Yes, we’re back! We never actually went away, it’s just that Make Music New York represents the final point of a months-long process of organization and mobilization, and so summer is a time for a little hibernation. That’s part of the process too, at least for the blog; lie in a cool, dark space for a while, let the images, memories and words stew around for a bit until they start to make some sense . . .

We hope all of you had a great time at MMNY, as we did. Each year seems to be a step forward in every direction, with more musicians, more venues, more styles and more special events (one of our brand-new special events was, unfortunately but understandably, not open to the public: on June 20, Rikers Island hosted Funk Island). There was far too much music for any group of people to take in. On the central North-South axis in Manhattan we were able to get to, the experience was great, even spectacular.

We began at dawn in Central Park for the Yoko Ono Secret Piece. The Park is surprisingly busy at 5:00am, with groups of people exercising, sprinklers running automatically and the ever present sound of cars on the surrounding streets. Still, it was lovely and stimulating to be there, and the impression was that the piece succeeded on Ono’s terms. It’s meant to define an environment where the individual is deeply conscious of the surrounding woods, and if the contemplative feeling that we carried around all day long was evidence, it worked.

Next stop, the entirely different environs of Wall Street, for GROUP and a tremendous performance of composer Louis Andriessen’s Hoketus. It’s difficult to play music outside, you have to work against either wide-open spaces or overly reflective echoes. The music was ricocheting across the street in an exaggeration of the hocket technique that Andriessen uses, but the power of the sound and the fabulous precision of the musicians made it work. It was great to see traders in their floor jackets wander out of the stock exchange to see what the hell was going on!

By this time, the early afternoon, it already seemed like a full day, but it was time to head back up to Central Park for SWELTER. Talking with Luke Jaaniste of Super Critical Mass a few days after MMNY, it turned out that up until almost the last moment the piece was struggling to come together. But on the lake it was a tremendous success. The combination of sight – musicians on the lake, facing outward like in a Caspar David Friedrich painting – and the sound of resonant horns reaching out to each other across the expanse of water, was indescribably magical. The lake and the Park belonged to the sound, and the aesthetic gesture took full dominion over the landscape. Stunning, and beautiful.

For us, the day came to an end up at Morningside Park, for a spectacular and deeply powerful performance of Inuksuit. We saw the indoor production at the Park Avenue Armory earlier in the year, but there was no comparison between the two. It’s a tautology, but witnessing the work outdoors explains why it is meant to be performed outside. The open space, the uneven vistas and broken sight lines are the perfect accompaniment to a piece that has a large-scale organization but inside which the musical events, the playing, happens with little coordination. It’s not random, but it is by chance inside that larger enclosure, and that is a cognate for what it’s like for us to sit or stroll through a park or down the street in a city. It’s John Cage’s idea, but without the extreme dehumanization. It was easy to call it beautiful, but what it really felt like was something that happened inside us and outside us at the same time. Towards the end, as the music diminishes, we could hear the birds in the park sounding out of the aural landscape. After the final notes of the piece itself, the crowd sat in a kind of levitating, sweet silence for a minute or so, before lauding composer John Luther Adams and musical director Doug Perkins with massive, and deserved applause. This wasn’t just a great MMNY event, it was one of the greatest musical events we’ve witnessed, anywhere, in many years.

There’s so much more to MMNY, and you can find clips, bits, pics and sounds from all over collected at our companion Tumblr.

In 1952, John Cage created his (in)famous 4’33“, an act of philosophical rebellion that called for the rethinking of the experience of hearing music. The next year, Yoko Ono offered a response: Secret Piece, a rethinking of the experience of performing music.

The work is for any number of players, and it doesn’t even require an instrument. If you can sing a pitch (in her original score, it’s F below middle C) you can play the piece. But it does require woods, and a summer’s morning, and time. Make that morning the 21st, the first day of summer, and generously allow Central Park to stand in for the woods, and then Secret Piece becomes one of our most special events for this year’s Make Music New York.

This is a work that touches on some of the most essential and important elements of the avant-garde arts of the twentieth century. The simplicity, and this is as simple as music-making gets, and the egalitarianism that accepts any means for producing the simplest of all musical structures, is of the Opere dell’arte povere, works that can be realized, in as committed a way as possible, by those of us with the least means. It is a piece of environmental art and music, connecting the performers with the world immediately around them, calling on that environment to accompany the players. As much as we’d like, we cannot bend the grass and the trees and the birds and the wind to our will, but that futile attempt (a noble one in this case), places us away from the center of the universe and in the much more useful position of being a part of the universe. Sing in the woods and know what Copernicus felt. Make a sound into the woods and, with humility, listen for a response.

