New Music Ensemble, Part 1 - Liner Notes

The New Music Ensemble was a new music group that was active from 1963-1967. 

They are best remembered today as an influential free improvisation group, but they also regularly performed contemporary repertoire. Rehearsal recordings of their improvisations were heard by Franco Evangelisti, who was inspired to form the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza in Rome. (In fact, Larry Austin played in an early version of the Gruppo.) As the NME dissolved, several of the group's members formed Composer/Performer Editions and SOURCE: Music of the Avant-Garde.

Billie Alexander, soprano

Larry Austin, trumpet, flugelhorn, string bass

Jon Gibson, flute, soprano saxophone, clarinet

Wayne Johnson, clarinet, bass clarinet

Stanley Lunetta, percussion

Richard Swift, piano

Arthur Woodbury, flute, alto saxophone, bassoon

The NME released two LP's; both were private pressings and neither has been reissued. I'm still looking for a copy of the first LP, but I have scans of the front and back covers, so I have typed out the liner notes here.

[No recording information is included with the first NME album, but according to Larry Austin's recollection, it was recorded in spring 1964.]

For further background, check out the following documents:

• Forum: Improvisation. Childs, Hobbs. Perspectives in New Music, September 1982. Austin is interviewed beginning on pg. 27, but the whole article is worth reading for its extensive interviews.

• My 2014 interview with Stanley Lunetta, who gave his perspective on the NME.

• This page from Stan's website, which includes a sound bite from each NME record.

 

New Music Ensemble Liner Notes

The Ensemble

The New Music Ensemble here explores the realm of free group improvisation. This group of improvisers and performers has excited the greatest interest among composers, performers and the general public. Unlike other improvisation groups, the New Music Ensemble does not use plans or charts for their improvisations. Rather, they depend upon the group compositional feeling for structure from the smallest musical gesture to the total composition. Using contemporary musical vocabulary and innumerable conventional and unconventional virtuoso instrumental techniques, the New Music Ensemble creates total art improvisations.

Harry Aron, Associate Professor of Psychology at Sacramento State College, has followed the NME, has written about it, and has been a devoted listener. He writes:

Harry Aron. Source: harryaron.com

"A word. The New Music Ensemble is at the horizon. Horizons are always out of reach and never understood. They feel strange. And they are reached for in distrust. But are looked to. The NME is listened to. And they are reached for in distrust. But are looked to. The NME is listened to. And in the listening makes for you at least one horizon a little clearer. Somewhat more understood. And in so doing makes a thousand more horizons. An achievement.

"But you say. The NME doesn't make sense. What does? What new thing does? Not to mention the old. All right. For a moment at least agree. Now tell me, you ask, what can I listen for? Why force me to perjure you? But I will. Just remember, you asked. You smile in your contemporary morality, knowing of course that now we are both guilty. Do you think it would help if someone would just strangle moralists? Or is that what morals are - stranglers?

"What has all this to do with the NME? Well, for a moment think of what you felt. Repulsion, indifference, excitement, joy, even interest! You were forced to experience, aided to sensing, by the sound of the NME! By something of your history! Something long buried in the tradition which you call your style of life. Of the blindness which gives you vision. And hearing.

"The NME gives you a chance. The real chance lies in experiencing yourself. Or at least part of you. Even if in revulsion. Most directly what happens to you while listening is an examination of yourself in the context of their sound. In the context of their courage to make a sound which is so exposed because it doesn't immediately fit. It exposes you. You move with them to a horizon. Or remain behind.

"Stretch. Why should you? Why not? It's human. It is humanizing. You see, that's what the NME is doing for you. They offer you a context in which some of your most primitive feelings and history of behaving can be altered by disconnecting your feelings. By locking them to strange sounds and unexpected sequences. The chances are that in the unusual the typical in you is for the first time visible. Subject to alteration. It's a discovery with a chance. A chance to become.

That's what people at the horizon do for you. To you. They allow you to regroup. To see and hear additionally. Or to retrench. To demand the old. The tired. To keep your prison the same. Or to change it. The humanity of the NME is that they allow you to choose the way. They don't make the prisoner, nor do they detail the citizen. It seems as if the NME has completely captured what it means to be humanistic: absence of invariance, discovery about your makeup, and change in who knows what direction - set by you. How? Through their music. But what marks their music? The pauses? The dissonances? The acute listening to each other? To themselves? And in listening the creation of the new sound? Which sets the piece? But which way will it go? That, of course, is the discovery. The creation. And the humor. They build the pieces. As you rebuild, your guesses are surprised! Confirmed! You are a partner as you are the student. You draw on yourself as you are given. That's involvement. And, of course, that's what the NME allows. Through an involvement which gives you the chance to stretch, to move, toward the new horizons I was talking about earlier.

