Bergstraesser: Playing Free in Nebraska

Here's another post about the scene that orbited around Randall Snyder's Lincoln Improvisation Ensemble. Randy was kind enough to share his archival copy of EAR, which contained Playing Free in Nebraska, a first-hand account by Mike Bergstraesser of his work in the region. (Like everything on this blog, I share it for educational and research purposes only.)

This is from EAR, July/August 1978 (p. 8)

Playing Free In Nebraska

by Mike Bergstraesser

It is a pleasure to share with you some of the esoteric music currently happening in Nebraska. First, let me give you a brief history of the improvisational and experimental music being performed in the state, particularly in Lincoln.

In September 1974 Randy Snyder, Associate Professor of Composition at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln (UNL), and Noyes Barthalomew [sic] formed the Lincoln Improvisational Ensemble (LIE). LIE, which is part of the UNL School of Music curriculum, offered less structured formats and more spontaneous improvisation than any previous ensemble.

Over the past four years LIE has consisted of many talented musicians including Paul Bendell on cello, Bill Buntain on trombone, Molly Baldwin on piano, Bob Reigle on tenor sax, and Preston Koch on synthesizer. Several of these members have gone on to organize improvisational ensembles in Oregon, Wisconsin, and Oxford, England.

Lincoln Improvisation Ensemble performing in Temporal Matters by Barbara Ball Mason.
From left to right: Mike Bergstraesser, Warren Schaffer, Tom Malone, and Randy Snyder

About one year ago several members of LIE formed a new improvisation ensemble in Lincoln called SurRealEstate (SRE). SRE was not University-based, allowing exploration outside the school system. Currently both LIE and SRE perform in Lincoln and Omaha, each band sharing several musicians.

LIE's music runs the gamut from spontaneous improvisation to highly structured formats. LIE has accompanied poetry, plays, and dance. Most of the music and many of the dances, plays, and poems are written by members of the ensemble. LIE has also accompanied several works by a variety of artists outside the group.

SRE's music is as diverse as LIE's but emphasizes sonic exploration and spontaneity. SRE utilizes extensive percussion, sound-sculpture, and theatrics. SRE performs irregularly in Lincoln and has accompanied several dances by the Circle-Nicely Dance Company. Surrealestate Live is the title of SRE's first record, recorded late in 1977.

The instrumentations for LIE and SRE are very similar, since the groups share several members. All musicians play at least one instrument competently, and many players improvise on several different instruments. A typical piece may include flutes, saxophones, bassoon, brass, piano, synthesizer, tapes, electric guitar, and bass, and an occassional [sic] violin or cello. Percussion racks, toys, vocalizations, and spontaneous poetry round out the basic repertoire.

Multi-media format for Surrealestate and the Circle-Nicely Dance Company

An example of a format commonly used in the improvisation ensembles is illustrated. I wrote Proto for SRE and five dancers. The score integrates symbolic and graphic notation which is custom designed for both individual personalities and the group as a whole. Performance space has sometimes been a problem, especially for SRE, which does not have access to space at the University. Currently SRE practices in the homes of its members. LIE performs regularly at Kimball Recital Hall on the UNL campus and has played for several university and community fairs and festivals.

The musicians and composers in both groups finance their endeavors in a number of different ways. Several members are musicians in local commercial rock, jazz, or country bands, some are music students, and others work in a variety of non-musical jobs to support their interests in composition and improvisation.

Mike Bergstraesser writes about his work:

I have been active in LIE and SRE for the past three years and have written and performed about a dozen pieces for these ensembles. The flexibility and enthusiasm of both bands have been very valuable in the realization of my experimental music.

My compositions encompass many different genres including acoustic, electronic, and electronically modified acoustic music. Some examples of my music are:

Tree Music (1976) is a multi-media for Tai-Chi dancer, flute, piano, gong, cello, and photo-electric mixer. This piece integrates several ideas I have been working on including perspective, information theory, aleatoric notation, and gestalting.

