A Shot in the Dark: February 2019

Update (March 24 2022) - For more details, see David Lee's 2017 thesis Outside the Empire: Improvised Music in Toronto 1960-1985.

Back in November 2018 I was alerted to an eBay item which included the text "new music ensemble". This one was a new one for me though, based in Toronto. The cover was striking:

More images at discogs.com

The record names only two performers: Ron Sullivan and James Falconbridge. With this information, I went on a deep dive to see what I could find out. A Google search for the "toronto new music ensemble" sullivan falconbridge yields the following results (Repeat the search and to see one additional result)

Notice the final link: Full text of "The Varsity, September 19, 1966 - March 17, 1967". I went searching through this raw data and found one historical document, which I want to share with you all. Its formatting is all jumbled up, so I'm mirroring it here. I think you'll find Doug Pringle's description of "New Music" vivid and inspiring.

New Music

By DOUG PRINGLE

• New Music moves toward the ectsatic state.

• Things and people bathed by the music are beautiful.

• New Music moves the listener by physical force; it is an attempt to communicate by setting mind and body in vibration together, unseparate; an act of force, but not of violence, of love.

• The understanding reached is not intellectual, and not emotional, in the sense that we understand these modes in art. Its significance is spiritual, it moves the mind and body together.

John Cage in 1966.
Photo: Victor Drees / Getty

• New Music is pure music, in the same sense that new painting is pure plastic expression: the material and formal properties of the medium which determine the expressiveness of a piece of art have consistently been disregarded in the past in favor of the literal subject matter, which is much more easily verbalized because it is drawn from literary sources. As color and composition are the base elements in visual expression, melody (in the broad sense as a linear arrangement of sounds) and texture make the sense in music. (Cage's disparagement of the tradition of harmonic structure in Western classical music from Beethoven to Schoenberg as a denial of the essence of world music, melody, is interesting in the context of this polyphonic improvised music.)

Miles Davis in 1966 at Newport.
Photo: Joe Alper

• The best jazz in the past has attained the same kind of spiritual feeling beyond the normal emotional range, in the same way that most great painting in the past has been expressive in pure plastic terms. The development of painting in this century ha been rooted in self-criticism, which has led to art which is fully conscious of its elements. Similarly, self-criticism in improvised music ha led to its refinment and increase in expressive scope through the recognition of its essential strengths.

• Miles Davis synthesizes; new musicians realize.

• The point is not getting hot, or getting excited; these assessments of behaviour are part of a scale of values which are inapplicable to the music and its state of mind.

• The music seems frenetic and harsh, yet the sense of the music is cool; it is an attempt to open up the mind so that stimuli are freely exchanged. The accelerated tempo is an effort on the part of the musician to match musical realization to the rate of conception; thus conscious with-holding of ideas is to a large degree eliminated, and the music is a measure of the mind. Criticism must follow the performance, and discipline and self-knowledge must precede.

• The synchronization of conception and expression makes the music a form of automatism; many analogies are to be made with abstract expressionism and De Kooning and Pollock's working methods, although the painter remains a solitary figure in a way that is undesirable for the musican who feels the common mind.

Albert Ayler, 1966. Photo: Jan Persson

• Albert Ayler; "You have to really play your instrument to escape from notes to sounds".

• The form of the performed music is strong, and improvised passages often sound like composed music, when sympathies are strong. Sound relationships are deduced and intuited. Recordings change the involvement of minds entirely, but lead to understanding in a different way, as cross-sections of a continuous thing.

• New Music is not sexy, in the sense that it imitates sex; musical expression is another aspect of the erotic impulse.

• New music is not a calculated experience; it is a simultaneous knowing.

• Getting out of your mind is not out of the question.

• Playing new music is like singing until your lungs ache.

The author is a member of the Toronto New Music ensemble which played four engagements at the Penny Farthing in the past month under the leadership of Michael Snow. The band consisted of Snow (trumpet), Harvey Brodhecker (trombone), Jim Falconbridge (soprano sax), Stu Broomer (bass), Ron Sullivan (drums), and the author on alto sax. The New Music is a New York-based development of the jazz tradition. Further engagements are planned, including campus concerts.

The Varsity, Sept 30 1966 (p. 4 and 5)

To the sponsors of Perception '67 at UC a word of warning: refrain from linking the projected 'new music' concert with 'jazz'. Stu Broomer should have made this clear by billing his group as The Stu Broomer Kinetic Ensemble, with an emphasis on the word 'kinetic'. I have searched all over for an English translation of that particular title, but the best I came up with is this: "Those Of Us Who Play (Hung-Up) Musical Instruments And Make Noise According To The Principles Of Hypersensitivastronuclearsolarplexusphysica". In other words WATCH OUT! I talked to composer-arranger Broomer last night, and he has tentatively arranged to perform an original composition called 'Holy Communion'.

The Varsity Review, Jan 20 1967 (p 2)

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A Shot in the Dark

Sunday, February 10, 2019

The Toronto New Music Ensemble // New Music by Doug Pringle