Music Universe, Music Mind
READ Music Universe, Music Mind: Revisiting the Creative Music Studio, Woodstock, New York (Ann Arbor, Arborville Publishing, 1996, ISBN 0965043843)
ORDER Music Universe, Music Mind
This book is the only full-length account of the legendary Creative Music Studio, founded by Ornette Coleman and Karl Berger in 1971.
A wonderful book of reminiscence. -- Karl Beger
A valuable addition to the bibliography on the pedagogy of improvisation. -- George Lewis
Read the introduction, in which you'll learn what the Creative Music Studio was.
Read the preface,in which you'll discover how the book came to be
Read the list of guiding artists, those who came to the Creative Music Studio as instructors.
"The art of improvisation, in the foreground of contemporary musical practice, is an art of self discipline. Far from being a practice second to notated composition, it has been a means for even more precise personal expression in all the world's musical cultures, including the West. Studies of the world's musical cultures are to a large extent, studies in the art of improvisation; observations of attitudes and approaches are not merely interesting as exotic objects of study, but are directly inspiring as examples of this discipline. No matter what material one chooses to use today, this basic attitude of self discipline towards precision in all details must be developed.
"The contemporary situation has created a new sense of the purpose and impact of the musical laws; a glimpse of what other cultures have known about the relationships of music to many areas of life. Basic musical training, the kind that does not deal with a particular musical style or with the playing of an instrument, seems to be beneficial for practically anyone. A sense of right timing and rhythmic cycles, for example, seems to be a basic human need. In fact, all the performing arts could benefit from these practices. This is why body discipline, dance, all visual media, poetry, songwriting are complementary to contemporary musical development."
-Karl BergerThis book is about a unique endeavor in shared musical experience-musical education, yes, but so much more. The Creative Music Studio comprised an actual community in which music and the creative process were fused into a lifestyle that brought students of all levels into contact with seasoned, improvising professionals of the highest stature. The studio, founded in 1971, was located in a number of different sites in and around Woodstock, New York. And although there has been no CMS since 1984, the community that developed still exists in a remarkable network of creative musicians all over the globe.
There has never been another "school," or instructional musical offering of any type, that has brought together so many of the world's leading improvising or contemporary classical (or simply uncategorizable) musicians. The Creative Music Studio had a magnetic force that drew musical innovators from all over the world. By 1981, its tenth year, CMS had reached its goal of having better than 50 percent of its student body from outside the United States. Musicians came from Europe, Canada, Brazil, and Japan, as well as the United States. As the student participation became more international, so did the music. Guiding artists came from several countries in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, from India, Turkey, and Japan. The phenomenon of world music, whatever one considers that to be, cannot be fully examined without an understanding of what happened at CMS.
I will refer, throughout this book, to students and teachers, or guiding artists. Most musicians who were interviewed for this book, however, concurred with the idea that the line between student and teacher was frequently blurred. All who came were collaborators in studying, performing, and living music in an atmosphere that held personal expression paramount.
You will notice, too, that musicians are generally referred to by their first names. This is not done to appear overly familiar. This is done because that's the way it was at CMS, and I hope to portray realistically the intimacy and the extended-family quality that being part of this community provided.
Students had the opportunity not only to attend classes with the instructors but also to perform and record with them. During some sessions, students and instructors even lived in the same quarters, ate meals together, did laundry together, and in many cases forged ongoing professional relationships. The student-teacher interaction, in fact, was more like an apprenticeship. Much of the valuable learning came about through the experience of sharing life together, beyond developing the techniques of the craft.
In describing CMS, it's difficult not to compare the experience of going there with the experience of attending a university or conservatory's music program. When one thinks of music education, formal, academic environments are what naturally and most quickly come to mind. European classical music has been the standard, although many colleges now present programs in jazz studies. But there is actually no basis for comparison between CMS and traditional music schools, other than to say that there is music at each, and there is learning at each.
The closest thing to an educational experience of the sort that CMS offered would be an innovative jazz, world, or improvising music curriculum, such as those at the California Institute for the Arts, the University of Michigan, Wesleyan University, York University in Toronto, or the University of California at San Diego's Department of Critical Studies and Experimental Practices. However, none comes close. The Black Mountain College educational experience was similar in that it was a community of artists, living their art. But the music program there was just one component, and with the exception of John Cage's experimentation, it was presenting primarily the European classics. One way to convey the uniqueness of the Creative Music Studio is to present a list of the guiding artists. Some names are well known, others are quite obscure. You'll find dancers and poets in there, too.