The score consists of four different deciduous trees, one for each instrument. On the trunk and limbs of the trees I drew staves and on these staves I wrote the music which was a combination of very specific pitches and durations as well as aleatoric notations. The scores are laid on their sides when performed and the various angles of the staves in the limbs of the trees force the musicians to twist and contort, resembling real tree limbs.

A Tai-Chi dancer performs simultaneously with the music and when his shadow interrupts the photocell mixer, the instruments that are sounding at the time are amplified through the house P.A. system, dramatically projecting the sounds to the audience.

You've Got A Lot Of Nerve (1977) is a multi-media biofeedback composition for solo biofeedback performer, physician, electronic tape, and slides. This has been my most ambitious electronic composition and the only biofeedback piece performed in Nebraska. This piece consists of five movements, each combining different bio-potentials, different electronic textures, and different lighting and visual effects. An electronic program tape paces the performance and provides a central nervous system cleanse between each of the five movements.

So far in 1978 I have co-composed and performed the music for an originally choreographed dance entitled Temporal Matters by Barbara Ball Mason. This dance incorporates acoustic, synthesized, and tape music and was written and performed by LIE members Randy Snyder, Warren Schaffer, Tom Malone, and myself (see photo). This has been the most performed piece in the history of LIE and probably one of its most successful. 𝄇

-BONUS -

I also located a short promotional article about Bergstraesser, Reigle and Surrealestate. This came from Jazz Echo, a publication of the International Jazz Federation, Inc. (Vol 9, No. 39, January, 1979 - p. 9)

New music is alive and well in the heartlands of America. Surrealestate is an improvisatory ensemble working out of Lincoln, Nebraska, that was formed about a year and a half ago by tenor saxophonist/clarinetist Bob Reigle.

During the summer of '77, Reigle and several other musicians got together and played regularly, often six days a week. The result of these intensive sessions can be heard on the group's first album "Bob Reigle with Surrealestate," released on their own Aardwood label (available through New Music Distribution Service, 6 W. 95th Street, New York, N.Y. 10025).

Describing the album, Reigle emphasizes, "All of the music was totally improvised--no parameters or structures were discussed before we started playing." The group's flutist, Mike Bergstraesser, explains that the music is "dictated by experience, with minimum control exercised by reason, exempt from moral and aesthetic preoccuptation."

Both Reigle and electric bassist Mike Mansfield studied at the Berklee College of Music. Reigle, Bergstraesser, flutist Tom Malone and French horn player Warren Shaffer all worked together in the Lincoln Improvisation Ensemble before forming Surrealestate. Other members of the group include trumpeter Preston Klik and percussionist Rich Jones, who has a master's degree in composition.

Surrealestate has performed at the University of Nebraska, on a local radio station and has also presented several concerts in the Lincoln area.

Contact:
Robert F. Reigle
7640 Fairax
Lincoln, NE 68505
USA

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Randall Snyder on the Lincoln Improvisation Ensemble

Randall Snyder.
Credit: Daily Nebraskan

I came across Randy Snyder in a rather unusual way. Using my subscription to Newspapers.com, I spent much of my spare time in 2016 searching for mentions of phrases like "improvised music", "improvisation ensemble", "ensemble improvisation", "music improvisation", and so forth. This search has, to date, borne much fruit, as longtime readers of this blog will attest.

With the phrase "improvisation ensemble", I struck a vein. In Lincoln, Nebraska, there was for several years a group called the Lincoln Improvisation Ensemble, under the direction of Randall Snyder. A Google search for "Lincoln Improvisation Ensemble" turned up a few curiosities, including an LP on Discogs, the liner notes of which mention the LIE:

From Bob Reigle with Surrealestate
(Aardwoof No. 1)

Other than this release, very little turned up. I decided to contact Randall and see if he could answer some questions I had about the LIE. He was very gracious with his time, and agreed to the publication of our conversation and some score excerpts.




