Rhys Chatham - One, three, a hundred, four hundred guitars!

Rhys Chatham (New York City, September 19, 1952) is an American composer and musician who, more than anyone else, has helped canonize the stylistic tenets of post-minimalism.

At nineteen he was asked to take charge of the musical programming at The Kitchen (founded in 1971 by Woody and Steina Vasulka), the prestigious gallery located in the heart of Manhattan's Greenwich Village that influenced entire generations of visual artists and helped establish talents such as Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Peter Greenaway, Brian Eno and many others.

Chatham's contribution to popular music can be traced both through three decades of alternative rock (No Wave, Sonic Youth, Swans, Melvins, Nirvana), and through the “doom metal” of the Nineties (Sleep, Earth, Sunn O))) and Om).

Onda Rock interviewed him in an exclusive for its readers, who will get the chance to retrace his career and his experiences through heartfelt and thoroughly fascinating revelations.

What sparked in you the desire to express your feelings through music, and how did you go about forging your own musical language?

Both of my parents were writers (my father a novelist, my mother a playwright) and amateur musicians; my father, in particular, was a highly gifted harpsichordist, and it was thanks to him that I first became interested in music. I grew up listening to and playing the music of Elizabethan composers such as Giles Farnaby and John Bull. I later became a flautist, and it was through my new instrument that I took my first steps toward contemporary music, learning the entire contemporary flute repertoire, playing Berio's “Sequenzas”, Boulez's “Sonatine for Flute”, Varése's “Density 21.5”, etc.

It was while performing these compositions that, still a teenager, I decided I wanted to become a composer; so I began taking lessons from Donald Stratton and Tom Manoff at the Manhattan School Of Music, and later from Morton Subotnick, who at the time was teaching at New York University.

Initially I was a committed serial composer and wrote works in the post-serialist style. It was through Subotnick's influence that I began to take an interest in electronic music. When I was still sixteen, Morton was kind enough to let me use his studio at New York University, as well as his "Buchla" synthesizer – a sort of non-tempered answer to the Moog, an instrument that was very fashionable towards the end of the Sixties.

At the New York University studios I met Charlemagne Palestine, Maryanne Amacher and, later, the French composer Eliane Radigue. It was these people, more than anyone else, who stirred my interest in the minimalist musical movement. Charlemagne was already composing music marked by long duration. Together with him, in 1970, I went to a La Monte Young concert; neither of us had ever heard of him, and we were amazed that someone had beaten us to the idea of making long-duration music! That's how I decided to study with La Monte and offer myself as the tuner of his harpsichord in "just intonation" (which involves tuning the strings so that they can simultaneously produce the same note, ed.) in exchange for lessons (I became so skilled that I made it my profession, tuning instruments for Gustav Leonhardt, Albert Fuller, Rosylyn Turek and once even for Glenn Gould!).

While studying with La Monte, I had the chance to play in Tony Conrad's group and was quite influenced by it; at the time I had no idea that my mentors were the two founders, along with Terry Riley, of American minimalism. I also sang in La Monte's group, the so-called Theatre of Eternal Music. Terry Riley and Jon Hassell were part of the group at that time. It was a wonderful and deeply formative experience.

Many describe your artistic output as "avant-garde". What meaning do you attach to this word? Do you feel your music matches your own idea of avant-garde?

I think it all depends on how you define "avant-garde". We generally tend to classify as such the music of the Fifties and perhaps the Sixties, like serial compositions, the Fluxus movement, etc.

It doesn't seem to me that during the early Seventies we still called our music "avant-garde", since that term was used to describe an earlier musical period. Anyone coming from the school of Tony Conrad, Terry Riley or La Monte Young was usually classified under the term "minimalist". Anyone else coming from the school of John Cage was, I think, still called an "avant-garde musician", although by the Eighties the term used to describe the post-Cage output would become "post-modern".

In a general sense, in the Eighties I considered myself a post-modern composer, although more specifically I could well have been called a post-minimalist: I in fact belonged to the generation that followed the wave of the "first minimalists" like La Monte, Tony and Terry, and that of the "minimalists", like Philip Glass, Charlemagne Palestine, Steve Reich in the United States and Michael Nyman and Gavin Bryars – both older than me – in England. These guys were something like older brothers to me, though La Monte, Tony and Terry were more like uncles! So yes, I think I can say I was a "post-minimalist".

