DIGRESSION:
Some editors want glamour writing. They are only interested in the way the words and ideas sound. They want composition and posture. Make up and hair (Yes, hair! Lots of hair!). They want a clever witticism as the lead, followed by commentary that can be reduced to a series of one liners that furthers either one of two claims: this is great, or this sucks. Usually, however, these reviews are devoid of content. Although by sticking to the formula they do offer readable reviews and unambiguous recommendations.

Standards, taste, explorations about music at large are of no concern. They are dismissed in favor of reader-friendliness. (How else can you explain the use of usually indecipherable lyrics in a review to prove a point about the quality of an album?) In advance, I apologize for not making such style considerations. But, while I am parting from glamour writing, I am not promising that this review will have any content either. In other words, don’t be surprised if in the end you are stuck with the impression that reading this was entirely worthless.

BIOGRAPHY (an irrelevant narrative, hoping to convince the easily impressionable members of the audience that this album is worth getting solely on the basis of Christian Wolff’s credentials):
Christian Wolff studied a few weeks with John Cage, but is otherwise a self-taught composer. He is a pianist, guitarist, and (most importantly as far as this sell is concerned) a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard. He experimented with open instrumentation, open cueing systems, scores for non-musicians, and scores in verbal instructions only.

INSTRUCTION:
"Burdocks is for one or more groupings of players. It’s a collection of different, distinctive, compositional ideas in ten parts. The ten parts include specific notations on the other sounds a player hears; and various verbal directions both explicit and suggestive. Various numbers of performers can play, using any means of making sounds. Any number of the ten parts can be played simultaneously or overlapped. "I had an image in my mind of a varied community of musicians professional and amateur musicians along with non-musicians joined in a populist anarchist spirit." -Christian Wolff

DESCRIPTION:
This is the sound of experimental theory (more specifically, an antithesis to what we traditionally understand as music) directing the chamber. Entertaining the mind as opposed to soothing the ear, Burdocks, is an experiential piece. It may seem very irritating. Parts are rough and explosive. It’s almost like every instrument was a member of the percussion section and the notation was not notes but beats/eruptions of sound. Or, better yet, disruptions of sound. Music is about repetition, recursion, variations of the same theme, and like this litany, exploring ways of saying the same thing. Burdocks isn’t anything like this. Burdocks works more on an experiential level (and, more specifically, a taxing experience) of listening than the traditional performances. As opposed to a situation where one would justify that something was good by its ability to demand that the listener enthusiastically anticipate the repetition of the experience, Burdocks is not something you would want as a desert island disc. It is a difficult piece of music; stubborn, obstinate, and obscure. It demands complete attention, not in a baroque ornamental or intense kind of demand, but rather in an atonal distracting kind of way. You can’t passively listen to the performance. It’s too jarring.

ANECDOTE:
At least once every semester, I get really sick of the pop music that the indie rockers and hipster rags peddle as cutting edge. What triggers this mood shift is my concern that the "cutting edge" all sounds the same. This causes me to worry. Maybe I shouldn’t restrict my listening to things that just intuitively sound good and are easy to listen. Burdocks is the kind of thing I feel like listening to when I’m in this mood, but the problem that I have with these "difficult" pieces is that I’m not sure how to evaluate them. What features and qualities do I look for in these pieces? Am I only interested in the completely jarring and disruptive elements? If this is the case, then how is it different from shock art (performance art), and more importantly, how does this music escape the criticism that shock art underwent? Or maybe I my limited exposure has prevented me from developing a rubric with which to evaluate such pieces. Maybe this is the sign of a novice. Maybe as my opinion of pop music sinks to the point where it all seems completely repetitive and unlistenable, and as escape from the redundancy I listen to more and more of this difficult music, I will become more sensitive to the particulars of such pieces.

A MORE ACCESSIBLE ENTRY POINT:
Of Sonic Youth’s twenty disc entry list on allmusic.com, only one was rated less than two stars. In 2000 Sonic Youth paid tribute to the centuries avant-garde composers/conceptual sound artists (like Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, and Christian Wolff) by covering, collaborating and producing an album worth of compositions by these composers called Goodbye Twentieth Century. This is Sonic Youth’s lowest rated album. The critic who reviewed Goodbye wrote that the problem with the album is that in paying tribute to these contemporary composers, Sonic Youth forfeited their signature excessive feedback sound for subtle minimal sounds haphazardly interrupted by noisy atonal explosions. So why would a band like Sonic Youth be interested in these experiments in dissonance, atonality and polyphonics? Some suggest that contemporary Thrill Jockey experimentalist Jim O’Rourke, who collaborated with Sonic Youth on the EP SYR 3, influenced the band to try these more difficult pieces.

Maxwell Yim
11.04.01