ONCE Group - ONCE Composers and Their Music

ONCE Composers and Their Music

All of the ONCE composers had at one point in their careers studied at the University of Michigan with composition professor Ross Lee Finney. From their composition lessons and weekly seminars, the ONCE composers developed important roots in avant-garde compositional styles: twelve-tone, serialism, and Expressionism, for example. They also developed familiarity with prominent composers from the first half of the twentieth century such as Schoenberg, Webern, Varèse, and Berio. The early ONCE works most strongly reflect these avant-garde roots. However—possibly due to Gerhard’s one-year residency and his encouragement for ONCE composers to find their own individual style—the early compositions reflect a personal distinction already unique to each ONCE composer.

Much of the avant-garde music the ONCE composers were studying was numerical and mathematical; twelve-tone and serial techniques, for example, replace the twelve note names in an octave with numerical values 0–11. Besides studying these compositions, the ONCE composers had many other exposures to math and science. Reynolds is the most striking example of this with his previous career as a physicist and engineer, but other composers were also influenced by math and science. Ashley constructed many of his works around numbers and numerical formulas. Some of Ashley’s other works use recording techniques that would be impossible without scientific discoveries and innovations in electroacoustics. Cacioppo’s star chart score for Cassiopeia probably reflects scientific influence on his compositions. Gordon Mumma’s “discovery” of cybersonics reflects his work in a seismographic laboratory. Scavarda used a matrix form in his revolutionary piece Matrix for Clarinetist.

As ONCE progressed, many of the composers began to use their music to comment on musical traditions and societal conventions. Ashley’s and Mumma’s compositions are most notable for this, and the two composers often collaborated on their ONCE performances. The ONCE Group productions, led by Robert Ashley’s wife, Mary Tsaltas, also commented on societal rituals and conventions.

Manipulating the passing of time in a musical performance was a common interest of ONCE composers. According to Reynolds, this was a logical thing to do, just another reaction to previously composed music. Manipulating time was done in a variety of ways. Composers such as Reynolds and Cacioppo would write two or more parts moving at different speeds. Sometimes these parts would be horizontally juxtaposed, heard singularly one after another; other times they would be vertically juxtaposed, two or more parts moving at different rates heard at the same time. Scavarda explored indeterminate music where the length of a note was determined by the player’s ability to hold his breath or the amount of time it took a note on a piano or percussion instrument to decay. ONCE composers exploring this effect often placed long pauses in the music to even further skew the listener’s perception of meter.

Another ONCE festival theme—that eventually became an expectation—was creating or discovering new sounds or new ways to interpret music. Donald Scavarda is credited for discovering clarinet multiphonics in his clarinet solo, Matrix for Clarinetist. He also created abstract films that he used as scores instead of the traditional format. Ashley, Cacioppo, and Sheff experimented with graphic, verbal, and pictorial scores. All of the ONCE composers experimented with alternative ways of producing sounds on a variety of instruments. This not only contributed to each composer’s individual style, but created an expectation for music performed at each ONCE festival to present something new, continually challenge and stimulate performers, and captivate audiences.

From the first ONCE Festival, electronic music was a characteristic—and possibly expected among some composers such as Ashley and Mumma—component of ONCE. The early appearance of electronic compositions at the ONCE festivals is largely due to John Cage’s influence on the ONCE composers and Ashley and Mumma’s collaboration with Milton Cohen to compose electronic music for Cohen’s Space Theater productions. Ashley and Mumma both had electroacoustic studios in their homes, making electronic music a convenient composition device. Electronic music represented another possibility of new sound production, whether through magnetic tape layering or manipulation, recording, or cybersonics, one that was influenced by scientific developments.