In any case, towards the end of the Sixties another important movement developed in Europe, shaped by Musica Electronic Viva in Italy and by AMM in the UK. These groups carried forward the project of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Cornelius Cardew to free avant-garde music from the written page, incorporating both improvisation and electronic sound. One of the members of the original Musica Electronic Viva lineup, Frederic Rzewski, arrived in New York in the early Seventies and gave rise to Musica Elettronica Viva New York, which I joined playing flute. We played a lot of concerts and discovered musicians from other backgrounds who had already been experimenting with improvisation before us; the free-jazz scene, for instance, was deeply rooted in Manhattan at the time – two names above all: Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman – and so Frederic began hanging around with musicians from that world.

In your view, how has the language of minimalism evolved from the late Fifties to today?

Very briefly, I'd say that American minimalism was founded by Tony Conrad, who was its theorist and who drove La Monte Young's turn towards "just intonation", as well as La Monte himself and Terry Riley; these three began composing and performing long-duration minimal pieces starting in the early Sixties, although by the late Fifties La Monte and Tony's musical studies already included very slow movements.

There was then a second wave of minimalists, led by Philip Glass, Charlemagne Palestine and Steve Reich, together with several other composers (such as Phill Niblock, Tom Johnson, Philip Corner, Pauline Oliveros and Arnold Dreyblatt) who worked in the same artistic vein (most of them lived in Soho, a neighborhood south of Manhattan). Each of them brought their own contribution to minimalism. Tony, La Monte and Terry were working on "just intonation"; Philip (Glass) wasn't so much interested in "just intonation" as in reinventing Western harmony! Steve (Reich) incorporated African rhythms into his sound, and Charlemagne was more interested in sonority and working directly on harmonic series.

As for me, in the early Seventies I was still a student in total awe of those guys. By the time it came for me to write a composition not meant for study, New York was swept up by the punk revolution.

I thought to myself: "the minimalism promoted by La Monte and Terry was deeply influenced by Indian music, Philip Glass's by jazz instrumentation and visual artists like Richard Serra, Steve Reich's by African music... The members of Musica Electronic Viva incorporated free-jazz techniques into their work... So what could I possibly invent that hasn't already been done?"

I loved the new identity of rock and got to hear a band called Ramones, who made music simply by playing three chords. And to think I was only using one! I realized our music had a lot in common, and I composed a piece that included everything that represented me at that moment: my experience as a harpsichord tuner, my background as a minimalist composer, and my love for that new kind of rock. I named the composition "Guitar Trio", and it's the same piece I'll be playing in Italy during my March tour.

The version of "Guitar Trio" we performed ran quite long, sometimes even an hour. During that period I worked with visual artists like Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman. Robert agreed to create a series of dissolving images to be projected during our performances, which he titled "Pictures For Music".

In the Eighties, I decided to cut "Guitar Trio" down to an intense eight-minute piece. When I revived it last year, though, I chose to readapt it to the original long version, completing it with Longo's visuals. This will be the version – the original one – that you'll see on my Italian tour.

At nineteen you curated the musical side of The Kitchen. Do you want to talk about this experience and what convinced you to conceive, promote and run a project that turned out to be so important and influential? How did it affect your later professional experiences?

In the early Seventies, New York composers were split into two camps: those belonging to the "Uptown Music" scene, generally made up of musicians teaching at universities who drew on the post-serial tradition, and those coming from Downtown, shaped by Cage's madness.

Uptown composers wouldn't let Downtown composers play in concert halls; that's how people like Tony, La Monte and Philip ended up playing in the various Soho lofts.

The Soho scene lasted from the late Sixties to the mid-Eighties, partly because loft rents were low: just think, for mine, which was 365 square meters, I paid about $180.00 a month!

Nobody wanted to live in Soho except artists; that's how you ended up with such a high concentration of musicians living within about twenty blocks of each other. When someone wanted to put on a concert, they could play in a friend's loft.

The Kitchen represented a step up in quality for me and many others. Back then there were no "official" venues where Downtown composers could perform; so when Woody and Steina Vasulka asked me to organize a series of concerts at The Kitchen, I immediately said yes. Downtown composers needed to make use of the spaces a place like that offered. Its advantage, moreover, was that it had a good sound system and a grand piano. We promoted it superbly…

During the second half of the Seventies, Manhattan was the epicenter of a youth protest movement that came to be called "punk". What are your memories of that time?

