The March 1970 edition of KPFA’s Folio carried a brief note about a new show that would begin broadcasting on Wednesday evenings at 7:00 pm, with repeats on Friday mornings at 7:30 am: Ode to Gravity. The programme guide described it concisely as ‘A new weekly program by composer and intermedia artist [Charles] Amirkhanian which will most often deal with music and its extensions.’Footnote 1 The first broadcast on 4 March 1970 launched a radio show that would continue for the next twenty-five years, making it the longest running programme for avant-garde music in the United States. The evocative title was a constant reminder of the cutting-edge, experimental creative work that would serve as a guiding principle for programming decisions: Amirkhanian’s Ode to Gravity, which premiered in September 1968 at the Dancers’ Workshop in San Francisco, was a live theatre piece in which various objects ranging in size from a marble to a car fender were dropped from a balcony into a circle of spectators (Figure 1).Footnote 2
Ellyn Marshall and Charles Amirkhanian 1968 Concert Poster. Image courtesy of Other Minds Archives; Charles Amirkhanian Collection.
With fifteen years of producing Ode to Gravity completed in 1985, Amirkhanian was in a position to reflect on the radio programme as part of a celebratory retrospective. In describing the spirit at the heart of its inception in the March 1985 edition of the KPFA Folio, it is clear that there was, at times, a pugnacious edginess: ‘I saw it [Ode to Gravity] as highlighting extreme experimentalism and providing a time on the then-all-classical KPFA for listeners to be forewarned: this is going to be hard to take so tune out if you don’t like it.’Footnote 3 That countercultural aggressiveness is embedded within the 1968 live theatre piece Ode to Gravity too, as the latent violence and patently destructive action accompanies an escalating element of danger as larger and larger objects fall to the ground in close proximity to the spectators. In this way, the work shares affinities with Steve Reich’s contemporaneous Pendulum Music that is built on a novel conceptual process in which the audience is exposed to a gradually increasing amount of feedback noise.Footnote 4 Such a connection between the Ode to Gravity radio show and Amirkhanian’s eponymous composition suggests greater weight than merely as a sly self-allusion. It provides a compelling way to understand the radio programme’s development as a long-running, conceptual extension of that 1968 piece. Amirkhanian expressed this sentiment himself in 1985 when he observed that over the previous fifteen years, ‘larger and larger musical objects have been dropping out of Ode to Gravity’.Footnote 5
This article surveys the breadth of Ode to Gravity’s twenty-five-year history by beginning with historical context about Amirkhanian’s early years and his joining the KPFA radio station in 1969. His early fascination with records, avant-garde music, and twentieth-century poetry combined with the heady creative environment of the 1960s Bay Area counterculture to produce a young composer with an eagerness to present new music to audiences. He quickly bound together these diverse interests into a critical attitude and mission encapsulated by his self-granted title as KPFA’s ‘Sound Sensitivity Information Director’. This notion of directing and communicating ‘sound sensitivity’ via the radio provides a valuable lens through which to trace the shape and contours of Ode to Gravity, especially the creative, experimental broadcasts from the early 1970s that exhibit a diverse range of influences and epitomize the programme’s deliberately unconventional, avant-garde character. What then follows is an accounting of Ode to Gravity’s showcasing of music recordings over the airwaves, which reflected Amirkhanian’s preoccupation with circulating things on the cutting edge and periphery as another means to cultivate listeners’ ‘sound sensitivity’. An especially important part of this story is Amirkhanian’s advocacy for American music in a European context in the 1970s, which facilitated an important transatlantic exchange of ideas and introduced him to music programming and concert organizing that would grow in importance for him during the 1980s and 1990s. This article examines two representative composers who were afforded newfound exposure to audiences as a result of Amirkhanian’s ‘sound sensitivity’ advocacy, and which Ode to Gravity had a direct role to play. The broad trajectory observed over the course of Ode to Gravity’s history is one of intense, frenetic experimental activity in the 1970s that gradually slowed over the course of the 1980s as other responsibilities drew Amirkhanian’s attention and energy, eventually eclipsing the programme almost entirely. Accordingly, this article concludes with an explanation of Ode to Gravity’s ending in the mid-1990s, which is just as culturally insightful and suggestive as how it began.
The Arrival of KPFA’s ‘Sound Sensitivity Information Director’
Amirkhanian’s aesthetic upbringing in the 1960s was interdisciplinary, defined by interests in not only avant-garde music, but also contemporary poetry and visual art. The wide availability of music records was a significant dimension of his early creative life, exposing him to such figures as Lou Harrison and John Cage and their exploration of alternative possibilities to performing with percussion instruments.Footnote 6 Of particular importance was the Concert Percussion for Orchestra album released by Time Records in 1961 that featured music by both Cage and Harrison.Footnote 7 Amirkhanian’s enthusiasm for Cage was amplified by seeing a live performance of Variations IV in January 1965 at a concert in San Francisco that one reviewer described as accomplishing a build-up of ‘mood and fascination, even if it made me stick my fingers into my ears now and then to dim the racket’.Footnote 8 Inspired by Cage’s example, Amirkhanian composed his Symphony No. 1 soon after in February, scoring the work for twelve performers and roughly 200 non-musical objects.Footnote 9 In April 1966, still under the spell of that 1961 Time LP, the young composer travelled to Salinas, California to hear the premiere of Harrison’s Easter Cantata at Hartnell College (Figure 2), inaugurating an enduring friendship that would see Amirkhanian advocate strongly for not only Harrison’s music, but also other maverick composers such as George Antheil and Conlon Nancarrow.Footnote 10 The music of Ernst Toch was also instrumental in Amirkhanian’s early compositional development, particularly Toch’s Geographical Fugue that he heard performed by the Abbey Singers in a 1963 recording.Footnote 11 Employing a strict fugal form, Toch’s Geographical Fugue subjects the names of cities, countries, and landmarks to contrapuntal invention, but is not intended for a conventional live performance by a choir. Instead, the basic concept for the work is an investigation of speech as a source of musical material by creating a pre-recorded performance of the fugue on a 78 rpm record, with the actual live performance being the playing of that record to the audience at a speed faster than it had been recorded.Footnote 12 The resulting distortions were an experiment in proto-electronic music that epitomized those broader avant-garde interests of the Weimar Republic era in Gebrauchsmusik.Footnote 13 Inspired by Toch’s example, Amirkhanian’s Genesis 28 Four Speakers (1965) recounted the biblical story of Jacob’s ladder by using irrigation pipe covers to punctuate a series of abstract words, sentences, phrases, and quotations from Genesis 28 articulated by four male voices.Footnote 14
Lou Harrison and Charles Amirkhanian at the premiere of the Easter Cantata (1966). Image courtesy of Other Minds Archives; Charles Amirkhanian Collection. Photo credit: Richard Bradley Edwards.
