I had two weeks with every instrument, just so I could play and get a feeling of what it felt like. And—I think it was in the last year of high school—there was a man who was teaching music theory whose name was Joel Harry. I get in and he gives us a little test to see who knows what. He looks over all of them and he reads my name. You already know all of this; how much do you know? I did twelve-tone counterpoint.
He took me to the Monday Evening Concerts, to every single Monday evening concert, and he introduced me to the music of Ives. There was very little available. Schoenberg lived there, so we had some of his music. But Webern—there was only one score available at that time. There was only one score that I know of that was available.
I believe it was the Concerto for Nine Instruments, and there was a recording of the Saxophone Quartet. But this was the introduction. The next year I went to USC. I was actually paid a stipend by the month, free tuition, free room and board, but I had to play in everything. I had to play in the orchestra and the opera orchestra.
The first day was the English placement exam. I was 45 minutes late to an hour and a half test, so I flunked it. And I took the best course in English I ever took in my life—with the football players—five days a week.
The next day I got there on time and took my placement exams in music, and passed four years of music theory. So I had no undergraduate music courses, except history, in order to get my degree. You could be playing in a symphony orchestra.
I took the audition, got the job, and went to Denver the next year. Jim and a few other composers just out of high school came and every Monday night we got together and I taught them twelve-tone music.
FJO: So tell me more about your early, pre-moment of epiphany pieces. I know on your website timeline, you list a quintet for clarinet, mandolin, violin, cello and piano. MS: It was more than a quintet. It was about seven or eight instruments. The mandolin came from two sources. It came from the Schoenberg Serenade which I was absolutely in love with. It was great. It was pre-twelve-tone, and it had a mandolin in it. Also, my father had played the mandolin.
That was a twelve-tone piece. But I have no idea what it sounds like at this point. That was before the one with the mandolin, too. That was my breakout piece. I was also conducting during that period. This was when I was graduating. At that point I had one child, a boy, and a very, very ill wife. We had medical bills and psychiatrist bills. I was earning money, but it was really tight and Milhaud knew. I teach at Aspen in the summer. It was too gnarly and chromatic—twelve-tone. But he liked me and he had great admiration for musical ability and all the stuff I was already doing already in public.
But you can come and just write music. There was a big middle aisle and it was where he sat because of his wheelchair. Thank you. When I tell the story, I could cry. It was so moving. So I went to Aspen. I was given a little practice room, with a piano in it and no electricity. It was cold in the mornings. You lit a candle to keep your hands warm. But I had my son to take care of. I wrote a clarinet quintet. It was not in the style of Milhaud, but something he would like.
It was nice. And I brought it to him as a present. It was going to be played the week before I left, which was five weeks down the road. And so I was going to have my first, big public performance with this clarinet quintet. So then I start writing a piece for piano four-hands.
But there were two composers who were great pianists in the seminar. So they played it for me and we all decided—the three of us—that this was dynamite. I mean, it was so fresh and so new.
So I went to the office and I took my clarinet quintet off and put this piece on. This is new. You told me to open the window to get fresh air. This is it. So the performance comes. I think there were three movements. At the end of the second movement, there was so much commotion that the two pianists had to stare the audience down to get to the third movement.
They play the last movement, and people rose to their feet like I expected, except they were shouting and screaming. People ran up to the stage and started pounding on the piano. The two pianists ran off. It was just before intermission. Milhaud was at the edge of the tent.
He had his little hat with the brim up, and he pulled me down. It reminds me of the old days. FJO: So aside from that early clarinet quintet, Milhaud really was not an influence on you. MS: He was, but not musically. But I would have tea with him once a week. So, for a year, we did this. Not every single week, but lots of times. And he gave me an early edition of the Sylvia Beach book; it was a limited edition.
That was his graduation present for me. It was so positive. And I kept up with him. He really wanted to come to the Tape Center. I had this offer in New York. At one point, we were talking about not accepting the money, but that was stupid. We had to move it to an institution. Everybody wanted it.
Berkeley wanted it, the Conservatory wanted it, but we gave it to Mills mostly because of Milhaud. He really cared; this was important to him. You mentioned bebop and we talked about your early pieces and some other early teachers. What about Kirchner? The opposite. Leon thought this stuff was terrible—tape, electronics, Stockhausen; it was like the devil to him. MS: Come on! Can you help me? Oh Christ! He came to me and he stayed with us about two weeks up in my studio on Bleecker Street, and he was hopeless.
