The musician and writer David Grubbs began his career far from the silence and mushrooms of John Cage, the musician, philosopher, and writer. As a teen-ager in Louisville, Grubbs formed the band Squirrel Bait, an organized explosion that converted punk rock into something twice its original size, more melodic and chaotic than earlier iterations. From there, Grubbs moved into a series of disparate bands, mostly playing music fairly far removed from the tendencies of rock. One long-running project that he conducted with Jim O’Rourke, Gastr del Sol, seemed like a collation of all the parts of sound that are deëmphasized on mainstream rock records: silence, dissonance, scrapes, and squeaks.
Cage’s “Silence” was, in fact, the book that brought Grubbs to the work of John Cage, and, indirectly, lead to the writing of his own book, “Records Ruin the Landscape.” Now a professor at the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, Grubbs takes up a specific belief of Cage’s: that recordings can injure the ability of an audience member to experience a performance in real time. In theoretical terms, the recording reifies a specific moment, potentially interfering with a composition’s ability to live and change and breathe by fixing a single iteration as the “authoritative” version. Of course, Cage and all of the various composers and performers mentioned in “Records Ruin the Landscape” released commercially available recordings, uneasily or not.
The book is a swift and delightful document of ambivalence. Cage took pleasure in his own contradictions, and one of the most important and stubbornly plainspoken artists included, the improvising guitarist Derek Bailey, puts the matter bluntly: “The whole of people’s listening lives is built around records if I understand it right. But it’s all endgame—it introduces the endgame to something that is for me primarily not about endgame … The point of a record is that you can play it again. It’ll all eventually become mood music, right?”
One needn’t be a committed fan of Cage’s, or Bailey’s, to enjoy the challenge of thinking about how recordings alter, enhance, or distort the experience of live performance. Below is an edited and condensed version of an e-mail exchange that I conducted with Grubbs. A roundtable about the book, conducted with a panel of musicians, will post here soon. On Tuesday night, Grubbs will host a book launch at ISSUE Project Room, discussing the book with Branden W. Joseph, Lisa Kahlden, and Marina Rosenfeld.
SASHA*{: .small} FRERE-JONES: When did the idea of the book occur to you, even in roughest form?*
DAVID GRUBBS: The friction, if not an outright spark, came twenty-five years ago, when I first read John Cage’s book “Silence.” I loved its humor and sheer inventiveness, and also the pivoting between Cage’s precision of language when it came to music and his writerly looseness when it came to telling stories. What I didn’t know how to respond to was his programmatic stance against records—as in statements, such as this one from an interview with Cage by Richard Kostelanetz: “I’ve always said that a record is not faithful to the nature of music.”
I should be clear, however: recorded sound in itself was a revelation for Cage as a young composer. It spurred him to theorize, as he did in 1937, at age twenty-five, about having as his material “the entire field of sound.” His more curmudgeonly-seeming statements had to do with commercially-released recordings of music. Over the course of researching and writing “Records Ruin the Landscape,” I came to understand that his was a complex, willfully contradictory relationship to recording, and that what was most interesting were not Cage’s pronouncements but rather his decades-long engagements with technology, performance, and publicity.
Why did you want to explore this particular friction between performance and recording? Was it an affinity for these particular performers, or a wider interest?
In my previous answer, I hesitated at the word “research” because “research” sounds like work, and my relation to the music that I write about in “Records Ruin the Landscape” is primarily one of pleasure. This is stuff that I’ve been schooling myself in since I was a kid. There were times in writing the book when I wondered about the need for another book that takes Cage as its central figure—because there has been so much writing about Cage, some of it very good, and because Cage himself was such an extraordinary writer and chronicler. Without a doubt I was sustained by my fondness for and perceived affinities with many of the musicians in the book.
I’m not sure that I’ve fully accounted for the friction. I grew up in Louisville, and outside of punk and some very excellent postpunk strangeness (Circle X, Slint, etc.), my access to experimental music came through recordings. Years later, when I was sifting through John Cage’s correspondence at Northwestern University, he struck me as every bit the committed correspondent and dedicated internationalist as any teen-age fanzine editor, myself included. So why the grudge—I initially mistook it for a lack of imagination— against recordings, those means of time travel and transcending geography?
To begin with, Cage displayed little sentimentality. As I state in the book, Thoreau was his writer—not the Melville of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and the pathos of the dead letter office.
It didn’t take long for me to sense that Cage played a major role in setting the tone for period attitudes in the nineteen sixties about the incommensurability between recording and various kinds of experimental music that began in that period: indeterminate musics, text scores, long-duration minimalism, live electronic music, free improvisation, and so on.
Out of everyone you’ve come into contact with, who do you think comes closest to genuinely wanting a world with no recordings, with performance being the only source of music?
If you don’t mind me reframing the question, what I’ve found most interesting is not which composer or musician most strongly detested recordings, but rather what music is most resistant to or most poorly served by the form of the recording. Two years ago I participated in a symposium at U.C. San Diego with Alvin Lucier, and I took the opportunity to describe his 1969 piece “Vespers” as an example of a work that profoundly thwarts audio recording. (In “Vespers,” performers sonically map a space using handheld echolocation devices; Robert Ashley wrote of “Vespers”: “No number of microphones and loudspeakers can reproduce the relationship between the sounds and the space in which the sounds create the musical experience.”) And yet, after my talk, I was moved by Lucier’s description of the seriousness and the ingenuity and the care with which they executed the recording of the piece.
In a world where sales of recordings are no longer a stable source of income, even for big names, how is a niche genre like free improvisation affected? (There was never year’s salary coming in for anyone on the FMP [Free Music Production] record label.) Maybe the overall dip in earning from recordings makes it easier for people who rarely earned any money from selling records. Or does it?
There’s no question about it. Free improvisers—as with musicians in pretty much every genre—are increasingly ready to make it (hold for the drumroll) free. But what is happening now is that it’s possible to post recordings of gig after gig after gig, and listeners can have a more accurate sense of improvised music as an ongoing daily practice—and not one defined by a handful of landmark recordings. Who would have known that a greater volume of recordings would arguably better represent improvised music? When recordings of free improvised music were fewer and further between, listeners were more apt to come back to these again and again—and to bestow upon them the status of works. But the next question would have to be this: If people are less inclined to repeat listens of recordings of improvised music, does that mean that they are listening more intently the first time? I certainly wouldn’t make that claim.
Photograph of John Cage by Herve Gloaguen/Gamma-Rapho/Getty.