In February, when it was announced that there would be a performance of Arthur Russell’s Instrumentals at the Button Factory this May, it was a rare case of a gig coming totally out of the blue and seemingly without precedent. It was not happening on the back of a release, or a particular anniversary – and the only performance of the work since the 1970s had occurred as a once-off in New York in 2012.
Instrumentals, with its curiously nondescript name, was a curiosity even within Arthur Russell’s eclectic, restless career. Far better known for his mutant disco cuts and the haunting solo cello songs on World of Echo, Instrumentals instead positioned him in the world of minimalist composers from academic backgrounds like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. But while those greats use a trance-like austerity in their contemporary pieces, Instrumentals was shot through with the joy of the pop songs that Russell had penned both before after its composition in the mid ’70s.
Unless you were buzzing around downtown Manhattan’s avant-garde music scene in the late 1970s, Instrumentals would only become publicly consumable as part of Audika Records’ series of reissues and compilations of Russell’s work, appearing as part of First Thought Best Thought in 2006, where it immediately showed yet another side to Russell’s unique musical talent.
Peter Gordon was a friend and collaborator with Russell, and has, since the mid ’70s led Love Of Life Orchestra mixing dance rhythms with arty abrasiveness, and whose work was brought back to the spotlight in 2010 via remixes and re-issues with DFA. Gordon is director the performances of Instrumentals which include a number of Russell’s friends and contemporaries (including Peter Zummo, Ernie Brooks and Rhys Chatham) as well as contributions from DFA’s Gavin Russom. We spoke with Peter to find out more about the work itself and how this unique tour has come together.
Can you tell me a bit about the composition of the pieces, Instrumentals 1 & 2 that you’ll be performing in Dublin?
Well, Instrumentals is a piece that Arthur wrote in about ’74 or ’75. Arthur was a composer that’s well known for the wide scope of the types of projects he was involved in, ranging from more classical compositions to beautiful songs as a singer-songwriter, and then his disco and dance records as well. But what Instrumentals really comes from, what the title really refers to is instrumentals in pop music, and the way over the years that pop music is a mostly song-driven medium, but every now and then there are instrumental songs that are released. The way that the piece is constructed, is as a series of chords and melodies originally written as one long piece, without any repeats or without any changes. Then in the process of rehearsal the idea is that the band plays through this continuous piece and then finds different sections, maybe three, four, five different measured sections that are then repeated. So, what Instrumentals the piece is, is these one or two minute sections that are looped with these chords like pop instrumentals. That’s where the element of elaboration and improvisation and developing these sections comes about.
Do you think it bears some relation to a piece like In C by Terry Riley?
In many ways it is, but in that sense I think it’s more similar in construction to the work of Philip Glass or Steve Reich, in terms of modular music. With In C you have these different sections and one musician might be in section one and another in section three, so there is this overlapping, whereas in this modular or minimal music, or the music of Philip Glass, the whole band is moving from section E to section F to section G [for example]. So there isn’t that overlapping of different melodies from different sections like you’d find in In C.
You performed these pieces a lot in the late ’70s, is that correct?
Well actually when I first moved to New York in 1975, that was when I first met Arthur, one of the first projects I was involved in was the 1975 version of the piece in The Kitchen in New York. I helped Arthur, I was the music copyist and did score prep on this piece and then there was some subsequent performances, but it’s not like the piece has been performed a lot.
So the performances of it are still relatively rare?
Yes. A lot of the group involved now performed it a couple of years ago in The Kitchen, a one evening performance, but other than that, this is really the first time the piece has been played in a while. The nature of the piece means that its always different every time we play it. There are certain fixed chords and melodic lines but other than that it’s quite open in how it might be interpreted. The piece could be 48 hours, it could be an hour, it could be a half hour, three hours – in that sense it’s an open system. Also we’ll be adding more rhythmic and electronic elements this time around.
I guess what you’re saying there also means every time you play it with different musicians it’s going to be different as they have some freedom to move within the structure.
Yeah, very much so. In the music that Arthur makes and I make and many others, one could say Duke Ellington too for that matter, who is in the band, the personality of the performers, the musicality of the individuals in the group really is a very strong determinant for how the music is performed and how it sounds.
That’s really quite exciting.
Yeah, each time you get into it it’s a whole new process of exploration. It’s taking a different path than you’re used to even if you are going some place familiar. There are new things to discover every time.
The way I know the piece, and the way most people would know the piece, is through the recording issued on First Thought Best Thought, which in itself almost feels a bit incomplete when you hear it. So, how does the performance shape up to that recording?
Well, we’ll see! There’ll definitely be a different type of energy. We might be taking some things a little faster. I really don’t know yet. I guess we’ll find that out in Dublin.
So the performance that happened in 2012, can you tell me how that came about?
Well for that we were invited by The Kitchen to do a realisation of the piece – I forget the exact curatorial conceit of it – but I was asked by the curator Nick Hallett to revisit the piece. It’s something I’d been wanting to do for a while so that was a fortuitous opportunity.
It strikes me that Arthur and yourself have a similarity in your music where you touch on pop formats while coming from an art world background. Was this piece influential on Love Of Life Orchestra works that you did?
Well I think it was part of an ongoing conversation. I was already doing similar pieces at the time so Arthur and I initially became friends because we shared similar ideas about music and incorporating the language of the music we grew up with and liked to listen to and play, along with the more conceptual and structural elements of art music. At the time there seemed to be an artistic apartheid going on where either you did popular music or you did art music and each side was looking at each other with disdain in a certain sense. So, this was sort of wanting to make intelligent music while at the same time making it clear and not more ‘hidden’. A lot of the contemporary music that was dominating the discussion at the time was quite hard to understand unless one was really keyed into the inner codes of it. So what Arthur and I both wanted to do was to make honest and intelligent music using the materials that were at hand.
The DFA Fabriclive mix was where I first heard your music, and as soon as I heard the name Love Of Life Orchestra I made some sort of connection back through Tim Lawrence’s Arthur Russell biography. Obviously it’s a lot easier to find your music now.
Oh yeah, and I’m very much appreciate to and indebted to James [Murphy] and Pat [Mahoney] for discovering the track and putting it on there because it certainly has brought my music to a whole new group of people. Also, for me, it was an opportunity to revisit the music that I had been making when I was more dance orientated. It actually gave the opportunity to start revisiting that aspect of my own work. It sort of reintroduced my music to myself as well which is kind of funny.
How did the opportunity for this tour come about? Was it off the back of the 2012 performance?
I think so. I was initially contacted by Ben Freeney of Foom Music. Ben had somehow heard about The Kitchen performance and really wanted to bring this to Europe. So he contacted me and asked, ‘How could we make this happen?’ And it was a two year process from there to put together the proposals and then finally taking on working with the agency we’ve been working with. I’d really say this is so much initially driven by Ben Freeney’s passion to see this happen.
It’s music I thought I would never see performed. There seems to have been a consistently building Arthur Russell revival for 10 years or so.
It’s great. His music has so many facets and different aspects of his music reach different people. Then there’s overlap. It’s really interesting and quite beautiful to see this happening. And at the same time, the musical world, the world itself, is finally ready to accept the broad range of styles or the broad scope an artist might be involved with. When Arthur was alive doing his work the market was much more segmented. The audience was much more segmented. Now that’s broken down. There’s so many genres, so many areas of specialty that it’s just assumed that there is going to be a number of different areas and ideas that might encompassed in a work or by an artist.
Arthur Russell’s Instrumentals is performed on Saturday 23rd May in the Button Factory. Tickets cost €25.
Words: Ian Lamont
Images: Paula Court