I learned it in two weeks. He mentioned that he learned it from me, but that was his notion, so I gave up on it. You mentioned bebop and you talked about discovering twelve-tone music. And we spoke about your teachers—Dahl, Milhaud, and certainly Kirchner would not have been an influence on that sort of music, pieces like the fish tank piece. FJO: When I was in high school I had a teacher with whom I talked about experimental music who first got me interested in a lot of this stuff.
And he told me about some free jazz musician who drew a staff on a fish bowl and played according to what line on the staff the fish swam in back of. MS: Pauline, right! In recent years, Ramon has taken credit for it. We did a lot of improvisation. There is a DVD of it. FJO: Wow! Paint was coming off the wall for us. But none of that was the impetus for the electronics. Its potential was the result of a big bang, the technological big bang that would resonate. From that day, you only learned music by someone playing it, and you imitated it, until the printing press.
But even through the printing press and everything, we believed music was a continuum. It belonged to five percent, two percent of the population. Because you could only hear music if someone played if for you, or you played it yourself. So the evolution of music was like religion and everything else. It was a very narrow evolution of a continuity, until —the technological big bang in my mind at that moment.
Music is a cultural artifact of musicality. But people could be musically creative and create something that may not be part of that.
In fact, it might become all kinds of things like painting became because it was easy for people to get their hands on. They could do whatever they wanted. And we would have that opportunity in creativity with music for the very first time in a history of 40, years. Nobody could know. If everybody had the capacity to make music without ever studying it, we would have genres all over the place.
Some of them would be musical, some, who knows what they would be? What I saw was that I could bring a history of musicality to this moment. What I thought was that I could impact the development of the technology so that there would be the possibility that people would have a more musical interface to the technological world. Use it if you want.
You talked about how there was this moment where it opened up this whole new door. I mentioned all that electronic composition that happened in studios with the giant RCA synthesizers and people splicing tapes.
And then minimalism started happening. All these polar opposite styles were also possible with electronic music. MS: It was different. All of the things you mentioned, what was happening with the RCA synthesizer was twelve-tone music with a synthesizer. The first study of Stockhausen is a twelve-tone piece with electronics. This is making what I call new-old music—with machines. I thought that was a dumb idea from day one. What we want to do is approach it with musical creativity, which has nothing to do with scales, or anything else.
Technology allows you to move back to your inner self. What if you grew up with didgeridoos? Buchla comes along and says I can do what you want to do. We built what I called, at that time, an electronic music easel. There are all sorts of things you can do [with that flute]; you can spend a lifetime doing it. But I found out that it was much harder. FJO: Ironally, what wound up happening with electronic musical instruments for the most part is that they essentially became vehicles for what you call new-old music, twelve-note seven-white-keyed, five-black-keyed keyboards with a bunch of pre-set timbres like an organ.
MS: In the lecture I gave yesterday, when I get to that point, I show a picture of all the wires and everything of the first Buchla which was a year and a half before the Moog. At that moment it was very hard to conceptualize a new thing. And it was brilliant. My brilliance was in not using a black and white keyboard. Part of the original Buchla music box which Subotnick still keeps in his studio.
MS: The inherent musicality that I grew up with, why should I throw that away? That was the whole point. Not music. Not even new. Who knows? But you do it without the artifact. We worry about it because we think of ourselves as a march from 40, years ago to the present and on to the future. Long live Webern. They were creating the future. So you have to get rid of everything as you go.
There is no march. There was no evolution. What we have now is a kind of quantum existence of everything at the same time. Nothing is going to go away and history is gone forever. Now if they see the edge of the Big Bang, what is the past? They can co-exist. It was not worth it.
All these other kinds of music were happening at that time that suddenly really kind of took over the world. Jazz began to be taken seriously, various world music traditions suddenly got international exposure, and rock became ascendant in mainstream culture. You read all these histories of rock that talk about psychedelic rock and the advent of concept albums.