Just as access to LPs was instrumental in informing Amirkhanian’s development, so too was the ready availability of scores he could study and poets he could read. In the latter case, one of the most important early influences came through the poetry of George Oppen. Amirkhanian’s first acquaintance with Oppen came at a poetry reading given in May 1967 in the Arena Theater at Fresno State University where Amirkhanian was finishing his undergraduate degree in English: ‘The lingering impression I took away from the reading was the wafting of Oppen’s softly spoken lines, lightly amplified by a primitive microphone through a single vintage Ampro loudspeaker.’Footnote 15 Oppen’s poetic style had a palpable immediacy for Amirkhanian, in particular its unobtrusive quality and simplicity. His treatment of words presented a compelling alternative to the more dour, arcane, and difficult styles of the avant-garde poetic world of the 1960s. As Amirkhanian saw it, Oppen offered a detour:
around conventional poetic rhetoric – a reductive use of language devoid of pretence and artifice – that I was soon to find related to my emerging interest in musical minimalism and its rejection of post-serial pointillism and abstruse complexity. (An oversize graphic score for performance in any medium that I made a year later prominently bore the legend ‘clarity pays’ as an homage to Oppen.)Footnote 16
Upon taking up his role at KPFA in 1969, Amirkhanian would eagerly share Oppen’s poetry with listeners, viewing it as a personal mission.Footnote 17 Throughout the 1960s, he also immersed himself in scores that demonstrated the newest notational innovations in avant-garde music. For example, his exposure to Roger Reynolds’s score for his multimedia theatre piece The Emperor of Ice Cream (1961–2) was particularly instructive both as a score for performance and as an aesthetically satisfying work of graphic art. The visual layout of The Emperor of Ice Cream specifies not only non-traditional vocal behaviours with evocative notation, but also takes account of performers’ positioning on the stage, organizing it with a conscious effort to exert control of the spatial aspects of the performance and resulting sounds.Footnote 18 This interest in Reynolds’s work would inflect the visual scores Amirkhanian began to develop with Ted Greer in the late 1960s. Greer was an action painter and jazz improviser who had interests in dadaism, surrealism, Jungian psychology, happenings, and post-Pollock spontaneity in visual art that appealed to Amirkhanian’s sensibilities.Footnote 19 The pair collaborated on visual scores that would produce sonic results they felt could not be achieved with standard notation:
Greer and I did these scores where he would draw my part and I would draw his part, and then we would amass an enormous variety of toys and instruments and bowls of Jello and everything you could name that could make a visual effect or a sonic effect. Then we’d perform each other’s notation simultaneously. The notation would be linear with one line right above the other, so he would be performing a face that I drew while I would be performing an insect that he drew. We would interpret these not by a key. In other words, many graphic scores in music would key a scratchy line to a scratchy sound, and these would be specified in the score. Our departure, we felt, was that we didn’t specify those.Footnote 20
Upon arriving in the Bay Area in 1967, Amirkhanian refined these ideas over the next two years while undertaking a master’s degree in interdisciplinary creative arts at San Francisco State University.
The final result of Amirkhanian’s graduate studies came in 1969 with a compositional approach he described as a ‘visual transduction notation system’, formalized and explained in a master’s thesis.Footnote 21 This notational system was explained in an article published in the September 1969 Folio that officially announced the beginning of his tenure as music director at KPFA and was supplemented with several of his graphic scores, one of which adorned the cover (Figure 3). The article’s technical explanation for this new notational system relies heavily on principles of indeterminacy developed by Cage that were ubiquitous in the stylistic ecosystem of the 1960s avant-garde. As Amirkhanian explained, the scores were ‘simply a matrix containing performance stimuli’, effectively recapitulating the idea of devising a piece of music that would be radically indeterminate with respect to any given performance by allowing substantial latitude when realized.Footnote 22 Also important in this article is Amirkhanian’s view of his graphic scores as finished works of visual art ‘which in turn will serve as the stimulus for another work of art – i.e., a performance of music or a play, the making of a painting or a sculpture, the presentation of a series of events, ad infinitum’.Footnote 23 Such an orientation bears clear correspondences to prior Cagean experimentation with radical visual guides to performance, exemplified by the paper illustrations and superimposition of transparencies for Fontana Mix (1958–9) and Cartridge Music (1960). Indeed, the visual materials for both of these works served as the basis for Cage and others to compose subsequent works, aptly described by James Pritchett as ‘progeny’.Footnote 24 Earle Brown similarly devised an ‘open form’ that ensured each performance would be singular and uniquely individual, described by him in visual terms as akin to Alexander Calder’s mobiles or Pollock’s action painting, with the most radical example being the sparse sequence of horizontal and vertical lines of varying length serving as the graphic score for December 1952.Footnote 25 Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise (1963–7) is also highly suggestive as an influence, as the lack of performance instructions afford a radical degree of openness to interpreting and realizing a performance of the 192-page graphic score.Footnote 26 In total, Amirkhanian’s article draws heavily from the ongoing fascination with indeterminacy and aleatory more broadly and is precisely what one would expect from a young composer seeking out models for simultaneous emulation and departure. It was also clearly suggestive to KPFA listeners in print of the ethos he would bring to the airwaves as the station’s music director.
Amirkhanian’s score on the cover of the September 1969 Edition of KPFA’s Folio (vol. 20, no. 9). Source: Internet Archive; Pacifica Radio Archives Folio Preservation and Digitization Project. Courtesy of Pacifica Foundation/KPFA Radio.
The first series of programmes Amirkhanian inaugurated at KPFA were called ‘Radio Events’ and foreshadow the shape many Ode to Gravity episodes would initially take. These Radio Events were happenings in which artists were invited to use as much airtime as they wanted to do participatory works that would physically involve the listening audience in some way.Footnote 27 The first episode on 30 September 1969, for example, entitled ‘Radio Caress’, exemplified Amirkhanian’s preoccupation with exploring radio not only as a source of communication, but also as a creative medium itself for creating new musical experiences. The initial instructions for this first Radio Event were simple, but enticing:
You are about to hear a series of sounds. As you listen, I want you to respond to these sounds by activating your facial muscles, as well as your whole head. You are to make faces and move your head in the manner suggested to you by the particular sounds which you will hear. In order to make this activity more interesting, please sit facing another participant, or, if you are alone, you might watch yourself in a mirror. You may wish to dim your room lights a bit in order to concentrate on the sounds.Footnote 28
Sounds and other instructions are presented over the nearly thirty-minute duration that feature a variety of activities to draw in the audience and reflect on the nature of sound, cognition, and self-directed creativity with minimal prompts. After March 1970, some of these Radio Events would serve as content for Ode to Gravity, such as Tom Zahuranec’s ‘Bucket-Ful Mercury Walk’, which took place in March 1971. The event consisted of an open invitation to listeners to come to the Tape Music Center at Mills College and operate a wide variety of musical equipment and machines that had been turned on for the evening (Figure 4). As the event began, Amirkhanian provided directions to the campus, assuring Ode to Gravity listeners that ‘the friendly guide at the gate will point his gun at you and tell you which building is the music building’.Footnote 29 During his first months at KPFA in 1969, Amirkhanian also encouraged his friend Clark Coolidge to deliver a series of one-hour programmes called ‘Words’, which featured the work of twentieth-century poets, sound poets, and authors. Coolidge was the drummer for the psychedelic Bay Area rock band The Serpent Power, and his poetic output was strongly influenced by the Beat generation and jazz, particularly the emphasis on the musicality of words and their expressive potential.Footnote 30 More broadly, he belonged to an avant-garde tendency at the time described as ‘Language Poetry’ that de-emphasized conventional expression, treating the poem as an object built out of language and that engaged in a dynamic, ongoing dialogue with the reader. The result was a rhetoric and style that undermined the conventional voice of authority beneath the text.Footnote 31 The seventeenth and final Words broadcast aired on 29 December 1969, and featured Amirkhanian’s hour-long composition Words (1969), which deconstructs language through rearrangement and layering to aurally explore pauses, sibilance, alliteration, and percussive consonants juxtaposed with vowels. Tape splicing is also apparent in Words, with the manipulation creating a gradually thickening vocal texture alongside concrète elements such as shuffling paper and coughs incorporated through overdubbing and multi-tracking.Footnote 32
Tom Zahuranec looks on as two men play with a synthesizer at the KPFA Radio Event ‘Bucket-Ful Mercury Walk’ at Mills College, Oakland (1971). Image courtesy of Other Minds Archives; Charles Amirkhanian Collection. Photo credit: Charles Amirkhanian.
