"Lithograph 26 X 26" (Detail) Copyright Bruce Conner
"Lithograph 26 X 26" (Detail) Copyright Bruce Conner
An edit from this volume of Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band is a soundtrack to the Bruce Conner film "LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS".
SOME FIELD NOTES FOR POPPY NOGOOD
Take a look at these words of Charles Olson
I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America from Folsom cave to
now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.
(Call Me Ishmael, 1947)
and their expansion three years later in his manifesto Projective Verse:
From the moment he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION -- put himself in the open --
he can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for
itself.
Olson had been defining a working poetry, rejecting the formal tradition as an
alien inheritance from Europe. The new verse was one "in which a poet manages to
register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath".
Olson called this COMPOSITION BY FIELD. This is poetry that fills the air as
well as the page, that constitutes an extension of the living body of the poet,
that celebrates the moment, the here and now in a non-hierarchical language in a
special American space.
Olson, it should be remembered, was rector at Black Mountain College at the very
time Cage, Cunningham, and Rauschenberg generated there a proto-happening or two.
They, too, helped in the opening of the field.
Another kindered figure is Pollock. He did Olson's thing on canvas. Create it
in space. Action. Body. Canvas as a field. Like a big plate of spaghetti.
Some few years later Bruce Conner explored the introverted side of the field in a
series of pen and ink drawings. These drawings contain a field so clustered with
lines accumulated onto themselves that a stasis is created in their anarchistic
weave.
Which brings me to Bruce Conner's good friend Terry Riley who has created such
fields in sound -- first in In C and then in the all night flights of Poppy
Nogood and the Phantom Band.
COMPOSITION BY FIELD. How else can we go about explaining a solo work that lasts
up to eight hours in concert and is entirely non-developmental and tonal to boot?
There was once total serialism (What Olson would have called non-projective
verse). Very European, the logical finale of a very long tradition.
On the blush it seemed democratic enough. Yet it was (by 1960) no longer
breathing. Now it seems that every budding young composer worth his salt passed
through it. Some stuck around. Others like Terry and fellow Berkeley graduate
student La Monte Young did not. These two friends realized the quick need to
renew themselves in the roots of the American field beyond Cage.
They looked first to the west (La Monte for instance drawing on his childhood
reminiscences of hearing wind blowing through the chinks of the Idaho log cabin
where he was born) and eventually and logically turned to the east, to India.
(projectile (percussive (prospective
Olson's words.
Poppy Nogood for soprano saxophone and time-lag accumulator. Loudspeakers placed
around the audience. An all-overness. Music in a field. Modal lines inspired in
part by Coltrane's "My Favorite Things". Building on the echo. Riley: "The
music has to flow in our bloodstream and we have to be carried by its
bloodstream".
"There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only eyes
in all head, to be look out of" (Charles Olson, Letter 6, The Maximus Poems)
-- Robert Dean
organ of Corti