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John Abercrombie Barry Altschul Maryanne Amacher Ramsey Ameen William Ames Derek Bailey A. Spencer Barefield David Behrman Ingrid Berger (Ingrid Sertso) Karl Berger Ed Blackwell Carla Bley Lester Bowie Anthony Braxton Peter Brotzmann John Cage>rroll Joseph Celli Andrea Centazzo Eugene Chadbourne Don Cherry Jay Clayton Sara Cook Jerome Cooper Marilyn Crispell Blondell Cummings Alvin Curran Z.M Dagar Olu Dara Anthony Davis Donnie Davis Thulani Davis Jack DeJohnette Paul De Marinas Yaya Diallo Robert Dick Aiyb Dieng Hamid Drake James Emery Douglas Ewart Malachi Favors Guilherme Franco Becky Friend Fred Frith Paul & Limpe Fuchs Allen Ginsberg John Giorno Jimmy Giuffre Gene Golden Andy Gonzalez | Jerry Gonzalez Steve Gorn Andre Goudbeek Trilok Gurtu Steve Haas Charlie Haden Mark Helias Julius Hemphill Dick Higgins> Gary Hill Richard Hill Anthony Holland Dave Holland William Hooker Zakir Hussein Abdullah Ibrahim David Izenson Michael Gregory Jackson Ronald Shannon Jackson Joseph Jarman Ahmadu Jarr Leroy Jenkins Howard Johnson Raymond Johnson Rrata Christine Jones Don Knaack Steven Kolpan Toshinori Kondo Lee Konitz Alhaji Bai Konte Dembo Konte Takehisa Kosugi Peter Kowald Garry Kvistad Steve Lacy Pheeroan ak Laff Oliver Lake Byard Lancaster Jeanne Lee George Lewis Garrett List Frank Lowe Jimmy Lyons Michael Lytle< Michael Mantler Dumisani Maraire John Marsh Stu Martin Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre Harry Miller Roscoe Mitchell | Louis Moholo Butch Morris Bob Moses Don Moye Sunny Murray Pandit Pran Nath Babatunde Olatunji Pauline Oliveros Ursula Oppens Peter Orlovsky Gerald Oshita K. Paramjyoti Evan Parker J.D. Parran Hannibal Peterson Henri Pousser John Prienenger Vasant Rai Steve Reich Sam Rivers Roswell Rudd Adam Rudolph George Russell Frederic Rzewski G.S. Sachdev Ed Sanders Lakshmi Shankar Schoenberg String Quartet Alan Silva Ismet Siral Leo Smith Harvey Sollberger Speculum Musicae Foday Musa Suso Steve Swallow Tamia Cecil Taylor John Tchicai Richard Teitelbaum Faruk Tekbilek Haci Tekbilek Yung Yung Tsuai Erasto Vasconcelos Nana Vasconcelos Janine Pommy Vega Murat Verdi Collin Walcott Ann Waldman Carlos Ward Philip Wilson Gary Windo John Zorn |
This is an unprecedented and fascinating era. It is only within the last forty years or so that musicians have had, as a tool of their trade, the technology that can bring them musics that have originated in such a vast geographic and historic expanse. It is only within the last forty years or so that the world has become so small. Today, any musician with even modest resources can choose to listen to, study, and emulate the music of Duke Ellington, Mozart, Ecuadoran folk groups, Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, Tibetan monks, John Philip Sousa, shakuhachi or bansuri flute masters, Afro-Cuban drummers, Miles Davis, mariachis, Beethoven, Willie Dixon, or John Cage. Certainly there remain, and always will be, purists of style. But for the musician who is open to the universe of musical expression, it's all within reach.
The Creative Music Studio was not a place to come to learn how to play an instrument or to study any specific style. It was an environment in which musicians, regardless of their levels of proficiency, could give full attention to the universal elements of music and receive guidance from advanced professionals in developing a personal relationship with those elements. With a keener sense of what it really means to be in tune and in time, the individual is much better prepared to develop a freer, more personal expression within whatever musical context he or she chooses.
"We live in a Number One situation. Although we learn from traditions, we cannot simply continue them. They have been defined by world regions that have lost their exclusivity. We live in very transitional times. It is up to us what we make of them. . . .
"Personal expression is now, more than ever, based on the discovery of personal potential and of personal tradition beyond tribal supports and securities. More than ever we must learn to start from the beginning, from the experience of silence, the experience of available space. Actually, that is an inspiring challenge, but not easy by any means. Personal discovery begins with the simple discipline of meditation, the meeting and making friends with oneself and the space around: centering oneself.
