RHYS CHATHAM - A Crimson Grail

Four hundred electric guitars intoning a hymn to eternal music. Four hundred electric guitars on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur in Paris, on the night of October 1, 2005. A 12-hour sonic marathon from which the 56-odd minutes of this "A Crimson Grail" were drawn, the latest offspring of the giant Rhys Chatham, father of Glenn Branca and grandfather of Sonic Youth.

It sends shivers down your spine just thinking about it: 2400 strings vibrating in unison, forming a single, gigantic flow of sound, a celestial mass of notes overlapping, coupling, screaming out a collective rite whose unbearable power breaks through the wall of transcendence, opening a passage upward, in a gravitational rapture that leaves you speechless, hypnotized or meekly resigned. Music that, as it floods the space, makes clear and necessary its place of origin: a distant point where even silence vibrates and resonates.

So it is that the first movement lets the abstract essence of the electric guitar flow out of and back into itself time and again, between peaks and cascades of chords, in a symphonism of offering, a liturgy of self-giving. The influence of the location on the genesis of the music is undeniable. Even more so when, like a choir, the guitars converge into an angelic drone of solemn proportions, the distant, sleeping city wrapped in the restrained splendor of fluorescent lights. Pure asceticism, serene levitation. Barely perceptible, Jonathan Kane's cymbals sustain the faintly dissonant litany which, in the second movement, through a one-directional shift, evolves into another luminescent fade.

The roar of the crowd (around ten thousand people) then greets the arrival of the third movement, whose submerged power gives spatial form to the enchantment the music induces — both astonished and fearful, yet never violent. This music comes from a place where it has always been and will always be. It is motionless, yet intimately scored by the tension toward becoming: imperceptible but inescapable. And so, faced with this colossal flock of suspended notes, we remain as if blinded by something, without knowing its meaning or its reason. Perhaps, who knows, it is a divine, languid stream of consciousness whose prodigious beauty lies entirely in its hypnotic candor.

***

The avant-garde of the "non-avant-gardists"

by Nicola Mazzocca

Listening to a record like Rhys Chatham's latest, you find yourself swept away by a lot of things. First of all by the music itself, which is truly stunning, blissful as if touched by grace, a kind of paradise; then by the sheer scale of the undertaking — Christ, four hundred guitars all at once — by the jarring gap between what you expect (chaos) and what the guitars actually produce, and by the image of the setting in which it all took place. But if, like me, you went looking for the video of the performance because, like me, you simply had to have it, I'd like to offer you a further key to reading this record which, in my opinion, raises its conceptual value considerably.

Rhys Chatham's new record is played by four hundred people, with four hundred guitars, and while listening to it you don't even think about it — but seeing the faces of the people playing the guitars, the first question that springs to mind is: how many of these four hundred people had previously had, or would in future have, anything to do with avant-garde music? How many of these four hundred people had any academic training? And how many of these people experienced this event as an avant-garde statement rather than as taking part in something unique and beautiful that produced an extraordinary result? And how do you explain that thousands of people watched the concert, and not only weren't bored stiff but actually loved it?

With this record, Chatham makes clear — to those who never wanted to take an interest, or to those who never could due to lack of information — the highest value of avant-garde music: that of being pure music of sensation, which may need to be written by academics when composed at a desk, but can arise spontaneously from anyone, in any way, regardless of the technical training of whoever makes it, and above all can be perceived, recognized as one's own, and even loved by far more people than expected — certainly partly because of the event itself, but it's an endless number of extra people who let themselves be swept away by something that, musically, on paper, they would never have imagined they could like.

"A Crimson Grail" is the avant-garde played by a multitude of people who don't even know what the avant-garde is but can play it brilliantly, and it's loved by a lot of people who don't even know what the avant-garde is but can appreciate it perfectly well, and certain faces among the players — male, female, of all ages, intelligent faces and dumb faces alike — betray a sheer pleasure in playing what they're playing, and for all these reasons what comes out of it is musically exhilarating and conceptually right, healthy, and the bearer of a wonderful message.

All this to say: what if the masses' lukewarm response to avant-garde music were simply a matter of poor engagement?

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11/03/2007