Amirkhanian joined KPFA at a time in which there was ongoing discussion about the radio station and its place within the counterculture and New Left during the late 1960s. Coincidentally, the beginning of his tenure coincided with the twenty-year anniversary of KPFA’s birth in 1949 under the auspices of the Pacifica Foundation, launched by Lewis Hill and E. John Lewis, both of whom were conscientious objectors during the Second World War.Footnote 33 Their perspectives drove KPFA’s mission to be a progressive community radio station that used the airwaves as a public meeting space to facilitate free expression and the exercise of participatory democracy.Footnote 34 In this way, it was part of the broader alternative media environment that spanned the United States in the 1960s and was most conspicuously embodied by the numerous underground presses that appeared in cities around the country. The Berkeley Barb, for example, was an underground newspaper that served the local community through the printed word and complemented KPFA’s listener-supported endeavour to disseminate news and alternative perspectives via the medium of radio.Footnote 35 Despite a shared mistrust of mainstream media, the relationships between these institutions were not without ideological friction. In October 1969, another local underground newspaper, San Francisco Good Times, published a retrospective of KPFA at twenty years old, expressing some of the tension that existed when Amirkhanian arrived:
Twenty years, I don’t have to tell you, is a long long time. And through all that time, KPFA has been – and is – the voice of the liberal community. This liberal community can get behind (to varying degrees) an issue like People’s Park. But, in the day-to-day kaleidoscopic struggle for change where issues aren’t always so clear, so easy to lend moral endorsement to, the liberal is hesitant. And it may be the reflection of this attitude that keeps KPFA’s relationship with the street community at arm’s length.Footnote 36
This suspicion was a foundational part of the countercultural rebellion that Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau described in 1966 as ‘the Movement’. In their accounting, modern American liberal society was deceptive and hypocritical, undermining its ostensible adherence to values of justice and social welfare by promoting unceasing economic growth and efficiency while also pursuing foreign policies that enforced American hegemony abroad as a bulwark against the threat of communism.Footnote 37
The internal politics of the station were reflective of the ongoing concern about its broader direction and principles. The public affairs director at that time, Elsa Knight Thompson, was the veritable matriarch of KPFA, having come to the station with a background in journalism that oriented her towards a BBC-style of presentation and scrupulous professionalism. She also cultivated a reputation for strict supervision and favoured more political programming while curbing what appeared to her as an overabundance of programmes about music, art, literature, and drama.Footnote 38 Amirkhanian felt the effect of this vision of the station during his job interview for the music director position, recalling that her expectation was that he would ‘efficiently program the morning concerts and the afternoon concerts and dutifully send in copy for our program guide, the Folio, and not bother anybody. And she saw in me somebody who could be molded to suit her purposes.’Footnote 39 By contrast, Al Silbowitz, the station manager when Amirkhanian joined, was interested in hiring ‘somebody flashy’ who would promote avant-garde music over more traditional, classical fare.Footnote 40 Whatever the office politics at KPFA, Amirkhanian managed to garner latitude in making his programming decisions. He indicated early in his tenure that no ‘stated music policy’ for the station existed, but he did express candidly that ‘We’re not interested in duplicating KSAN’s rock approach. Or, for that matter, KKHI’s classical approach. … We prefer records out of print and tapes not available in this country. I’d also like to see us get into a lot more live performances.’Footnote 41 He was able to bring his personal aesthetic sensibilities to bear as a composer with interdisciplinary interests in avant-garde music and art, particularly sound art and sound poetry, describing himself in 1971 as KPFA’s ‘Sound Sensitivity Information Director’.Footnote 42 In opting for this alternative title to ‘Music Director’ at KPFA, Amirkhanian was explicit about the radical posture underlying the decision:
I have tried to shift the emphasis from ‘whether or not it’s music’ – a question which is of little significance to the listening experience – to ‘how do these sounds affect my life (entertainment/disturbance/etc,) and how do they relate to my creative perception of art experiences (stimulation/boredom/other).’ Thus, the problem is no longer definition but experience.Footnote 43
That interest in discovering and sharing the offbeat, the difficult-to-find, and the thought-provoking, in an effort to deepen the sonic awareness of the public, would play a prominent role in the earliest episodes of Ode to Gravity that began broadcasting in March 1970.
The Weird and the Wonderful
When surveying the intellectual milieu in which Amirkhanian was steeped during the 1960s, it is unsurprising that the first years of Ode to Gravity’s programming were dedicated as much to reporting on and presenting current trends in contemporary avant-garde music and art as to serving as a creative outlet for himself and others. He came to the radio station with the mindset of a composer who saw KPFA as a vehicle for propagating new and exciting methods of artistic communication through sound. As a result, many Ode to Gravity broadcasts from the early 1970s are wildly eclectic and lengthy sonic collages for listeners that sought to achieve precisely the expansion of consciousness implied by his self-assigned job title as Sound Sensitivity Information Director. Over time, as Ode to Gravity found firmer footing, this kind of experimental work lessened, giving way to more conventional broadcasts that focused primarily on interviews with a diverse range of subjects and showcasing their music. A broadcast such as ‘Do Fraig Amours’ from 1970 is representative of these experimental, creative transmissions: Amirkhanian stitches together a 45-minute survey of sound materials, beginning with selections from Carlos Surinach’s recently completed Via Crucis (1970) and incorporating recordings of other pieces such as Carlos Chávez’s Sinfonía de Antígona (1933), Surinach’s Ritmo Jondo (1952), as well as popular American songs such as ‘I Can’t Sleep in the Movies Anymore’ (1929). The spoken word is also included. For instance, an excerpt from Louise Huebner’s Seduction Through Witchcraft (1969), specifically the section on ‘The Coleopterous Charm for Romantic Adventure’, appears with all its dramaturgical richness through musicality of her vocal delivery. Similarly striking is the inclusion of Lenny Bruce discussing dirty words and toilet humour while birdsong twitters along as an accompaniment.Footnote 44 Despite the starkly different materials that comprise ‘Do Fraig Amours’, and recalling Amirkhanian’s enthusiasm for Cage, there is little time in which a truly anarchic sound continuum of diverse, overlapping textures is present. This Ode to Gravity broadcast expresses a dramaturgy of surrealistic, almost Freudian, dream logic, with vague correspondences linking together the constituent parts: religious and numinous associations through the deliberately antiquarian-sounding music of Chávez; sultry intonations about witchcraft and magic; overly sentimental film music from the General Electric Theater and the anthology’s associations with then California governor Ronald Reagan; and the taboo subjects of toilets and ‘caca’ interjected by Lenny Bruce, whose arrests on obscenity charges had culminated in a 1964 conviction.Footnote 45 Other broadcasts in the early years of Ode to Gravity were more explicit in disseminating striking, pugnacious avant-garde experiments over the airwaves.