"In search for our own music, we learn to realize that our personal material is already there, something to be discovered rather than learned. While we study our instruments and discipline our musical minds, our materials begin to surface. No one can teach anyone to play if the goal is improvisation. One can only teach common basics, awareness of the many details to be watched, traditional approaches, and try to be an example of some kind. Music is a lifelong study, a way of life. It begins by imitating others, sometimes almost to the point of total identification, the same way that children learn to walk talk and do things. This is an important period and not to be ridiculed at all. Certain inroads into personal aspects of music can only be made that way: understanding what the layers are that can be reached.
"Finally, there can be the liberating experience that the material is not the point at all: We train ourselves to become instruments when the music can flow through freely, like electricity through a transmitter. We don't know where it is going. We don't even know what it is doing. We are only as ready as possible, keeping the tools sharp, keeping fine tuning-essentially empty so we can vibrate."
-Karl Berger
(This section of the 1978-1979 promotional brochure for the Creative Music Studio sessions was entitled "Liberation Through Sound.")
In January of 1976, I was playing drums in a bar band in Traverse City, Michigan. We were a quartet of musicians, all in our early twenties, who had had some instruction on our instruments, some experience in school bands, but were, for the most part, learning on the job, driven by our love of the music. Our repertoire was a standard sort of pop/rock/soul amalgam: Motown, Meters, Beatles, Tower of Power, Stevie Wonder. We even did Eddie Harris and Les McCann's "Compared to What" to let the people know that we were hip. But when I wasn't on the gig, I was drawn to, motivated by, and sustained by "the art of the improvisers."
The Detroit radio stations that had turned me on to Jimi Hendrix in the late sixties had also thrown a little Miles Davis and John Coltrane into the mix and set me on my way to discover jazz and the whole universe of improvised music. My musical guides became Miles, Coltrane, Art Blakey, Ornette Coleman, Olatunji, Charles Mingus, Albert Ayler, Ravi Shankar, Max Roach, and on and on. I had no loyalties to bebop, postbop, avant garde, fusion, cool, swing, Latin, or whatever. I soaked it all up. Communication technologies had brought the whole world of improvised music to my living room.
What happened next, for me, was the first of a number of episodes of near perfect timing-coincidences, if you will-that directed my life toward Woodstock, New York, and the Creative Music Studio Our quartet was breaking up, and I was ready for the next phase of my life, but without a clue of how it would unfold. I came upon a little ad in Down Beat magazine, which was the first that I had heard of the Creative Music Studio (CMS). It was offering a chance to study music with some of the finest improvising musicians in the world: Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland, Anthony Braxton, Ed Blackwell, Don Cherry, and a host of others whom I was at that time unfamiliar with, including Karl Berger. It seemed too good to be true. I had a car, a little bit of money, no commitments, and was faced with an opportunity of a lifetime. By March, I found myself transported from my humble rock-and-roll beginnings to a community of improvisers of the highest caliber.
I relate this episode because it is so similar to that of hundreds of other musicians from all over the world, who, by seeking a higher level (or is it a deeper level?) of musical expression, found themselves at the Creative Music Studio. Many were following commercial music careers; some were just discovering music; some already had university degrees in classical music studies; and some came with fully developed experimental concepts. They came from all levels of musical proficiency and from all backgrounds. All were welcomed with open arms. What we found at the Creative Music Studio was unique and it was amazing. There has never been anything in music education that could compare with the experience of CMS.
CMS was an environment in which personal expression was paramount. For some, there was too much freedom in that environment. For those of us who were open to the experience, our lives were changed forever. It was the type of experience that can make the rest of your life seem mundane.
The last CMS session that I attended was in the spring of 1979. Since that time, my life has taken many turns that have made Woodstock seem as if it were light years away. That heady, elevated feeling that comes from doing something truly extraordinary had become too much of a distant memory. Being at the Creative Music Studio had started to seem like a dream that I once had. That is why I decided to write this book.
I called Karl Berger, the director of the Creative Music Studio and the Creative Music Foundation, in the summer of 1994 and proposed to him the idea of a history of CMS. He was enthusiastically in favor of it. My wife and I then drove to Woodstock from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I began a process of reconnection. By interviewing Karl and whatever remaining CMS people I could contact during our short visit, I began to reconstruct the rise and fall of this unique study center. Each person I spoke to was able to provide me with names and phone numbers of others who were involved. Over the course of a year and some months, I interviewed, by phone, as many people as I could reasonably contact. Musicians across the United States, in Canada, and Europe were eager to reminisce and relate their CMS stories. Their enthusiasm made my job much easier--a true labor of love.