"Listen. Be. Do as the NME."

July 28th, 1963. This is one of the earliest photos of the NME, taken before their debut concert on July 31st. Note the mention of Pat Woodbury, who later performed with the NME as Billie Alexander. Also note the presence of Jerome Rosen, an early member who did not appear on either recording.

Our Music

The NME was formed in June 1963. The instrumentation used by the group was a result not of planning but of the performing abilities of the individual players. The first public concert took place in July 1963. Since that time, the NME has appeared in nearly twenty concerts, as well as on radio and television.

We call our music free group improvisation. What we really mean is that it is group improvisation without a preconceived, explicit context. We are, however, operating within an implicit context. In a strict sense, then, we are never actually free. Absolute freedom is in fact not desired, for the result would be anarchic.

As we operate within an implicit context, each player seeks his role. One gesture suggests a consequent gesture; that gesture another. For the most part the overall intensity of a gesture is controllable - but not every detail. Many times, upon rehearing our session on the tape, we become dissatisfied with a note or sequence of notes - but this is the inherent gamble of "spontaneous" composing. The composer can refine his art work, excluding unwanted details. But the composer lacks the immediate contact with the performer's concept of the art work, and can only imagine - can only hope - for the intended result, the obvious exception being electronic music, where the composer deals directly with the art sound. The unrefined details of group improvisation can often become significant music - immediately. And this ever-present possibility continues to intrigue us.

Implicit in our improvisation is the practice of gradual liquidation of material which may or may not coincide with the gradual emergence of fresh material, which in turn may itself be liquidated or suddenly disrupted by explosive contrast of spontaneous material. Subsidiary material invented by one improviser may suddenly be projected to the foreground of the context by an other improviser. What at first might seem mere impulsiveness is actually deeply rooted in the piece. As a result, our reaction to certain types of gestures is ever sharper. The player who initiates the piece - often the one who plays the first note - sets the tone, calls the tune, motivates the oher [sic] players to respond to this piece in a certain way.

Our growing understanding of our music and our growing sensitivity to certain types of gestures has tightened our control over the outcome of individual pieces. When we decide, for instance, that an improvisation will be a "short piece", we sense its inherent compositional problems: economy of means, tight controls over the choice of pitches, fewer and shorter impulsive contrasts, and a less complicated sound context which would necessarily call for long, elaborate gestures to spend the cumulative energy. "Long pieces", of course, will always present the greater challenge.

This blurb appeared on 20 Sept 1964
in the Sacramento Bee

When a piece is in motion, our response to the context is readily apparent in the rhythmic configurations. In early improvisation sessions, a frequent complaint by certain improvisers was that our music lacked a descernible [sic] "pulse", making us seemingly incapable as a group of creating rhythmic designs which could make a piece "fast" or "slow". We feel that for the most part it was due - in those early stages - to a lesser degree of sensitivity on the individual's part to the rhythmic motion of the group composition; i.e., sensitivity to the concept of tension-release. Improvisers now are acutely aware of the relative tension of a section, labeling it "fast", or the relative non-tension of a section, labeling it "slow".

The one area which we thought would be the most problematic has turned out to be the least problematic: choice of pitches. Here we react ideally - at once to the group context, at once to individual improvisers, at once to the content of our own improvisation. We discovered early that, as fluent practitioners of the music of our time, we almost automatically selected the appropriate combination and/or sequence of pitches for the context. No pre-improvisational pitch arrangements were concocted, except in an occasional "study". The pitches chosen always seem relevant. Even the occasional remote references to conventional diatonic modes rises and subsides naturally without awkwardness and with credibility. This fortunate fluency in the choice of proper pitches keeps our pieces in motion, even when other elements of the context seem weak. Our "feel" for the right pitch is proven when, in the course of an improvisation, someone "hits a wrong note". This can cause the offender and the entire group to howl with laughter, delighted in the group understanding of its pitch idiom. For the most part duplication of pitches is avoided by the group. When chance duplication does occur performers immediately correct, if necessary, the conventional implications of non-motion by skilfully [sic] moving away or emphasizing the coloristic potential of the pitch combination. Otherwise, any and all pitch combinations are admitted.

- Notes by Larry Austin and Richard Swift

March 29, 1964