During the punk period I started composing and I grew up as a person.

In the early Seventies I was still studying at university and, since I was pretty much an "enfant prodige", many of the musicians I was in contact with were about ten years older than me. But by the mid-Seventies, anyone my age had already graduated and was moving to Soho to become part of that scene. That's how I started meeting artists my own age who were making a name for themselves, like Arthur Russell, Jill Kreosen and Peter Gordon.

Until 1976 I had never been to a rock concert, and Peter thought it would be a good idea to take me to see the Ramones. As I said a moment ago, what I heard changed my life forever. Peter, Jill and Arthur were already writing material influenced by rock, and I fell in line shortly after.

At first, all the Soho artists would go to CBGB's to hear the new bands, and it seemed like half the audience was made up exclusively of them; very soon, though, I started noticing how the other half of the audience was made up of the members of the very bands that would be playing there!

It was fantastic, and it felt like we were part of a tribe. They were my people, and we were all more or less the same age.

Patti Smith was hugely influential at that time. I met her during the period when she was reciting her poems at St. Mark's (a church in the East Village, where the Beat Generation poets used to gather to read their work); until one day we saw her play at CBGB's alongside Television, and we thought: "Wow! Great… If she can do it, we can too!".

The great thing about the New York punk movement was the shared feeling of hostility toward any kind of musical virtuosity. It almost seemed like no musician was interested in learning how to play their instrument properly. What mattered was learning to play it your own way. Think of Lydia Lunch's Teenage Jesus And The Jerks: they played elementary rhythms backed by a single chord generated by out-of-tune guitars. It was all as stupid as it was great, at the same time.

This new philosophy caused a profound, unwitting contamination of rock, opening it up to canons that until then had been the exclusive preserve of classical music. It also allowed people like me to play minimalism in rock contexts.

What made you feel the need to contaminate your music with punk? Which encounters most influenced your work of that period? In your view, what has survived of all that in the new generations?

Listening to "Guitar Trio", "The Out Of Tune Guitar" (I'll also be performing a version of the latter on my upcoming Italian tour) and especially "Drastic Classicism", the Downtown audience, who until then had tended to regard certain compositions as pure noise, was able to grasp a new, radical push coming out of minimalism. So I can say, with a touch of pride, that "Drastic Classicism" was one of the pieces (along with work by people like DNA and Teenage Jesus And The Jerks) that inspired New York's "noise rock" movement (No Wave, ed.).

I'll leave it to critics and musicologists to pin down the influence "Guitar Trio" exerted on those who came after. As far as I'm concerned, I can only try to mention a few acts that are in some way connected to what I did: certainly Nirvana and, perhaps more directly, "drone metal" bands like Sleep, Om, Sunn O))) and the like. I love them, but I have no way of knowing whether or not they were influenced by my work: you'd have to ask them yourself! I wouldn't even be able to say whether "Guitar Trio" helped make their work possible. We can certainly spot some connection between what all these bands do and Black Sabbath, though I can still find elements in their attitude that are akin to my "Guitar Trio".

Your music has had a considerable influence on a number of musicians, among whom Glenn Branca, Swans and the early Sonic Youth certainly stand out. How do you think they interpreted your ideas? What's your relationship with them like?

I have to be very careful answering this question, because the names you mentioned all belong to friends of mine, and nobody likes being compared to someone else, or having other people's influences pointed out in their own music. In any case, it's not my place to do that: that's a matter for critics or musicologists. That said, I'm happy to talk about it in general terms.

People often compare Glenn's work to mine, because he's always used instrumentation similar to my own. When he wrote his first piece for six electric guitars (I believe it was called "Instrumental For 6 Electric Guitars"), I thought he was imitating me: the instrumentation he used was certainly similar to mine, and as if that weren't enough, up until then I'd always heard him play with bands that had at least one singer in the lineup. But when I listened to his more recent work, I realized how different it was from anything he'd done before, and I changed my mind. After all, nobody can claim copyright on instrumentation…

As for "Guitar Trio", curiously enough, what interested me most wasn't the tuning. Both my mentors, Tony and La Monte, used "just intonation" for their own work, and I always tried to break away from their approach to create something new; that's why I decided to draw on my experience as a tuner while focusing on other goals, like the melody of the harmonics generated by the guitars. I say this to emphasize the importance I wanted to give to the harmonics themselves, rather than to the tuning system, so that anyone could listen to the harmonics of "Guitar Trio" exactly the way a harpsichord tuner would.