June 1970 featured a substantial broadcast consisting of an entire avant-garde opera composed by Liam O’Gallagher entitled The People’s Opera (Aerosol, or the Computer that Couldn’t Hear). Previously presented in April 1970 on KQED in collaboration with Robert Moran, The People’s Opera was strongly defined by its use of intermedia components, featuring nine transistor radios tuned to FM or AM stations, noises from a telephone system, excerpts taken from Peking opera, as well as sound poetry and television broadcasts alongside a range of instrumental soloists and tapes made by Moran and Amirkhanian. As the subtitle suggests, the opera is preoccupied with science and science fiction, reflecting O’Gallagher’s interests in the subjects. O’Gallagher had, in fact, already been one of Amirkhanian’s earliest guests on Ode to Gravity in March 1970, showcasing his tape pieces that he described as ‘aesthetic anarchy’ and that drew from and reflected on the implications of ongoing scientific innovations. The tape recorder itself was one such remarkable tool gifted to modern humans through science and was a ‘survival kit for the imagination’ that could help listeners write their own biographies, a process that could cultivate a religious, numinous degree of self-awareness.Footnote 46 Illustrative works exhibited on the programme from March 1970 include Command Module, which involved what O’Gallagher described as ‘mutations’ of primarily science fiction material (in collaboration with Carl Wiessner) that bear a strong resemblance to the cut-up technique of William Burroughs. Three More Stories similarly relies on cut-up ‘mutations’ that are drawn from reports about the contemporaneous moon landing. An Inventory of Change juxtaposed several tracks of tape that included material from the Office of Civilian Defense, as well as O’Gallagher’s own EEG and ECG waves recorded in a research lab. Finally, the mischievous, humorous piece Border Dissolve and Audio Space involved calling long distance directory operators and asking them to look up various phone numbers.Footnote 47 It is this sonic ambiance that inflects the sound world of The People’s Opera, which bears clear influences from Cage’s aleatoric compositions. One is reminded of Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) and Radio Music (1956) when O’Gallagher describes conducting the radio performers:
The ‘conductor’ signals the operators of the radios to approach the microphones or recede from them. Soloists play according to any predetermined plan. Two soloists play in the studios and two phones [sic] into the studios and play their parts through the phone system. The ‘scorer’ works from the main broadcast control room of the radio station and controls the mix and effects of the various inputs. He determines the final signal or output. The ‘orchestra’ selects their stations and maintains them throughout the performance. If possible, stations should represent various genres or segments of the community, such as Chinese language, soul, Spanish language, rock, popular tunes, spiritual, and Bible-toned stations.Footnote 48
June 1970 also saw Ode to Gravity transmit ‘Rigid Foxhole’, an hour-long performance of pre-recorded sounds with live readings of experimental texts by Amirkhanian, as well as other subjects such as world records for caloric consumption, spitting, and eating. ‘Rigid Foxhole’ is far more aggressive in tone than the incantatory, miniaturist spirit underlying an influential work such as Cage’s Indeterminacy and also borrows from Burroughs’s cut-up technique. Indeed, among the cacophony of sounds at the beginning, Amirkhanian can be heard stating a kind of tongue-in-cheek thesis for the radio collage: ‘I had a hankering to shoot pins at Bartók.’Footnote 49
Cage’s influence appeared in other early, experimental Ode to Gravity broadcasts. For example, ‘Pianos Not Rag’ was heard over the airwaves in September 1971 and mixes together a vast array of music for piano, as well as jazz excerpts, passages of orchestral music, and experimental poetry. The total sonic effect bears some similarities to Cage’s recently completed HPSCHD (1969) and its chaotic surveying of harpsichord solo pieces through algorithmic computer processing. No such rigor is at play in Amirkhanian’s experiment, however, favouring instead a musical logic of free association that moves at a slower rhetorical pace and cadence, complemented by experimental poetry that creates an hour-long sound object. April 1971 featured a ‘participatory time space event’ entitled Chess devised by the California College of Arts and Crafts lecturer James Petrillo and produced in collaboration with his students. Chess involved thirty-two people acting as chess pieces that utilized the Richmond District of San Francisco as the chessboard. They received their instructions to move from portable radios that reported the moves of an ongoing chess game taking place within the KPFA studio. Captured pieces would move with the pieces that captured them, which resulted in a gradual aggregation of the human chess pieces into groups that moved around the defined area of play within San Francisco. As Petrillo explained, this event-piece reflected broader preoccupations at the California College of Arts and Crafts with producing artworks that were activity-oriented rather than object-oriented.Footnote 50 While sharing a surface level affinity and demonstrating clear awareness of the sensation surrounding the Cage–Duchamp collaboration for Reunion only three years prior, Chess was more haphazard and focused on using a defined space within San Francisco as a field of radical play and possibility rather than in producing specific sonic results. In fact, the diverse music and text recitations that accompanied Chess bear no clear correspondence to the moves or overall progress of the game, functioning more like a stream of incidental sound to accompany the announcement of moves over the airwaves.Footnote 51
The bicentenary of Beethoven’s birth in December 1970 was the occasion for another experimental broadcast entitled ‘Bon Bonn Bon’ that Amirkhanian presented in collaboration with fellow composer and KPFA colleague Richard Friedman. Like other brash experiments at this early stage in the history of Ode to Gravity, the homage to Beethoven fuses together a wide range of disparate musical sources with the spoken word to create vague, allusive symmetries and connections. The inclusion of a piece by the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, for example, is an especially salient sonic marker of disability in the broadcast, as this jazz guitarist, like Beethoven, was disabled.Footnote 52 Also prominent within ‘Bon Bonn Bon’ is a reading of Ezra Pound’s Cantico del Sole (1926). The poem expresses Pound’s ambivalent feelings about American culture in the early twentieth century, expressed through the recursion of a central concern about ‘what America would be like/If the Classics had a wide circulation/Troubles my sleep.’Footnote 53 Concluding with Beethoven’s Eight Variations in C Major WoO 67, ‘Bon Bonn Bon’ falls into close aesthetic proximity with other prominent avant-garde Beethoven explorations at the time. Amirkhanian, in fact, advertised this broadcast-piece in the December 1970 issue of the KPFA Folio as a ‘Ludwig party’ conceived in the spirit of Beethoven-themed pieces by Karlheinz Stockhausen (Opus 1970) and Mauricio Kagel (Ludwig Van).Footnote 54 The correspondences to Opus 1970 are especially striking because that piece was a rethinking by Stockhausen of his earlier Kurzwellen (1968), in which the medium of radio plays an essential role as the performers of the radio receivers draw musical material spontaneously from shortwave broadcasts. Stockhausen’s central conceit for Opus 1970 was a hypothetical situation in which all available broadcasts for Kurzwellen happened to be music and speech related to Beethoven.Footnote 55