Many of Snyder's scores are available for download here:

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/musicsnyder/

Here's a transcript of our conversation in mid-2017:

Can you talk about how the Lincoln Improvisation Ensemble came together?

RS: I started teaching at the University of Nebraska in 1974, and started the group up the very first semester, that fall. That iteration of the band went for about 3 or 4 years, and then it kind of petered out. Then I started it up a second time, [in the] mid ‘80s. And that had a slightly shorter lifespan, maybe about three years. So there were two groups really, of all different personnel - students.

How did you come to be interested in improvisation?

RS: My background was as a composer. I’d say for lack of a better description, kind of in the Elliott Carter tradition. And also a jazz musician. I was interested in trying to find an ensemble that could create chromatic improvisation. When I got my DMA at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), I played in an ensemble that was directed by Les Thimmig. That was one of the models for the group I wanted to start when I got the teaching position here in Nebraska. That group was a very orthodox group; it did not allow for even modal improvising, and I wanted to make this group slightly less strict, in terms of its aesthetic. So while we had chromatic free improv in the center, we went into lots of different directions, ultimately even getting into multimedia and theatrical pieces, with film, dance; it’s kind of hard to summarize. We did a lot of different kinds of things; it depended on the input of the players, where they wanted to take the group. While I was the director of the group, I wasn’t the leader, in terms of making decisions about repertoire. That was left up to the players. So we had a couple good years. I get it’s kind of hard to characterize it, because it was kind of all over the map.

Can you say more about the place of free improvisation in the LIE?

RS: It was the center of it, really. We used some “formats”; some pieces we would just walk out on stage without any preconceived notion of what was going to happen. Then other pieces had “formats”, which might have pitch classes that were selected ahead of time, or some generalized notions of things. Some of these got to be very elaborate, in terms of graphic notation for example. Some of my students were influenced by Stockhausen with his Seven Days in May, and modular improv. I think the 80’s group was more prone to using guidelines. I would say in general that group was a little more “conservative”, if I could use that expression. John Link was a member of that group; he’s a composer in New York, and teached at William Paterson. Several players continued in this vein, one was Robert Reigle, he had a group called Surrealestate. He’s been teaching in Ankara, Turkey, and he signed this petition against President Erdogan, and he was summarily fired. And he had tenure.

TIME, SPACE(d), COLOR - A format by Snyder

One of the purposes of the group was for my composition students to try out ideas. These “formats” a lot of times were like compositional plans. I stressed that a composer, before they start writing a piece, should have an idea of what’s going to happen in the piece; to draw a kind of roadmap, often using pictorial or graphic notation, just to give a sense of the overall disposition of the piece. And these would be brought in separately as these kind of roadmaps. Have you ever heard of the magazine EAR? There was an article called “Playing Free In Nebraska”; one of my students contributed the article. There was a West Coast EAR and an East Coast EAR; this was the West Coast magazine. I imagine that came out in the late 70’s. It was a nice article; it talked about various ensembles in Nebraska that specialized in free playing.

Did the LIE make any recordings?

RS: We recorded every concert on reel-to-reel, but [there were no] recordings that were good for public consumption. I guess we felt that was beside the point of the group, to make documents like that. There are recordings available, I think mostly at the archives at the UN Lincoln, and I retired from there about 7 or 8 years ago, so I don’t know what’s going on there now. I doubt that there’s any interest in this sort of thing.

Did you have a hard time getting the LIE accepted as a part of the U-N curriculum?

RS: The chairman was a composer, a very cool guy. He welcomed the idea, which was amazing in retrospect. That was the first group, and after a year or two, we mostly played gigs. It was a gigging band, basically. Then it became part of the curriculum, as an elective ensemble. The players in the 80’s band, they got 1 credit in lieu of having to play in wind ensemble or something. I think the curriculum was revised later, and I don’t know if it’s still there as an option. It may be, I really don’t know. The school has turned in a direction toward more commercial jazz; right when I was leaving, it was heading in that direction, and I wasn’t that interested in that path.