From the very start of his career, Glenn was interested in working with "just intonation" and in using traditional intonation systems far more than I was: that resulted in a deep difference in sound between our respective work. What's more, the score for "Guitar Trio" doesn't include any fingering for the guitarists' left hand: every melodic nuance has to be generated by the harmonics. From the moment Glenn began writing instrumental guitar pieces (that was in 1979), he always preferred working with the notes produced by fingers sliding along the guitar's fretboard, which allowed him to create driving, overwhelming rhythms.

I've never been particularly drawn to tuning systems, since I dealt with them extensively during my studies. Every now and then I do have to work out particular tunings, but I see them merely as a means to an end, and above all they don't define the sound of my pieces the way they can in Glenn's music.

On top of that, Glenn's work and mine have often been equated simply because they both feature instrumental guitar parts that relate to minimalism in an almost accidental way. Beyond what I've described, I think that's where our similarities end.

I'm very close friends with Sonic Youth and we play together every now and then, even though none of them was ever an actual member of any of my bands. I think their contribution to rock was unique, especially for channeling certain ideas that came out of the Downtown art scene of the Seventies and encoding them in a purely "pop" language; their music, in short, was definitely something new, and I've always loved it.

I think my work and Glenn's helped, in a way, to foster a cultural environment that gave rise to bands like Sonic Youth and Swans; beyond that, I believe they made a musical contribution that was genuinely significant, yet distinct from my work or Glenn's.

As for Swans, for instance, I don't think anyone has ever given Michael Gira credit for being the first to use a kind of "monstrous" voice on his records, which, in the end, is the very same voice we hear today on every doom metal record. Either way, he was the first person I ever heard do anything like that!

Looking back over your very long career, which of your works do you consider the most significant, the most successful, and why?

Oh God, what a hard question! Hmmm…

I could say “Guitar Trio,” since it brought together, in a completely unprecedented way, both the minimalist current theorized by the New York Downtown community and the no wave movement. It was a very significant work, especially for the influence it exerted on musicians of that era and on those of today. Also, when I play it today, it sounds just as fresh as it did when I wrote it thirty years ago.

Your tours are consistently marked by your choice to play alongside local musicians, depending on where your performances take place. How does that choice come about, and what's behind it? Basically, what's your goal in playing with people you don't know?

The original concept behind “Guitar Trio” is to share the experience of performing it with as many musicians as possible. Playing that piece is a genuinely ecstatic experience, both for listeners and for musicians. For many it can represent a new technical approach to the guitar, and for many others it's something completely new, because it lets them understand just how much music can come out of playing a single chord over and over. “Guitar Trio” takes the concept of minimal music out of a purely intellectual realm, turning it into a visceral, out-of-body experience.

In the piece titled “An Angel Moves Too Fast To See,” which I've toured in twenty different cities around the world since 1989, the year of its premiere, the underlying idea was to involve guitarists by giving them the opportunity to play with an orchestra. Most of them often don't have the same orchestral approach that classical musicians might have, so I wanted to give them the chance to explore new styles.

The scores for this piece are conventional and call for the same tuning across all the instruments involved. I use a specific modal tuning for the guitar, not so much because I'm interested in upending the instrument's own tuning system, but rather to sidestep each musician's personal experience, so that everyone can start from the same technical starting point – once they've learned the fingering needed to play the piece.

“An Angel Moves Too Fast To See” is made up of six movements, and each one calls for a profoundly different performance style. That's why the musicians involved can build up new experiences, like playing alongside an orchestra, engaging with other guitarists, and even learning a variety of guitar techniques they can reuse in their own work.

During rehearsals we become a kind of small community, and every time the piece is put together it's as if a new group had been formed. When I played in Lisbon, guitarist Rafael Toral met his future wife in the orchestra! Now they have a beautiful child, and in a way, I feel a bit like the godfather...