It was primarily during the early 1970s when Ode to Gravity first went on the air that it most epitomized Amirkhanian’s sensibilities as KPFA’s Sound Sensitivity Information Director. An illustrative example of the changes that occurred over the first decade and more after its launch is encapsulated in an episode from August 1981 in which Stuart Dempster and Bill Fontana presented a two-hour-long collaborative performance. Fontana’s Landscape Sculpture with Fog Horns was still sounding at the time at Fort Mason in the San Francisco Bay after premiering in June as part of the New Music America festival, and Dempster undertook a performance of his pieces Masonry and Fog Calling to accompany Fontana’s sound installation.Footnote 56 Following an introduction by Amirkhanian and a short discussion with Fontana and Dempster, the performance proceeds uninterrupted. Gone is the deliberately obscure, aggressively in-your-face avant-garde-ism of the 1970s, giving way instead to a more conventional method of disseminating new music, a style of new music that was itself more unobtrusive. By the 1990s, echoes of the early 1970s style of content and presentation were even more distant.Footnote 57 In a way, the baton of treating the medium of radio itself as a creative, free-form medium for avant-garde experimentation on KPFA had first passed to Stephen Hill, whose ‘Music from the Hearts of Space’ began in 1973. This contemplative programme exhibited a range of music of a reflective, often ambient, quality that exemplified the vibrant Bay Area network of groups and organizations devoted to spiritual devotion and health.Footnote 58 In 1981, Don Joyce launched ‘Over the Edge’ on KPFA, a radio show focused on culture-jamming through sound collages that recapitulated the bold and inventive programmes of Ode to Gravity’s early years.Footnote 59
Ode to Gravity at Home and Abroad
A formative event occurred on Amirkhanian’s first day of work at KPFA: ‘I arrived at the station, and somebody directed me to a music office that had twelve-foot-high walls lined with LPs and said, “Go in there and make some programs.”’Footnote 60 Alongside interviews with composers, a consistent feature of Ode to Gravity throughout its history was the exhibiting of under-the-radar or obscure recordings. It is unsurprising that the very first broadcast on 4 March 1970 was entitled ‘American Music on 78s’ and exhibited three works by American composers on recordings from the 1930s and 1940s: Leonard Bernstein’s Clarinet Sonata (1942), Carlos Salzedo’s Concerto for Harp and Seven Winds (1926), and Walter Piston’s String Quartet No. 1 (1933).Footnote 61 Similar recording showcases followed in the early stages of Ode to Gravity’s development. For instance, in 1971 Amirkhanian shared with listeners what he described as ‘rare gems’ from Lou Harrison’s personal record collection that featured percussion music from the late 1930s and early 1940s by Harrison himself, as well as by Henry Cowell, Johanna Beyer, and William Russell.Footnote 62 Harrison and Amirkhanian shared a deep love of records, and their capacity to provide access to alternative musical traditions, particularly non-Western ones in Harrison’s case, were formative in their artistic developments.
Music from non-Western traditions was also a recurrent fixture throughout the life of Ode to Gravity. During the first weeks of launching the programme, Bay Area listeners were introduced to music from Afghanistan via recordings made in Herat of musicians performing in a teahouse on the dutar, clay pot drums, as well as bells and rattles with vocalizations.Footnote 63 Within the next two years, episodes that covered non-Western subjects included: an hour-long discussion of the music of Komitas and his ethnomusicological importance as a ‘Bartók for Armenian music’ with the pianist Maro Ajemian and her husband Lionel Galstaun; an introduction to music for the oud by Khamis El Fino and Indian ragas; recordings of Sudanese music performed by Hamza El Din, a virtuoso who represented for Amirkhanian ‘a musician who does more than simply keep alive the flame of some tradition’ in the face of increasingly ubiquitous Western culture; and a survey of Armenian folk music complemented by an interview with Dikran Karagueuzian, the editor of the San Francisco-based newspaper the Armenian Guardian.Footnote 64 Into the 1980s, representative advocacy for new music included highlighting the genuinely international dimensions of the electronic music synthesis. In 1983, for instance, Ode to Gravity drew attention to the music of Coriún Aharonián and Graciela Paraskevaidis, native Uruguayan composers of electroacoustic music and important organizers of new music in South America.Footnote 65 The dynamic syncretism of the composer Richard Horowitz and Iranian vocalist Sussan Deyhim were on display in 1987 on an Ode to Gravity episode that covered the release of their album Desert Equations: Azax Attra, which fused the stylistic sheen of new wave electronica with percussion instruments and Middle Eastern instrumentation.Footnote 66
Amirkhanian also looked to Europe, especially during the 1970s when Ode to Gravity was at its peak of activity, to find like-minded individuals who justified his preoccupation with bringing avant-garde music to American audiences. He interviewed Werner Goldschmidt in April 1972 in Baden Baden to discuss the latter’s record label Wergo, his interests and work as an art historian, and his struggles to re-enter the discipline upon returning to Germany in the 1950s. Goldschmidt, as the ten-year anniversary of the label’s founding approached, explained his motivation for creating Wergo as stemming from a profound need ‘to give myself a sense of moral justification after having been abroad for such a long time and through the events since 1933. Having been thrown off out of the way I intended to go, I needed something which would have been near to what I intended to do when I was young.’Footnote 67 What Goldschmidt had planned to do as a young art historian was research the parallels he observed between the liberation of visual form and colour in painting and the expansion and loosening of traditional harmonic forms in music. He brought this scholarly background to bear on the albums produced by Wergo most conspicuously through generous and substantial liner notes.Footnote 68 That recognition of the importance of circulating records as a means to foster international dialogue among the avant-garde was also on display in a similarly insightful interview done by Philip Freriks of the Dutch broadcaster VPRO with Chantal d’Arcy in May 1973 in Paris and broadcast on Ode to Gravity. The subject was her record label Shandar, which had established its reputation through releasing albums by a range of important avant-garde composers, from Steve Reich to Sun Ra. The distinctly American character of the catalogue reflected the fact that many of the early recordings came from Maeght Foundation-sponsored concerts, as in the cases of Cecil Taylor’s Nuits de La Fondation Maeght from July 1969 and Albert Ayler’s Nuits de La Fondation Maeght from July 1970, both of which were released in 1971 by Shandar; Sun Ra too had his own Nuits de la Fondation Maeght LP recorded in August 1970 and then released in 1971.Footnote 69 The increasingly large draw of avant-garde American music in Europe was noted by d’Arcy when recounting that she organized a concert of Steve Reich’s music in 1973 in the south of France attended by 3,000 people, and the successful attendance at May 1972 concerts of Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and Pandit Pran Nath reinforced her conviction that these minimalist composers represented ‘a new way of life’ that was important to showcase.Footnote 70
