New York; in 2000, her work was celebrated with the commissioning and performance of her Lunar Opera: Deep Listening For Tunes; and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts named Oliveros the winner of the John Cage Award for 2012.
Michael Parsons (born 1938) studied Classics at St John’s College, Oxford, and piano and composition at the Royal College of Music, London (1957–62). His early compositions were influenced by Schoenberg, Webern, and the European avant-garde, but during the 1960s he became more involved with indeterminacy and experimental music. In 1969, he was co-founder of the Scratch Orchestra with Cornelius Cardew and Howard Skempton. While teaching in art schools in the 1970s he was associated with the Systems group of visual artists, and wrote participatory pieces for untrained performers and environmental works such as Echo Piece (performed on a frozen lake in Finland in 1976). Recent works include versions of choral odes from Sophocles’ Antigone, Three Sappho Lyrics, settings of Alkman and Ibycus (for the Finnish vocal ensemble Fiori), Paraphrase for orchestra (Basel Sinfonietta commission, 2011), Nevrazumitelny for the Vocal Constructivists, and Concertante, for Tania Chen and the Magnitude Ensemble (Spitalfields Festival commission, 2014).

Lauren Redhead (born 1985) is a composer, performer, and musicologist from the north of England. Her music has been performed by international artists such as Ian Pace, the Nieuw Ensemble, Trio Atem, Philip Thomas, BL!NDMAN ensemble, and rarescale, and she has received commissions from Yorkshire Forward, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Making Music and the PRSF for Music, and Octopus Collective with the Arts Council of England. Her opera, green angel, was premiered in January 2011 with the support of the Arts Council of England. Her music has been performed at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, the London Ear Festival, the Full of Noises Festival in Barrow, and many locations throughout the UK and Europe. As an organ performer she has premiered notable works of experimental music by Chris Newman, Nick Williams, John Lely, and Scott McLaughlin, amongothers. In 2013, she made her debut organ performance in North America at Wesleyan University. A CD of her chamber works, tactile figures, was released on the engraved glass label in 2012.

Performers

The Vocal Constructivists (formed by Jane Alden in 2011) specialize in the performance of text and graphic scores, alongside works that extend ‘traditional’ notation. The group comprises 23 singers, of various musical backgrounds, whose ages range from 18 to 72. In addition to performing experimental works by Anthony Braxton, Cornelius Cardew, Pauline Oliveros, Bogusław Schäffer and Christian Wolff, they have given premieres of works by George Chambers, Jan Duszyński, Charles Céleste Hutchins, Ronald Kuivila, Paula Matthusen, Michael Parsons, and Lauren Redhead. Idiosyncratic notation is exp-lored as a form of social practice, the scores supplying open-ended vocabulary for collective discourse. Coming from diverse backgrounds, the group draws on a variety of artistic influences—classical, global, avant-garde, and performance art. All interpretative decisions are made by members of the group, worked out in collaboration.

Jane Alden, founder and director of the Vocal Constructivists, is Associate Professor and Chair of Music at Wesleyan University, CT and a Fellow of the Institute for Musical Research, University of London. Her research and publications address manuscript production, patronage, reception history, musical notation, and visual culture in the medieval and modern eras. She is currently writing a book on the Scratch Orchestra and participatory music-making in London. Alden is active as a singer and conductor, seeing performance as the most effective way to reach out beyond academia to communicate with a wider public. 

Stephen Rice, co-conductor of the Vocal Constructivists (tracks 1, 5, 6–9), is a lecturer in music at the University of Southampton, where he held (2008–2011) a Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. A choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, he founded the Brabant Ensemble 
(www.brabantensemble.com) in 1998, a group that has established a worldwide reputation for high-quality performances of 16th-century polyphonic music.
Simon Walton, co-conductor of the Vocal Constructivists (tracks 3 and 4), is active as a performer, teacher, coach, and musical director. In addition to con-ducting, he has worked professionally as a flute player and singer, performing, recording, and broadcasting with a wide variety of ensembles, including Ensemble InterContemporain at IRCAM, Opéra de Lyon, Osterfestspiel in Salzburg (Berliner Philharmoniker) and the choirs of the London Oratory and Westminster Abbey. He teaches at University College School, London. 

Production 

Antony Pitts, producer and editor, is a composer and sound designer, formerly a Senior Lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music and Senior Producer at BBC Radio 3, and recipient of the Radio Academy BT Award (1995) and the Prix Italia (2004). A treble in the Chapel Royal, he was Academic and Honorary Senior Scholar at New College, Oxford where he founded TONUS PEREGRINUS, winning a Cannes Classical Award (2004) for their #1 debut album Passio. His music has been premiered at the Wigmore Hall, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Berlin Philharmonie Kammermusiksaal, and is available on 1equalmusic, Hyperion, Harmonia Mundi, Naxos, Signum, and Unknown Public. 
Erik Nyström, acousmatic composer and sound engineer, studied recording arts at the School of Audio Engineering (London), computer music composition at CCMIX, Paris, and electroacoustic composition at City University, London, where he received the M.A. and Ph.D. His work specializes in the recording of contemporary music, often involving challenging logistics; his compositions are widely played at festivals and conferences.

Acknowledgements

I offer deepest thanks to the singers for all their time, energy, enthusiasm, and brilliance. It has been an honor to collaborate with artists of such talent and dedication. The group’s approach is inspired and shaped by the composers with whom it has been our privilege to work. We are most grateful for the opportunities they gave us, and their expert coaching. The superb production team understood immediately what we were hoping to achieve, and enabled us to get there and beyond. I am indebted to all members of the Pitts family, who spontaneously provided encouragement and feedback in editing and post-production. Sincere thanks to photographers Monika Chilicka, Helen Frosi, and Lucy Pawlak for their excellent work capturing the group. The staff of the October Gallery (London) earned our warm appreciation, for their patience, quiet (during our recording sessions), and interest. Wesleyan University has supported the production of this album with a Project Grant and a Dean’s Award. The Institute for Musical Research supported the work behind this album, in the form of a Fellowship and access to Senate House Library. Celia Springate deserves special thanks for arranging rehearsal space at the church of St Mary, Newington (London). Heartfelt thanks to Nir Bitton, who gave so generously of his time and expertise in designing the CD packaging and booklet. (Jane Alden)
 
Walking Still is dedicated to the memory of the foundational constructivist, EAA.


Photo Credits: © Helen Frosi/SoundFjord, Monika Chilicka/Gold Lens, and Lucy Pawlak 
Used with permission

Innova Director: Philip Blackburn 
Manager: Chris Campbell 
Publicist: Steve McPherson

Innova is supported by an endowment from the McKnight Foundation.