“An Angel Moves Too Fast To See,” in particular, isn't a work that can only be appreciated by “insiders”: it can easily be enjoyed by anyone who loves rock. The real subjects of the performance, its “stars,” are the local musicians themselves, and that's exactly what happened when I played in Milan and Palermo!

As you just mentioned, you've played in Italy in the past – including alongside some notable musicians. Which Italian musicians (past or present, it makes no difference) have struck you the most, and why?

As I just recalled, I played “An Angel Moves Too Fast To See” in Milan and Palermo. You can hear what happened on my CD released a few years back on Table Of The Elements. I met several wonderful musicians while working in Italy. One of my dearest friends is Maurizio Marsico, whom I've known since the Seventies and who was the first person I brought “Guitar Trio” to Milan with. The great bassist Steve Piccolo, who was also part of Lounge Lizards, now lives in Milan, and I often get to play with him.

As for my earliest influences, I should mention Luigi Russolo with his “L'Arte Del Rumore” and his writings belonging to the Futurist movement, as well as Giacinto Scelsi, Luciano Berio, and the works of Musica Electronic Viva from the Sixties.

Your latest work, “A Crimson Grail” (Table Of The Elements, 2007), is drawn from a recording of four hundred (400!) guitars made on the night of October 1, 2005 in the church of Sacré-Cœur in Paris, and I find it a stunning work, marked by a rare emotional intensity. Would you like to talk a bit about that experience, what it meant to you, and how it fits within your body of work.

It's a piece composed to be performed in a specific location, namely the Basilica of the Sacré-Cœur in Paris, whose acoustics boast a fifteen-second echo delay. I could never have used drums there.

Because of that kind of reverb, I tried to place greater emphasis on the sound of the guitars and to use very slow chord progressions, sacrificing the baroque sound of the melodies, exactly as you can hear in “An Angel Moves Too Fast To See.”

What came out of it was something deeply emotional, so much so that after it ended, some people came up to me with tears in their eyes, telling me how much that piece had shaken them. I really think that “A Crimson Grail” represents the logical evolution of my orchestral language for electric guitars.

Right now I'm working on a new piece called “A Secret Rose”, which calls for a hundred electric guitars, bass and drums, all in standard tuning. It will premiere next May in the United States.

Have you recently discovered any records (past or present) that left a deep mark on you? Would you like to talk about them?

As I said before, I only recently discovered the early-Nineties “drone metal” movement, and in particular the Sleep album titled “Dopesmoker” (Tee Pee, 2003). If you don't know it, I recommend you listen to it: it's a sixty-minute piece built on strange processions of guitar riffs that sound both heavy-metal and minimalist at the same time.

I've always been drawn to the instrumental sections of heavy-metal records. In the early Eighties I even thought about putting together a minimalist version of Black Sabbath. The whole thing ended up turning into “Drastic Classicism”. It was only after listening to bands like Sleep, Om, Earth and Sunn O))) that I felt my dream of combining heavy-metal with minimalism had finally been fulfilled. When I first heard these bands, I was stunned, and now I always listen to them when I'm at home.

These artists inspired me to the point of deciding to form a band, Essentialist. We've already recorded enough material for an album, which should come out after the release of my “Guitar Trio” project.

By the way, I don't know if you're aware that, together with the Guitar Trio, I toured America with bands like Sonic Youth, Tortoise, former members of Hüsker Dü and many others. We recorded everything, and the result of that experience will be collected in a triple CD to be released by Table Of The Elements by the end of March. The title will be “Guitar Trio Is My Life”.

What do you consider to be the most innovative musical proposals, or the ones most characteristic of the historical period we're living through? Basically, what do you think best exemplifies our era (answering “Britney Spears” doesn't count)?

Sorry, but right now I'm too tired to answer: I've got no energy left! I'll save my answer for another time.

What are your plans for the future?

The reason I'm so tired is that I'm about to finish the music for “The Secret Rose” and I'm spending a lot of time on Essentialist. After that, I've decided to compose a series of instrumental pieces for various combinations of orchestral instruments (strings, woodwinds and so on). That's because, every now and then, I feel the need to reconnect with my classical roots.

Thanks to Die Schachtel, Wakeupandream and Nico Valenti Gatto.

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