Do you have any particularly fond memories of the LIE that you’d like to share?

A typical ad for an LIE concert. Several of these can be
found in papers from the period.

RS: I think the first band, it was my first year there, and the players in the band were almost my age, and they were applying using the GI bill. Some of them were Vietnam veterans, some outstanding talented people. That group in particular, we became like a club. It was like a rock band; we would rehearse and go out for drinks afterward. I recall some of the first gigs; we would play anywhere, for free of course. We played one performance at an arts fair, and a couple people complained about the noise. This was an indoor amphitheater, it sat about 2,000 people. They came and told us we had to stop. Some of my students were there, and they complained about this, so they wrote letters to the editor, and it became sort of a cause celebre for a while, it was funny. So there was a debate in these letters, about “What is art?” and all this kind of stuff. (laughs)

What paper were those letters to the editor in?

RS: Well there were two papers back then, there’s only one now. Either the Lincoln Journal, or the Lincoln Star. And now there’s just the one paper, called the Lincoln Journal Star. I recall there was a columnist who interviewed me about this.

These were students who were taking my History of Jazz class, they weren’t music majors; it’s not like our own people were sending in these letters. They just came to hear the band, and we were told within three minutes that we had to stop playing. It was astonishing, the anger that we aroused, which I suppose is one of the traditional roles of music. We weren’t that loud! We started out as primarily an acoustic band, but we used analog synthesizers. Near the end, we were keeping up with the changes in the technology.

One of my students was a medical student, and he created a biofeedback piece. And I was the subject: I was wired up, I wandered out on stage looking like Frankenstein. The galvanic skin response, I remember: when I started sweating, that would cause a signal to change. [Changes in] the heartbeat was monitored, and that would cause something in the electronics to reflect that. He said that, because there was some danger of a loop effect happening, that there had to be a doctor there, in case I fell upon some hard times! So one of his teachers was there, just to make sure that things didn’t get out of hand.

Did the LIE begin as a class, or was it an extracurricular group?

RS: We rehearsed at the school, but it wasn’t a class. I wanted to get to know the students better; we were out drinking one night, and over a beer we thought it would be fun to go in this direction. Some of the players envied jazz musicians. They couldn’t play jazz; at least, they couldn’t play bebop. They wondered if there was another way that they could experience playing improvised music, but not under even the strictures of avant-garde jazz of the ‘60s. So I’d say that, with one or two exceptions (we had about 10 people as a core group), most of them did not have jazz chops. So this was kind of an alternative way for them to experience playing non-written music.

Program notes from a concert on 22 April, 1986

When did the LIE begin to "peter out"?

RS: It was about the end of the decade, I’d say. We started in ‘74, we kind of reached a peak in ‘76, in terms of frequency of performances, and the excitement of the group. And then players left; I recruited some new players, but it kind of died a natural death, by the end of the 70’s. ‘79 if you want to put a year on it. Then it started up again: I had a new crop of people, and they had heard about [the earlier group], and wondered if we could reconstitute it. I started by using some of the more successful written formats as starting points. In that group, I think I was really more the “leader” than I was in the first group: I was older, they hadn’t had quite the richness of experience that the players of the first group had.

I’d say we had maybe 2, 3 good years. It didn’t last quite as long as the first group. And then there was talk of starting it up again, but I was in a different direction in the 90’s musically, so I wasn’t personally quite as interested as I had been in the past. 𝄇

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

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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Further Reading:

- A touching example of how the music and the Internet can bring people (back) together:

https://cleanfeed-records.com/all-about-jazz-review-by-stuart-broomer-2/

[Feb 2023] The link above now redirects to a phishing website. Unfortunately the comments section was not preserved in the Internet Archive.

- "Jim Falconbridge" turns up on a Dixieland revival disc in 1964:

http://www.new-orleans-delight.dk/Cliff%20Bastien%20Recordings.html