Sometimes I wonder whether my emerging interests are part of a more general pattern � that is to say shaped by forces which shape other peoples� perceptions � a Zeitgeist . perhaps. The wider interest which may or may not be growing in the English tradition of experimental music is one example. I first registered the term when someone suggested at the Music Department of the University of Hertfordshire earlier this year that might be what I do. Then I began to register examples of the term being used here and there. Now there�s a significant chunk in today�s Guardian on the subject. The article has a refers to a website which contains a fairly serious article looking at the idea of an experimental tradition by Virginia Anderson. Here�s an extract:

� Griffiths evaluates all music written in the twentieth century in light of the ideals of the avant garde in its narrowest sense, and so he treats Cage, Young, and Cardew less thoroughly than Boulez and Stockhausen. This practice is common in histories, and by the 1980s had become more frequent in journals. In the period in which the books under discussion were written, experimental and minimal composers were not as likely to receive performances, reviews of their works, or funding from government and private bodies as those who composed in the approved academic style - as can be seen in lists of composers who have been awarded Pulitzer prizes, or those who had appeared on the BBC's 'Music in Our Time'.�

So the idea of an experimental tradition has been blocked out by the thought that if music was contemporary and serious then it had to come from an avant garde lineage where Boulez and Stockhausen were high points. Of course what this viewpoint ignores is the actual history whereby Cage influences Stockhausen in a big way and S passes on that influence to Cardew and Young.

Anyway here� the Guardian�s view from John L Walters:

�English experimental music has been simmering away quietly for more than three decades. The movement, which is associated with characters such as John Tilbury and Cornelius Cardew, plus many offshoots such as the Portsmouth Sinfonia, was enshrined in Michael Nyman's 1974 book, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. What emerged tended to involve non-musicians and professional players working together, a more democratic relationship with the audience and messy happenstance.

And though the music is avant garde, with a stubborn streak, it is rarely ugly. It has a take-it-or-leave-it quality, both unsettling and calming; its influence upon ambient music has been enormous. Many of the experimentalists have continued in their subversive, gentlemanly way: John White, Howard Skempton, Michael Parsons, Gavin Bryars and Dr Christopher Hobbs, who has just released Fifty in Two Thousand (Experimental Music Catalogue). Hobbs was the teenage student who studied with Cardew and played with AMM, the Scratch Orchestra and the Promenade Theatre Orchestra (PTO). The PTO made music on toy pianos, reed organs and small percussion - a flyer once boasted: "NO noisy electronics... All musical material guaranteed through-composed. NO hit-or-miss improvisation."

Fifty in Two Thousand is a 75-minute epic comprising 50 sections of equal duration, scored for five different combinations of two instruments - all played live by Hobbs. The work moves between quiet repetitive phrases for prepared piano and percussion to busy, Gamelan-like motifs for piano and digital synthesizer. The timbres are seductive and easy on the ear; the music's presentation in 90-second chunks means that "the listener never has to deal with one kind of material for too long" as Hobbs writes in his liner note.

It is not to be mistaken for meandering, quasi-improvised chilling; the rigour of Hobbs's compositional approach gives the piece substance and purpose, and an arithmetical structure you find in the best work the composers Peter Greenaway and Louis Andriessen. Hobbs's disc is available via www.experimentalmusic.co.uk�

And this led me off to that site where I found the article. Here�s another chunk:

�Experimentalists are not part of the line of composers revered by the avant- garde. The exceptions are Cage, who has been accepted because of his short time as a student of Schoenberg, LaMonte Young, whose early works were serial and who attended the Ferienkurse in Darmstadt, and Cornelius Cardew, who was Stockhausen's assistant in the late 1950s. However, the mature works of these composers are a reaction, not only to their teachers, but also to the basis of musical thought up to that time - the very roles of performers, composers, and listeners, the very definition of music as sound. Far from being historicist reaction, the revolts by Cage, Young, and Cardew resemble a divorce from historicism.�

Maybe there is another way of telling the story ? After all Cage was taught by Cowell who also taught Gershwin and Bacharach! Maybe there�s more than one tradition that cane flow through history?

Anyway I had a crack at an early unrecorded Steve Reich work � Music for Two or More Pianos 1964 which is half way between Thelonius Monk and a richer genre of minimalism. It is 9 chords plus some instructions about how you are to work through them. I sought of extended the instructions a bit � using Wavelab � unfortunately I lost the file before I could record � so it was a kind of performance � a passing episode. I have a source file which I could use to make another version.

�How New York Stole The Idea of Modern Art� � Serge Guilbaut is proving to be a good buy. He wants to offer a better explanation of how Abstract Expressionism became so dominant