I thought everyone would like to see the article in today's UK Gaurdian.
This is just a rough OCR of the paper so there may well be a few errors. I
make no comment on the content.
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Shuffle and cut What do you get when you cross a tango, a symphony and a
Warner Bos catoon soundtrack? John Zorn tells Tom Service how he puts
together his multi-genre 'chopped-up' chamber works
It is impossible to categorise a track by John Zorn. You're likely to hear
fragments of everything from classical masterpieces to thrash metal, from
jazz licks to film music soundscapes. This music is the soundtrack of
postmodernism, the aural equivalent of surrealist collage. "I've got an
incredibly short attention span," Zorn says. "My music is jam-packed with
information that is changing very fast.'
As is his career. Just when you think you've got hold of it, he does
something completely unexpected. Zorn, who is 50 this year, made his name in
the late 1970s in New York's free improvisation scene, then founded a
postmodern rock band, Naked City. He recorded an album that exploded the
film music of Ennio Morricone, and another that blew apart tracks by Ornette
Coleman. Then he created Masada, a Jewish jazz combo, and is now a
figurehead of radical Jewish culture. And over the past 15 years, having
established himself as a noisy iconoclast, he has been writing classical
pieces, including works nominated for Pulitzer prizes.
Much of Zorn's music is defined by a cut-up aesthetic. He is influenced by
the block-like structures of Igor Stravinsky, death-metal bands such as
Slayer and Napalm Death, and film and TV editing. But there is another
important source: Carl Stalling's scores for Warner Bros cartoons. "To
separate Stalling's music from the image and dialogue and listen to it in
the abstract is to enter a completely new dimension;" Zorn says.
Zorn's music takes Stalling's "new dimension" to another level. In his
cut-up pieces, he plays around with musical genres as other composers play
around with notes. The 1989 chamber orchestra work, For Your Eyes Only, is
typical. (The work forms the climax of the Britten Sinfonia's current tour,
in a concert conducted by Stephen Drury.) Snatches of cartoon music are
juxtaposed with jazz licks, outrageous tangos and bits from classical works.
The whole 14-minute piece is an unstable riot of quotations and original
material. It is as if it had been put together by chance, with pilfered
sounds and ideas crammed indiscriminately into place.
This is the music of a composer who can't throw anything away. And there is
some truth in that observation: Zorn's flat in New York reached a state of
critical mass recently, when there was no room for any more books, records,
or CDs. Instead of moving somewhere bigger, Zorn - who always eats out -
simply removed his kitchen to make more space.
For all its volatile energy, For Your Eyes Only is not an undisciplined,
postmodem melange. The piece was composed using a system that Zorn calls
"file-card composition". He says: I write in moments, in disparate sound
blocks, so I find it convenient to store these events on filing cards so
they can be sorted and ordered with minimum effort.' Each block of music -
and there are dozens in this piece - has to find the right place in the
structure. "Pacing is essential. If you move too fast, people tend to stop
hearing the individual moments as complete in themselves and more as
elements of a sort of cloud effect.'
Once he had decided on the sequence of file cards, Zorn then had to
Orchestrate them. "I would start early in the morning, and the TV would be
on. At that time, Channel 9 was showing re-runs of Hawaii Five-0 and
McHale's Navy - shows I knew and loved from my childhood - so I'd work right
in front of the TV. I worked 10 to 12 hours a day for a week, Just
orchestrating these file cards. It was an intense process - one I don't want
to go through again."
Drury, as conductor of the Britten Sinfonia's concert, has the job of
negotiating the relationship between the individual moments and the whole
structure of For Your Eyes Only. "Each fragment needs to have its own
integrity and intensity," he says. "When you're in a particular phrase it
has to sound absolutely convincing. So when you play the little quote from
The Rite of Spring in the piece, it has to sound like it could actually be
part of a whole performance of Stravinsky's piece."
For Your Eyes Only is huge challenge for players, who have to master the
genres of individual fragments and then change from one to another
instantly. "You have to feel like you're in charge of the remote control for
the television," says Drury, so that each section does not anticipate the
next one. 'I Listening to the piece is equally bewildering.
Like the volatile structures of his music, the twists and turns of Zorn's
career have alienated some of his fans. For some, his classical pieces are
evidence of a sell-out to the establishment; and for the classical world,
his reputation for irreverence is problematic. He sees things differently.
'All the various styles are organically connected to one another. Im an
additive person - the entire storehouse of my knowledge informs everything I
do. People are so obsessed with the surface that they can't see the
connections, but they are there.'
One thing common to all the aspects of his work is Zorn's attitude to
performers. "I'm not going to sit in some ivory tower and pass my scores
down to the players. 1 have to be there with them, and that's why 1 started
playing saxophone, so that 1 could meet musicians. 1 still feel that 1 have
to earn a player's trust before they can play my music. At the end of the
day, 1 want players to say: this was fun - it was a lot of fucking work, and
it's one of the hardest things I've ever done, but it was worth the effort.'
The next chapter in Zorn's musical biography is also one of the most
surprising. "I feel I'm in a transitional space at the moment," he says,
"and I'd like to move towards abstract music, something just called Sextet,
or String Quartet, or Symphony no 5. But at the same time, it's not
something 1 can just put on like a suit of clothes. I came from a very
honest place in the 1980s, writing pieces like For Your Eyes Only, and this
abstract, spiritual music has to come from another very specific place. It's
a process of simplifying, and I don't think I'm there yet. But when 1 am, 1
want to write fewer and fewer notes ~ so that there will just be a few notes
on the page, but they will really be the right ones!'
John Zorn as postmodern spiritual minimalist? Watch this space.
Britten Sinfonia perform music by John Zorn at the Corn Exchange, Brighton
(01273 709709), tonight, then tour to Oxford, London, Cambridge and
Birmingham.
