Petr Kotik – Many Many Women

“Reader, you and I are about to share a delicious secret. The disc you’re holding (or perhaps listening to by now) contains a classic of 1970s underground music – a durable classic, in fact, from an era whose most spectacular productions often proved ephemeral. It is a musical monument, vast in scale, rich in polyphony, resonant in cultural associations. And yet, unbelievably, few people have heard of it. It is one of those wonderful artistic productions that somehow slipped through the cracks, a disaster that our cultural cognoscenti assure us never happens. I indulge a slight measure of hyperbole: there is a circle of New York musicians who realize that Petr Kotik is a major, profound, brilliantly inventive, and intensely original composer, even if he remains unknown to the general public. If one wants reasons, there are plenty to choose from. 1) He is an expatriate with the usual disadvantages of that position, considered European in America and American in Europe, thus easily ignorable on both sides. 2) He has devoted himself to conducting and producing other people’s music, so that the people who know his music are mostly composers who want him to do something for them, rather than the other way around. 3) His musical aesthetic followed a trajectory set in the 1970s, while the music of the 1980s veered off on a very different (and less adventurous) tangent, leaving him unstylish. 4) His music (this is such a common one) is so vastly original that very few people “get it.” Need more? And so Petr Kotik remains one of the great unknowns of music at the turn of the 20^th-Century, an intrepid and intransient pioneer who has persevered for 30 years with little recognition. Born in Czechoslovakia, he became enamored of the music of John Cage, with whom he first performed at the age of 22 – Kotik is a virtuoso flutist. In 1969, at the invitation of Lejaren Hiller and Lukas Foss, he came to Buffalo, New York, for a residency at the Center for Creative and Performing Art at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Meanwhile, however, the Soviet occupation of Prague made it inadvisable for him to return home. Stranded in a country whose aesthetics he admired but whose politics and economics he has always found depressingly incomprehensible, Kotik formed his own ensemble to play his music, the S.E.M. Ensemble (whose initials stand for nothing except perhaps the middle letters of “ensemble”). Many Many Women (1975-78) remains probably Kotik’s best-known work – not because he never equaled or surpassed it, but because of its size, the fact that it was recorded, and its position as the first pure expression of his aesthetic. The work is a setting, if you will – though not in any conventionally musical sense of “words set to music” – of an entire novella by Gertrude Stein. More accurately, the piece is a performance of the novel, an intoning of it filtered through Kotik’s inimitable idiom of parallel intervals. Like so many of Stein’s texts, this one seems almost nonsensical in its constantly varied repetition of words and phrases. As always, however, careful attention to the words elicits a powerful cumulative effect, a phenomenological exploration of ways of being human:

She had this thing. She had loving children. She had one. He did not live to be going on being living. She was not expecting that thing, she was not expecting him to be one not going on being living. She was one not succeeding in living. She was a sad enough one.

Like Stein’s friend Virgil Thomson, Kotik writes a flat, uninflected kind of vocal line perfectly suited to Stein’s generously repetitive prosody. I once wrote that hardly any younger composers had followed in the footsteps of John Cage, and a friend (Richard Kostelanetz, in fact) pointed to Kotik as an exception. It’s obviously true in an important way, yet when you think about it, it’s hardly true at all. Nothing in Many Many Women (nor in any of his other music) sounds in any way like Cage’s randomized pointillism, even less like the rhythmic modalism of his early works. Yet there is a Cagean counterpoint running throughout the work, a continual overlap of lines that go together without having been specifically planned to. Even more centrally, Kotik’s music is non-hierarchical in the same way as Cage’s: there are no climaxes, no parts more significant than any other, no bridges, no transitions. If you could make Cage’s music lyrical, or perhaps interest a bunch of Gregorian-chant-singing monks in Cage’s chance processes, you might come up with a result something like Kotik’s music. For the melodic and harmonic aspect of Kotik’s music are far removed from Cage’s sound world. There are 173 segments of music in Many Many Women, ranging from quite long to very short. Each of them is a line sung (by voices) or played (by instruments) in parallel fifths, fourths or octaves. Such a doubling has not been heard to this extent since the days of Notre Dame organum in 12^th-Century Paris. And the melodic lines are so steady, so reassuring, yet so unpredictable. They’ll drone along on one pitch for several syllables, moving to an inflecting neighbor note, then suddenly leap to another register and wander back. No one else’s music sounds like this. How did Kotik derive it? The answers are idiosyncratic, and show what a refreshingly practical, nontheoretical, intuitive composer Kotik is. The lines in many of his early works are drawn from a bunch of graphs he found in the early 1970s; the graphs belonged to a science professor friend who was throwing them away, and charted response times to alcohol in experiments with rats. Kotik was charmed by the shapes and used them for years, so that the chantlike lines constitute a kind of “found melody.” Practicing the melodies written from these graphs with singer Julius Eastman (an S.E.M. regular who later untimely died at 49), he found them difficult to keep in tune, so he practiced with Eastman by doubling the melodies at the octave. To his surprise, he liked the sound. If octaves sound so good, Kotik thought, then perhaps all the perfect intervals will. He started to use them all, octaves, fifths, and fourths. Movement in parallel intervals became a feature of Kotik’s music that instantly identifies it as his. The doublings give the melodies a sturdiness, a harmonic emphasis which create a curiously tonal effect even in the most random counterpoint. And so, in his works of the 1970s – most monumentally Many Many Women and Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1979-82), on a text by Buckminster Fuller – Kotik created a music that floated in “tonally atonal” chanted lines, like so many joyously random Benedictine monks seduced to a postmodern liturgy. The aesthetic was of the 1970s, expressing spontaneity and rebellion against hierarchical authority, yet Kotik had captured those qualities in stately, introverted melodies that seemed etched in granite. No one quite knew what to make of this music, just as few know today. It did gain admirers among New York new-music lovers who would flock to Kotik’s concerts in the knowledge that they were hearing something very spiritual and pure and special. Eventually, in such works as Wilsie Bridge (1986-87) and Solos and Incidental Harmonies (1983-85), Kotik quit using the graphs – having internalized them into a distinctly personal melodic style – and began adding to his music a vibrant percussion track of tambourines, cowbells, and ride cymbals. His music of the 1990s (for instance Quiescent Form of 1995) is marvelously sculpted, elegantly contoured, too seldom heard and far too seldom acknowledged. Many Many Women stands at the beginning of his career as his early masterpiece, a classic on its own terms and a promise of great things to come.” – Kyle Gann

Label: Labor – LAB-6/10

Format: 5xVinyl, LP, Boxset

Country: US

Released:1981

VG+/VG+, with light boxwear.