Lincoln Improvisation Ensemble Receives Rude Reception

In my interview with Randall Snyder, he said:

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 célèbre for a while.

I was able to find a letter to the editor of the Lincoln Star that describes this incident, and a follow-up from the paper which give more details. Enjoy!

Musical guest group offered little courtesy

Rude reception

The Lincoln Star, 5 May 1978 Page 4

Lincoln, Neb.

On Saturday, April 22, we witnessed an event that any proponent of freedom of expression would have found appalling.

The Lincoln Improvisation Ensemble, who had been invited as guest performers, were scheduled to play at 4:30 p.m. The program, however, was running behind schedule and the group did not ascend the stage until approximately 5:10 p.m. No sooner had they announced the first number and begun to play than a representative of the Arts Festival intervened.

The Lincoln Improvisation Ensemble, Feb 1975

Judging from the clearly audible comments shared between the official and the ensemble members, he apparently asked them to play some "real music." He asked if they would lower the volume on their instruments because they were "scaring away the customers," and then stated to the audience that "some people were wondering when they were going to stop tuning up."

He then inquired: "Who wants to listen to this?" Ignoring the enthusiastic affirmative response of the 25 to 30 people who had gathered to listen, he asked the remaining performers to leave (two performers were so insulted, they had already departed).

The L.I.E. was invited to play at the festival on a no-fee basis -- they did not ask to come. As guest performers, they should have been accorded the respect due any guest. The 25 to 30 members of the listening audience should have been accorded the respect due any patron. Basic social graces and humane consideration seemed to be lacking. Regardless of whether the Arts Festival personnel knew of the L.I.E.'s musical style (and they should have), the moment of the performance is not the time to decide if the band should be perform. Rather, it would seem to the average person that this issue should have been decided prior to the invitation.

What happened to the Lincoln Improvisation Ensemble is akin to the initial rejection of the then-progressive musical styles of Louis Armstrong and the Hot Fives in the 1920's. Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in the 1940's, as well as John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk in the 1960's created music in the face of such rejection. Their music is now acclaimed as classic or modern jazz. This phenomenon is not peculiar to jazz music, but may also be found in philosophy, literature and painting. Throughout history, people have consistently resisted any new idea that seemed to be a radical departure from tradition.

An arts festival is traditionally a vehicle which provides for the cultural exchange of conventional and unconventional art forms between the patron and the artist. Lincoln should consider itself fortunate to include the Lincoln Improvisation Ensemble as members of its artistic community. Freedom to express that creativity is a necessary prerequisite to its continued growth.

ROBIN BUCHMAN
DAVE SKOW
BARB STIMSON

This letter was printed 11 May, 1978 by the Lincoln Journal. Ten days later, a response came:

 

Quartet or ensemble? Music or noise?

by Helen Haggie

Illustrator - Karen Blassen

An incident of April 22 at the Festival of the Arts sponsored by the Lincoln Community Arts Council seems to have been blown out of proportion as the result of letters to editors of Lincoln newspapers.

The incident centered on the volume of music made by the Lincoln Improvisation Ensemble at the festival, and the circumstances surrounding the group's departure from Pershing Auditorium during the festival.

The letter writers claimed that a festival official told the musicians they were "scaring away customers["], asked them to play "real music" and to "lower the volume." The letter writers quoted the official as asking, "Who wants to listen to this?"

The letter writers asserted that 25 to 30 people had gathered to listen to the ensemble but that the official finally asked all of the musicians to leave after two of them departed, feeling that they had been insulted although the ensemble was there by invitation of those who arranged the festival.

Arts Council President William Schlaebitz responded to a request for another side of the incident, saying that he went to the musicians with certain requests after noticing people "streaming out" of the auditorium and being approached by several artists who had displays in the arena. Several asked: "Can't you do something about all that noise?"

Schlaebitz said he found that [the] source of the "noise" was the Improvisation Ensemble, a group he described as 8 to 12 musicians on stage; Schlaebitz says he asked them to turn down the sound amplification, but this request did not get results "so I returned and I did ask them to leave."

He said this was to protect a "captive audience" in the auditorium from sound that was annoying many rather than entertaining.

Chairman Keith Heckman of the festival's performing arts program, said the invitation was for a quartet of  improvisers, not a large ensemble, and that group appearing "was much larger than I expected." He recalled that the entire festival was moved into the auditorium because of bad weather outside and speculated that the ensemble's music played outdoors would have made no problem because those who didn't like it could have moved on and still been in the festival area. "A lot of persons had to make concessions when it (the festival) was in the auditorium," Heckman added.

As for an assertion by the letter writers that the festival officials were, in effect, stifling innovative performing artists, Arts Council Director Sam Davidson said in response to a question that the festival never has been described as a haven for unconventional art. "Every new innovative art has its place, but it is hard to force it on the public in large doses," Davidson said.

Schlaebitz said he apologizes if the group and its admirers are unhappy, adding he wants no verbal shooting match over the incident.

𝄇

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

𝄇 𝄇

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. 𝄇