They claim that the Beatles invented all of that with their LP Sgt. You were creating Silver Apples of the Moon at the same time they were in the studio recording that album and your record deals with these very same issues. The way people used to think about listening to music—music was what you heard in a concert hall or in a club. There were records already, of course, but they were perceived as just artifacts of those live experiences. Creating music that was intended exclusively for home listening was something totally new.
Now we take this for granted in an era where people walk around with earbuds listening to their own personal soundtracks created from recorded music. But this was a completely new idea at the time. When interactive CD-ROMs came, I made a piece for that right off the bat at the moment that the color monitor was coming in. Long-playing records with high fidelity were just coming in. It was so good it sounded like the real thing.
So we need a new medium, a new music, and we will commission composers to come in and write music for it. I thought he had been to one of my lectures. It was in the morning. I thought he was making fun of me. And the next morning when I got home to see the kids off to school, I had this cheap record on of a Bach Brandenburg to calm me down, to get me in position so the kids would get up, and I could give them breakfast and get them off. And it was on Nonesuch Records.
This guy said he was the President of Nonesuch. He was real! And I tried all day to call him on the phone. I just destroyed my life; the opportunity came and I blew it. The next night! He thought I was coming to push him out again. Soon after Nonesuch released Silver Apples of the Moon a rock band formed named Silver Apples which used tons of electronics.
This was a major moment of cultural convergence, and you were in the center of it somehow. So-called high art, low art, popular culture, jazz, rock, classical music, the avant-garde, it all converged at that time.
How did members of the Mothers of Invention wind up in your studio in the first place? MS: Well, I was right in the middle of all the rock clubs. So when they got finished, they heard that there was this guy, Morton Subotnick, who is the mad scientist in the laboratory of the ecstatic moment. Someone used the term, and it passed through people—the Mothers of Invention, Lothar and the Hand People. This was the Ecstatic Moment Laboratory.
And everyone says you know what that would be. MS: Yeah, of course, the thing ended. It became a whole new musical genre. You did seven of them yourself, but after that, it seems, you missed having a live performance element and started writing works that incorporated musicians performing in real time with the electronics.
MS: No, remember with Sound Blocks , that piece for four musicians, four tracks of tape, image and someone speaking, my first problem was to solve the electronic problem. I now had my language, or my whatever it is, my personal tools for electronics.
Double Life of Amphibians had no words in it. But it had subject matter. Both of them had subject matter, but people watching Double Life of Amphibians would not have gotten it, except for the program notes. Hungers had—by the title itself—human needs. And that I felt was close to the end of the trek from All geniuses are mad. The albums catapulted him to international acclaim.
I am punk. But in , Perry, who was always wildly eccentric, suffered a dramatic mental breakdown after his wife left him for a Rastafarian studio musician. The grounds of his property were cluttered with Rasta sycophants, and he was being extorted by the local gangs. Perry became convinced that Rastafarians were to blame. He began to paint obsessively, covering the property with incoherent graffiti.
In , in the depth of his madness, convinced the studio was possessed by evil spirits, Perry set the Black Ark studio ablaze. When she reached the entrance to the ruins of Black Ark, Perry was standing there. Despite their many contradictions, their affection and mutual admiration is palpable.
His one complaint about life in Switzerland is that he lacks rivalry. After his meal, Perry sprawls on a white couch, his feet impatiently kicking back and forth, and watches The Upsetter , a feature-length, soon-to-be-released documentary about his life. Grainy 8mm footage depicts Perry as he lights fires on the floor of his charred Black Ark studio, a baseball-bat-size marijuana joint in his hand, a half-naked madman spinning in place.
Very powerful shit! He puts his arms around his son and daughter, mirroring the documentary; Shiva and Gabriel sit in his lap — 18 years later they tower over their father.
She knows what men want. She has to stay here with us, forever! Gabriel is graduating from high school and plans to move to a big city. Perry heads back to his garage to work on some music. He e-mails his cryptic and circuitous lyrics to Keith Richards and various collaborators.
He rarely returns to the island of his birth to work. Lee "Scratch" Perry performs in London. Newswire Powered by. Close the menu. Rolling Stone. Log In. To help keep your account secure, please log-in again. You are no longer onsite at your organization. Please log in. For assistance, contact your corporate administrator. Arrow Created with Sketch. Calendar Created with Sketch. Path Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch.
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