That transmission of American music to Europe involved Amirkhanian personally when he was invited to join the staff of the VPRO radio station in the Netherlands from September 1973 to January 1974.Footnote 71 As he explained at the time, there was eagerness for him to bring over as much as possible:
They’ve asked for a comprehensive sampling of our music from Revolutionary times on up, so I’ll be taking stuff by Francis Hopkinson, the 18th century American composer, as well as contemporary musicians. I’ve really got some rarities for them, like the Four Diaphonic Suites by Ruth Crawford Seeger … I’m also taking the Balinese Ceremonial Music of Colin McPhee.Footnote 72
This was an especially fruitful transatlantic exchange for Amirkhanian, as it afforded him exposure and direct access to the European avant-garde and fellow travellers engaged in the same kind of bold compositional and broadcasting experimentation he was doing at KPFA. The association and collaboration with VPRO provided a wealth of material for broadcast to American listeners through Ode to Gravity as he travelled to seek out European composers. In September 1973, for instance, he had the opportunity to interview Mauricio Kagel before the October premiere at the Donaueschingen Music Festival of Zwei-Mann Orchester, a highly theatrical work scored for a collection of homemade instruments manipulated by remote control strings and wires.Footnote 73 Interviews with other esteemed composers such as Pierre Boulez were complemented by reviews of ongoing European music festivals such as the Gaudeamus and such exhibitions as the Seventh Annual Cologne Art Fair, where he interviewed multiple gallery owners to discern the ongoing avant-garde art trends in Europe.Footnote 74 Amirkhanian’s own work too figured into his residency at VPRO. His text-sound compositions, for example, framed a broader discussion about American music that took place with Ton Hartsuiker in February 1974, with the discussion serving as a chance to introduce repertoire by Conlon Nancarrow, George Antheil, Harrison, Harry Partch, and Peter Garland.Footnote 75
A crucial aspect of the exchange with VPRO also involved Amirkhanian having the freedom to programme music for the station. These broadcasts then served as content for rebroadcast in the United States via Ode to Gravity. For instance, he produced a radio concert in Hilversum that featured George Antheil’s McKonkey’s Ferry Overture, as well as Darius Milhaud’s Sonatina, Op. 221 and String Quartet No. 12, Op. 252, revealing his eagerness to highlight the striking creativity of both American mavericks and European emigres to America – his fascination with Antheil’s music in particular is discussed in the next section in more detail.Footnote 76 Sometimes the American element was even more conspicuous; for instance, he showcased the music of David Johnson for VPRO. Living in Cologne at the time, Johnson studied composition at Harvard University and had collaborated with both Stockhausen and Kagel. These influences combined to produce Johnson’s distinctive style that blended electronic music synthesis, improvisation, musique concrète, and text-sound composition and hewed close to Amirkhanian’s own aesthetic orientation. It comes as no surprise that the piece he chose to programme was Johnson’s TeleFun (1968): this improvisatory electronic piece mixes a range of recorded sounds in the manner of musique concrète with an aural effect resembling closely those avant-garde creative experiments that served as content for early Ode to Gravity broadcasts.Footnote 77 Amirkhanian learned much during his time at VPRO and was at home among what were felt to be like-minded people. However, while lauding VPRO’s vision and the resources they had available to produce engaging content, he acknowledged that their lack of substantial airtime was a hindrance, a circumstance that was not an issue at KPFA: ‘If you want to be radical you need time. In Berkeley I have twenty hours for music. … Then you have time to say controversial things. And only if you do that will you keep the listeners’ attention.’Footnote 78 A testament to the value of this exchange was that it fostered a subsequent four-month-long residency at KPFA for VPRO’s music director Han Reiziger (Figure 5) in which he could produce concerts for American radio listeners about both Dutch music specifically and European music broadly in 1974 and 1975.Footnote 79
Charles Amirkhanian and Han Reiziger in the KPFA offices during the latter’s residency (1975). Image courtesy of Other Minds Archives; Charles Amirkhanian Collection. Photo credit: Carol Law.
The work Amirkhanian had done during the 1970s, especially the experience of concert programming and broadcasting at VPRO, expanded into other music administration endeavours in the United States, particularly over the course of the 1980s and beyond the bounds of KPFA. One notable undertaking that mirrored the spirit of Ode to Gravity began in 1983 when he started to host and programme the Speaking of Music series at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, which afforded prominent composers an opportunity to explain and discuss their work in front of live audiences. Guests included Laurie Anderson (Figure 6), Pierre Boulez, John Cage (Figure 7), Brian Eno, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Keith Jarrett, Mauricio Kagel, Tania León, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Nicholas Slonimsky, Olly Wilson (Figure 8), and Frank Zappa, several of whom had already appeared or would appear on Ode to Gravity or another KPFA programmes. Starting in 1988, Amirkhanian co-directed with John Lifton the Composer-to-Composer Festival in Telluride, Colorado, dedicating an episode of Ode to Gravity in May to discussing the scope and plans for the event.Footnote 80 His involvement with the Composer-to-Composer Festival ended after 1991, but this suite of responsibilities was soon replaced by his directorship of the Djerassi Residency Programme in 1993. As Amirkhanian’s time at KPFA was coming to an official end at the close of 1992, a long-time listener, Jim Newman, contacted him in an effort to ensure he would remain involved in the Bay Area music scene. The two collaborated and developed the Other Minds organization that year, directly drawing on Amirkhanian’s experience working in Telluride to establish an institution that would encourage the creation of contemporary music.Footnote 81 It was this tireless support for new music that brings us to another crucial dimension to Ode to Gravity’s sound sensitivity mission: as a platform to bring twentieth-century composers to the attention of the listening public.
Laurie Anderson and Charles Amirkhanian in conversation at the Exploratorium’s Speaking of Music Series (6 December 1984). © The Exploratorium. All rights reserved. Used and adapted with authorization. The Exploratorium® is a registered trademark of The Exploratorium®. www.exploratorium.edu.
John Cage and Charles Amirkhanian onstage during their Speaking of Music conversation (8 January 1987). © The Exploratorium. All rights reserved. Used and adapted with authorization. The Exploratorium® is a registered trademark of The Exploratorium®. www.exploratorium.edu.
