I felt quite fragile this morning � waking early � I eventually managed to get into the office and complete packing my stuff into boxes. Yvonne rang and we decided it made sense for me to take James to Cambridge for his interview on Friday � in fact its obvious when I break out of the passive and negative mentality that descends on me at DTI. (There are a couple of bits of music I regret not buying the last time we did this � one piece that a local composer did in the 70s after study in the USA � I think in San Francisco.)

I belong to the Situationist news group. I don�t read much of the stuff that comes in but one caught my eye:

�In an article on the nothingness.org website entitled "Guy Debord and the Situationists", a passage states,

"Although the SI group disbanded in 1972 after bitter wrangling over tactics, their ideas have continued to have widespread influence in anarchist and feminist circles and inspired, at times almost subconsciously it seemed, much of the style and content of punk rock."

I think that statement is very true. Who do you think are the most Situationist bands/musical artists of all time? I'll start: The Sex Pistols

The Plastic Ono Band�

I wont�t start on that now � but it�s a good question and a good observation in terms of punk. Paul Wheeler occaisionally mentions quietly that he was actually there in 1968.

Lucky Californians to have the desert nearby.

I kept on pulling at the threads on my familiar theme as I ranged around the net. First of all I came across some reflection by Eno about his time in New York in the 1970s:

�Robert Fripp went to NYC just for a little time, initially, and he ended up staying. I went there to do a couple of specific things, and I thought if I go back to London I'll get distracted, so I'll just find a place here for a month. But it turned out that I happened to be in New York during one of the most exciting months of the decade, I should think, in terms of music - it seemed like there were 500 new bands who all started that month.

"The first thing that really impressed me was that within two weeks I already knew and was having conversations with really interesting people... a lot of creeps, too, but the opportunities for meeting people are infinitely larger than they are here. And for meeting a really wide range of people.

"Another thing is that people are just much more willing to talk to one another, because everyone is desperate for an idea. People really regard it as important that they should find out what everyone else is doing, and surely part of the reason is that they want to incorporate whatever they can into their own work. That seems to me to be quite healthy, as opposed to the English situation, which has tended to be... there's the new wave scene, and the theatre scene, and the modern dance scene, and you never get any real collisions between them, except rather contrived ones."

In 1978 he commented �What's going on in New York now is one of those seminal situations where there are really a lot of ideas around, and somebody is going to synthesize some of them soon. Somebody is going to put them all together. That's always been the way of rock music as far as I can see, this forming of eclectic little groups of disciplines. What I see happening in New York is that there are a number of bands which have taken deliberately extreme stances that are very interesting because they define the edges of a piece of territory. They say 'This is as far as you can go in this direction'. Now, you might not choose to go that far, but having that territory staked out is very important. You achieve a synthesis by determining your stance in relation to these signposts. There are a lot of research bands in New York who are trying these experiments, and it's very altruistic of them in a sense. It makes things easier for everyone else and gives people some real, solid information to work from."

Pretty consistent with other evidence then.

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There is an irony here if we play with the idea that �punk� was a major ideologically driven eruption in the UK roaring away at this time . I suppose it was such an eruption that people didn�t actually talk about any thing as naff as intellectual underpinnings � they just did it.

On the UK avant garde scene, I started reading some essays by Goehr � born in Germany in 1935, studied at Manchester and Darmstadt and then became professor of Music in 1975. (Thus precipitating punk rock? )

I suppose he must soon retire? Goehr is unusual in that he even as a child he was brought up to like Schoenberg because his father was a fan. In fact father and son wrote an article on Sch in 1959 explaining his approach for a less specialised English audience � I think it was originally a broadcast talk. At Manchester G was part of a pioneering group that included Birtwhistle and John Ogden. I got a copy of his essays not so long ago and I am going back to them in more depth.

The story that G tells is that the European leading avant garde composers in the early 1950s � Boulez, Ligeti, Nono, Stockhausen adopted an approach called �total serialisation� � based on a rather extreme interpretation of Webern especially the later pieces. Sooner or later they all realised that this didn�t really work. What is surprising about the article is the way that he talks about Cage but doesn�t really refer to anything that comes �after�. He obviously knew Cornelius Cardew � and quotes the same remark twice where Cornelius tells him not to be shy about using technical devices.

There is no discussion of Minimalism at all � its as if it doesn�t exist. There is some decent material about how you can turn a tone row into a piece of music and Goehr is , I think, slightly away from the mainstream here � because he has an intellectual root in Schoenberg rather than Webern.

Actually he refers to Robin Holloway who teaches at Caius in the interview as an example of a younger composer who is less theoretical than himself. I was talking to Cathy Bell earlier this year about Holloway � she sang some of his songs at the Caius Music Society. I got the impression that musical outlook that he represented was less adventurous than the one which Powell and Roger Smalley promoted in the late 60s and early 70s. My hypothesis would be that as universities expanded in the 60s and 70s more serialists got jobs and the business got quite professionalised but they lost touch with their audience and there was a general counter-reaction in the 1980s from both audiences and funding authorities. You could say that this reaction was a kind of echo of punk.

I must ask Andrew K what the politics were like in Manchester at the end of the 1980s � the website now looks encouraging with at least one faculty member who studied with Feldman. In my last job I met someone who had studied composition in the 1980s at Birmingham University � he made a big impact on me � even so I cant remember his name � he also studied maths. He really pushed my thinking on composing, recording , storing and distributing music � he has a long duration musical enterprise called Dyp Experience � it has been underway for almost 20 years. The collection of people committed to a music and life ideology with quite a restricted approach to dissemination is a bit like the Theatre of Eternal Music.

I suppose that time in the late 60s and 70s was a point when there was something �new� in the USA and there was the possibility of a flow of ideas. Maybe there aren�t obvious world centres any more. Or maybe the laptop jams that Fred organises at Mills are some sort of leading edge. This is how Mills describes itself:

The Center for Contemporary Music

For over thirty years, the Center for Contemporary Music has been at the forefront of developments emphasizing experimental methods in contemporary music and its allied arts and sciences. In 1966, the San Francisco Tape Music Center (founded in 1961) moved to Mills College and became the Mills Tape Music Center, and later, the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM). Since its inception, this organization has achieved a strong international reputation as one of the leading centers for innovation in music.

CCM maintains a variety of electronic equipment, instruments and studios, provides instruction and technical assistance, and archives audio recordings. These are available for use by qualified graduate and undergraduate students, faculty and staff. The Center also performs a wide variety of community services in the arts, including public concerts and lecture series, informational and technical assistance, and artist residencies.

In addition, the Center is one of few music facilities in the United States open to the public on a non-profit, non-commercial basis, serving independent composers, artists, and musical groups. This service and other public programs keep CCM functioning as an important resource center for the Bay Area's community of composers and artists and contributes to CCM's atmosphere of exciting collaboration and information exchange among students, faculty, staff and outside professionals.

Pauline Oliveros who was in the same postgraduate class as Lamont Young and Terry Riley is also on the faculty. Its very hard to avoid the obvious conclusions. With AbsEx the USA assumed world prominence in a branch of the arts (maybe Pound and Eliot did it first in poetry but that was quasi-European) and that momentum seems to have carried it through. There was diffusion to the UK but never a critical mass.