Throughout the course of these interviews I became increasingly aware of a pattern of connectedness. It was often eerie,running into so many coincidences of time, people, and places. This emerging realization of my connectedness to a cultural phenomenon and the people who made it--a phenomenon much larger than I could measure by my own experience--convinced me of the necessity and the timeliness of recording what happened at CMS and attempting to place those events in the larger context of our arts, our society, and our times.
Many of the people interviewed I had never met. Others I hadn't spoken to in over fifteen years. Larry Chernicoff was one of those. I called Larry out of the blue one Sunday afternoon and he related the following incident. He and his daughter had been driving near his home in Massachusetts when they passed a sign advertising Pete Sweet's Tree Farm. They both found it amusing, and Larry told his little girl that he had known a guy named Bob Sweet at the Creative Music Studio. Not only hadn't he spoken to Bob Sweet since 1979, he probably hadn't thought about him either. Three hours later I called. A minor coincidence, perhaps, but typical of countless other personal connections that seemed downright uncanny.
Another series of connections, however, opened my eyes to the place that CMS holds in a larger, historical context of rts and education in the United States. While talking with Richard Teitelbaum, composer, educator, and electronic music innovator, he drew a parallel between CMS and Black Mountain College. His point was that if not for books like Martin Duberaman's history of Black Mountain, the school probably would have fallen into complete obscurity.
He laughed when I told him that I had never heard of Black Mountain. "You see!" We agreed that it would be tragic if the Creative Music Studio were to be forgotten.
I didn't pick up Duberman's Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community until several months later. It was during a conversation with Doug Hesseltine, the designer of this book's cover, that a flash of coincidence struck me again, illuminating even more brightly this connection between Black Mountain and CMS. After I gave Doug some background on CMS, he told me how much it reminded him of Black Mountain College (BMC) in North Carolina. I knew, then, that it was time to look into Black Mountain.
When I began to read of the similarities and actual links between CMS and BMC, I was astonished. Karl Berger had told me that initial planning talks for CMS had included Buckminster Fuller, Willem de Kooning, and John Cage (whose CMS involvement I was vaguely familiar with), along with Ornette Coleman and others, and I was surprised at this range of notables from various artistic and philosophic disciplines. But here, in reading Duberman, I discovered that Fuller, de Kooning, and Cage were prominent figures at Black Mountain, teaching and developing some of their most important works there. The composer Christian Wolff also had taught and presented works at CMS and BMC. The similarities between the two schools (I hesitate to call CMS a school, but the term is useful for the sake of comparison) are undeniable. Both CMS and BMC were located in settings of natural scenic beauty, an aspect that lent much to their character; neither would have been what it was if located in a city. Both were controversial, inspiring acclaim and derision in students, locals, and observers of the arts. And both were established by German emigrants, followers of a school of artistic thought that would relentlessly draw its proponents to an environment of freedom so that it may be given expression.
Like Duberman, I found myself being affected by the place (he, BMC, and I, CMS) through the process of writing about it. He impressed me with his view that history is not actually served by separating the historian from the retelling; his willingness to insert himself into BMC's portrait gives his book a vitality and a warmth that might not otherwise be there. I am not a historian as is Duberman. On the other hand I was there. My frame of reference had already been laid; the interviews and the reacquaintance with CMS merely fleshed out a body of experience that had begun its evolution in 1976. My having been there and having been strongly and positively affected by the experience will no doubt lessen my objectivity. That's fine. It is not my aim to give an objective account. I wish only to give my own view, with the confidence that its corroboration by so many others who were there will give it legitimacy.
In an interview with the trombonist George Lewis, we touched on the difficulties of going about the process of defining improvisation-no easy task. It would require, George felt, an ongoing dialogue over a period of time among masters of the craft, in which various seemingly contradictory aspects could be examined and all individual interpretations could be given voice. We reached the conclusion that defining the importance of the Creative Music Studio or attempting to characterize what it meant to be there (the experience was so different for so many people), was equally daunting. George states that "at a certain point you say, well, here's my definition of improvisation right at the front. Well, maybe it's already a mistake. Maybe at this point, instead of defining, you just have cases, and then the cases add up to something. That's what I find about CMS. It's not like, aha, here's the epiphany which occurred while I was at CMS. It's more like, here are all these cases of encounters I've had with different people and what I learned from each one."
It is my hope that the encounters in this book, with the nearly one hundred musicians, writers, and administrators who participated in CMS on some level and who consented to interviews, will bring CMS into a clear enough focus that its contribution will be recognized and that its memory will endure.