Olly Wilson during his Speaking of Music appearance (5 November 1987). © The Exploratorium. All rights reserved. Used and adapted with authorization. The Exploratorium® is a registered trademark of The Exploratorium®. www.exploratorium.edu.
Mavericks and Their Prophet
On 15 April 1991, KPFA listeners could hear Amirkhanian conduct a live telephone interview with Frank Zappa on Ode to Gravity that featured a call-in segment for questions. The wide-ranging conversation was deeply inflected by the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War and George H. W. Bush’s announcement of a New World Order following the overwhelming kinetic force the United States demonstrated against Saddam Hussein. The stifling political climate was such that Zappa expressed his serious intention to explore the possibility of running for president:
I’m pissed off enough that I’m at the stage where I’m considering running, and I’m taking concrete steps to look into it, and between now and the time that I meet with these guys I’ll be conducting some other research to see whether there’s any real reason to do it, because if I do it, I would do it to win.Footnote 82
Zappa had a long history of involvement with KPFA, and his idiosyncratic style, rebellious experimentation, and general non-conformity made him appear a living, breathing personification of the radio station’s values.Footnote 83 While he was certainly a fixture in American culture, there were other American composers who exemplified the avant-garde spirit of KPFA and who seemed to Amirkhanian unduly neglected. Ode to Gravity metaphorically dropping ever-larger objects into the public consciousness is apt in the two examples that follow, the objects being composers largely unknown at the time and injected into the listening mainstream. Both cases are also instructive in showing how Ode to Gravity helped provide a starting point and foundation for these long-term projects that would grow to involve other channels and mediums. Record production, concert organizing, and other advocacy tools were leveraged to successfully interject these composers into the public consciousness, and they provide additional texture to the story of Ode to Gravity and its gradual attenuation.
Amirkhanian developed an early affinity for Antheil’s music when he first heard the Ballet Mécanique on LP and read the composer’s autobiography, The Bad Boy of Music (1945) as a child. Once in his position at KPFA in 1969, he felt sufficiently credentialed to take a more active role in championing Antheil’s music, which seemed to epitomize that American maverick compositional style shared with other iconoclasts such as Harrison, Partch, and Ives. Amirkhanian contacted Böske Antheil, who was still living in Los Angeles, and began the initial stages of inquiring about her husband’s scores. By November 1970, Amirkhanian felt confident enough to programme a complete evening-length concert of Antheil’s music at Hertz Hall on the University of California, Berkeley campus on the 20th that sold out of tickets.Footnote 84 The local press billed it as a ‘research concert’, with the sense of excitement and hype in the Bay Area cultivated through a guerrilla campaign on the KPFA airwaves by Amirkhanian, who produced three two-hour programmes dedicated to exploring the life and music of Antheil, and an Ode to Gravity episode on the 18th that further introduced listeners to his music.Footnote 85 The November 1970 Folio also strongly promoted the concert, featuring an eye-catching cover design (Figure 9) and a substantial article by Amirkhanian about Antheil’s music. The San Francisco Examiner also published a sizeable write-up on Antheil’s life and work on 15 November, predicting that the concert would ‘see either the resurrection of a master, or another evening of pure “Whee!”’Footnote 86 The latter part of this forecast turned out to be accurate, requiring additional work over the course of the 1970s.
Cover design for the November 1970 edition of KPFA’s Folio (vol. 21, no. 10). Source: Internet Archive; Pacifica Radio Archives Folio Preservation and Digitization Project. Courtesy of Pacifica Foundation/KPFA Radio.
Antheil was one of the American composers Amirkhanian was keen to export to Europe and share over the airwaves during his VPRO residency in 1973–4, which afforded further domestic exposure through Ode to Gravity re-broadcasts. A series of programming opportunities with VPRO in 1976 were also crucial, as this was the year in which American music took centre stage at the Holland Festival, which was seen as a veritable celebration of the country’s bicentennial. It was in this context that Reinbert de Leeuw’s conducting of Ballet Mécanique at that year’s Festival firmly raised Antheil’s profile, with press finding his music to broadly reflect an assured, technically virtuosic iconoclasm that was distinctively American.Footnote 87 Such esteem recalls the rich cultural reciprocity between the United States and Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, and that Ballet Mécanique epitomized at that time. Footnote 88 Also relevant in this regard was Antheil’s close association with Ezra Pound, another American maverick promoted on KPFA due to his bold, interdisciplinary interests in both the spoken word and music. Amirkhanian had already dedicated more than two hours of programming to presenting the world premiere broadcast of Pound’s opera Le Testament de Villon on the eve of the Fantasy Records release in 1972 and would devote a further Ode to Gravity episode in 1983 to making listeners aware of the poet’s musical compositions. Altogether, by 1987, the growing cult status around Antheil was such that Amirkhanian could dedicate an Ode to Gravity broadcast to discussing Hugh Ford’s 1984 book Four Lives in Paris, which prominently featured Antheil, and supplementing the account with recordings of his music.Footnote 89
Nancarrow similarly figured into Amirkhanian’s constellation of American maverick composers whose music warranted greater attention and could benefit from his privileged position at KPFA. The parallels with Antheil are striking: Amirkhanian’s curiosity was initially spurred by a formative youthful encounter with Nancarrow’s music through a performance of Crises by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In this context, the pair appear kindred spirits to Amirkhanian’s own compositional sensibilities as they all pursued radical experiments in sound that foregrounded the technological mediums in which they worked.Footnote 90 Starting the job at KPFA in 1969 was again also crucial in driving Amirkhanian to action: just before taking up his position, he travelled with his wife to Mexico City to meet Nancarrow (Figure 10).Footnote 91 The equivalence to Antheil’s treatment bears further correspondence in a two-hour Ode to Gravity broadcast from July 1974 that showcased unpublished music that had been sent from Mexico City and served as an attempt to launch Nancarrow’s music into the public consciousness, with Amirkhanian pitching the music to listeners as ‘utterly new to our ears’ and composed by ‘an unrecognized genius’.Footnote 92 This took place at the same time that the singer Thomas Buckner was preparing to launch the 1750 Arch Records label in Berkeley.Footnote 93 The pair were keen to record Nancarrow’s music, which necessitated a minor heist in 1977 to record at his studio in Mexico City and surreptitiously bring the material back to the United States without the knowledge of the Mexican government:
Suddenly, Nancarrow, when we asked permission, was a national treasure. … when we wanted to take out his recordings, they came to us and said ‘No, you can’t do this.’ We decided we’d circumvent that. Bob Schumaker figured a way to put his reel-to-reel Nagra machine into travel suitcases along with Dolby systems and all sorts of microphones, and we went down there as if we were tourists with just a couple of bags. … When we got to the border to come out with the final recordings, there was a great deal of tension … a bunch of young boys ran up to us as we approached the counter and said, ‘We’ll get you through’, and they just grabbed our stuff as we were coming off the plane, rushed us through customs, and nobody paid any attention to us whatsoever. These were just some young kids helping some older people lift these bags. We were greatly relieved. We got out with the national treasures.Footnote 94
Carol Law and Charles Amirkhanian with Conlon Nancarrow at his home in Mexico City (June 1969). Image courtesy of Other Minds Archives; Charles Amirkhanian Collection. Photo credit: Carol Law.
The 1750 Arch Records release was part of a gradual expansion of interest in Nancarrow’s work. The same New Music America Festival in 1981 that featured the Fontana’s Landscape Sculpture with Fog Horns, for instance, also saw Nancarrow’s music performed to large audiences. The overwhelmingly positive reception seemed to corroborate Ligeti’s earlier declaration to Amirkhanian in a letter that ‘This music is the greatest discovery since Webern and Ives.’Footnote 95 The capabilities of a single radio show such as Ode to Gravity were both insufficient and unnecessary over the course of the 1980s, with engagement opportunities for Nancarrow such as Speaking of Music in 1984 and the Composer-to-Composer Festival in 1989 taking on a scope and scale that had a life of their own. An April 1987, Ode to Gravity broadcast dedicated to surveying Nancarrow’s music also places into sharp relief the changes from what KPFA listeners would have heard on the same programme in July 1974. The slightly unpolished, vaguely samizdat-esque sheen and style with which Amirkhanian presents Nancarrow’s player piano roll recordings is gone. Instead, we find a more conventional historical-documentary format designed to appeal to the mainstream listenership in the late 1980s.Footnote 96
The preceding cases trace a familiar pattern for Amirkhanian’s ‘sound sensitivity’ advocacy: a strong initial stimulus to bring a composer’s music to a wider listening public found expression through Ode to Gravity as a convenient starting point. As each project proceeded over the course of the 1970s, the growing suite of tools at Amirkhanian’s disposal and his rich network of contacts and collaborators amplified the momentum. This expansion of attention-driving programming included cooperation with other radio broadcasters such as VPRO, sponsorship of record production, particularly through the local 1750 Arch Records label, and showcases on other KPFA programs such as Morning Concert. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, public-facing events such as Speaking of Music and the festivals with which Amirkhanian became increasingly involved were the primary means to generate awareness and galvanize enthusiasm for these and other neglected or otherwise marginalized composers. Ode to Gravity, in these instances, did not so much ‘decline’ in terms of either output or quality, but rather became subsumed into and subordinated by a broader network of ambitious projects. It is when observing the trend in this specific context that we notice it also reflected in the broad trajectory of the radio programme as it appeared less frequently on the airwaves over the course of the 1980s and into the 1990s.
Amirkhanian’s Sound-House
Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1626) is a quasi-science fiction novel that depicts a utopian society on the mythical island of Bensalem. At the centre of this kingdom is Solomon’s House, a fictive foreshadowing of the real-world Royal Society and the broad contours of Enlightenment aspirations.Footnote 97 Bacon gives the reader a tour of the institution that includes ‘sound-houses’ dedicated to generating and imitating all conceivable sounds:
We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds, and their generation. We have harmonies which you have not, of quarter-sounds, and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep; likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which set to the ear do further the hearing greatly. We have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as it were tossing it: and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller, and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have also means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.Footnote 98
For twenty-five years, Ode to Gravity functioned like Bacon’s sound-house as it attempted to conduct a vast survey of all available sounds and present them to listeners. Ode to Gravity was a fixed node that sought to make sense of the rapidly changing artistic world surrounding it, which was principally defined by a frenetic pace of development as new approaches to composing music and creatively organizing sound arose seemingly overnight. Indeed, Cage described this period in which artists and composers found themselves to be an era without a mainstream – there were instead multiple streams or a delta, perhaps even an ocean, in which all were equally adrift.Footnote 99 Amirkhanian’s self-styled title in the early 1970s as KPFA’s Sound Sensitivity Information Director has a certain Baconian inflection to it and is a useful way of framing what Ode to Gravity sought to accomplish over its history: collect a vast amount of aural data that would allow suitably sensitized listeners to better understand the nature of post-war avant-garde music and raise their overall listening consciousness. In contrast to Cage’s metaphorical delta and sea or Bacon’s imaginary island utopia sitting within it, however, were the very real satellites and coaxial cables ushering in a new media landscape in the 1990s that led to the end of Ode to Gravity.
July 1995 was Ode to Gravity’s final month, although by that time it had already become more of a special occasion than a regular series.Footnote 100 In an article in the KPFA Folio for that month, music director Marci Lockwood explained how changing times demanded substantial programming changes at the station. The advent of satellite television and radio in particular reflected a dramatic expansion in the volume of available programming for audiences and saturating the media ecosystem to such an extent that it was felt KPFA would be unable to survive if it did not adapt. Effective 1 August, a range of programmes were discontinued in order to reformat KPFA to reflect the perceived changing habits of radio listeners.Footnote 101 Many were unhappy with the new scheduling and programming decisions, with one Bay Area resident writing to KPFA to express his frustration at the cancellation of Ode to Gravity and various other programmes. He lamented that the radio station had transitioned away ‘from the era of Charles Amirkhanian, when KPFA was instrumental in helping create the largest audience for contemporary classical music in the U.S., to this new era where the goal is regularity, and a new youthful audience which management somehow believes doesn’t want to hear this music’.Footnote 102 By 1995, Ode to Gravity was an already-attenuated experiment born of the counterculture in the early 1970s and had changed in character, incrementally moving away from the most extreme avant-garde experimentation on the radio that defined its early years. It was out of place in the media landscape of the 1990s, which was characterized by increasing neoliberal demands it would be unable to meet.
Was Amirkhanian’s twenty-five-year sound sensitivity experiment ultimately successful? One index for making such a judgement is to observe how far it propagated into research about twentieth-century music. By that measure, it was certainly effective. You can find references to Ode to Gravity peppered throughout the footnotes of scholarship on twentieth-century music, drawing particularly from the range of interviews conducted. Such a circumstance testifies to the enduring value of Amirkhanian’s project as a mitigation of our status as hopelessly belated observers. W. G. Sebald articulates the challenge succinctly in The Rings of Saturn when he observes that ‘the representation of history requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.’Footnote 103 Crucial to reconciling oneself to such difficulties of historical positioning is echoed in the overriding telos of Ode to Gravity, that consciousness-raising cultivation of sensitivity to sound through sustained and thoughtful exposure provided by its substantial holdings of aural data. This objective made Ode to Gravity a necessarily multifaceted undertaking both as a generator itself of musical experimentation and as a primary source for reportage about composers, recordings, and goings-on in the avant-garde music and art scenes. The flexible, dynamic content and formatting, especially in its early years, reflected a capacious view of what radio could be for listeners, infused by the orientation of the host. Returning to the idea presented at the beginning of this article that the entirety of Ode to Gravity was a conceptual extension of the eponymous happening that took place in September 1968, then its fundamental nature appears with added texture and definition: a long-running, twenty-five-year invitation to listen in a dedicated space that released the unique, the strange, and the compelling across the airwaves and into listeners’ ears.
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