MMNY is an environmental event by its nature, it takes place outside, and we try and take advantage of that. Secret Piece joins a roster of events that are inseparable from their sites, like GROUP, SWELTER and the scheduled performance of John Luther Adams’s Inuksuit in Morningside Park. Some of those pieces are open for participants, and none is more open than this one. Secret Piece is for everyone.

Everyone’s experience of the piece will be different. The Electronic Music Foundation, as part of their Ear to the Earth initiative to make sound and art about the world around us, realized the piece in both recording and performance a coupe years ago, and it’s illuminating to both read about the experience and listen to the participants talk about it, as well as to listen to a clip of the recording of the environment that was made as accompaniment. Live it yourself, meet us at the Columbus Circle entrance to Central Park at 5:00am, June 21 (you’ll probably see EMF head Joel Chabade there, to record the experience anew) and make your own Secret Piece. It is art as experience, music making as soundtrack to the sunrise, the passage of time, to a moment of living.

The big splash for Make Music New York 2010 was the performance of Iannis Xenakis’ percussion work, Persephassa, on Central Park Lake. It was a spectacle, and spectacular, drawing a mass of rowers (including your correspondent, who had the pleasure of rowing Anthony Tommasini around . . . I like to row), to loll about amidst volleys of beats and the shimmers and twitters of chimes and whistles. Some of the Park’s birds joined in as well.

So of course we’re back on the lake this year, with another centerpiece event. This one comes to us from Australia and its title is SWELTER. The piece is the creation of sound artists Julian Day, Luke Jaaniste and Janet McKay of Super Critical Mass (SCM), and is being realized by the TILT Brass ensemble, led by trombonist, composer and new music star Chris McIntyre, and produced by our friends at MATA.

The work that SCM does is (and there is an excellent audio sample at our schedule page), as they describe it, large-scale performance/installation projects that explore space through masses of musicians. They use the tool of identical instruments (the Mass Appeal idea) playing in public spaces and without direction or a set score, instead using algorithms (that is, a set of instructions) that guide the mass in the production of sound. The results, in enclosed spaces, take on a powerful, ambient physicality. Sonically, the idea is related to the gorgeous cistern recordings of Pauline Oliveros and Stuart Dempster, but the underlying goal is philosophical (even political), rather than spiritual. Sound is the ideal means of defining the dimensions and limits of an enclosed space, it is a physical wave that travels out and touches the real constraints of the space, bouncing back to our ears with some information about the environment. In a grand enclosure, one that dwarfs our corporeal selves, sound extends our own limits and in a way our own capabilities and powers.

A Deep Listening piece from Pauline Oliveros

A Super Critical Mass performance

What will happen on the lake, with SWELTER, will be a departure from SCM’s previous work and an adventure. The sound of brass across the water will have an antiphonal (call and response) effect, but there is only the air itself for the sound waves to reach into, until they dissipate. But SCM is by their intention flexible and improvisatory in their ideas and their production. As McIntyre explained to me, Day, Jaaniste and McKay are in the ongoing process of tailoring SWELTER to the site itself, the gently rolling rises and nooks and crannies that surround the water. That process includes actually testing the sound of the site, revising and adjusting the algorithms the musicians will use to take the environmental effects into account. Where Persephassa last year was placed on the lake, SWELTER this year will be made for the lake.

While the physicality of the sound SCM seeks will need adjusting, the ideas behind the piece will remain assuredly consistent. SWELTER is about the democratic use of space, about the public, egalitarian meaning of “public places.” There is no roof over the park, but that’s a strength, not a drawback. The park is for the public, the people, and the note from the brass player that reaches across the distance to the ear of the listener in the rowboat is a message and a statement, one that connects the two in the shared freedom of the public commons. It also binds performer and listener in a shared compact of respect and mutual involvement. Making sound in the park, pace the recent restrictions, is in the constructive and eminently civil creation of anarchy, people working together to create a common order without rulings from on high.

SWELTER is also, like every other MMNY event, open to you, every person with the right instrument. This is a piece for you to participate in, and TILT is looking for more brass players and needs to hear from them by Friday, June 17. If you have a brass instrument with valves (sorry, natural horns and bugles can’t create the harmonic consonance that the piece needs), and can play comfortably in at least one octave, they want you. You can sign up here, and spend the afternoon of the first day of summer, 2011, claiming Central Park Lake as your space, and that of your fellow citizens.

I’ve written about this before, but when you mix music and public spaces, you have to deal with the signal-to-noise ratio. And when those public spaces are in a dense environment like New York City, the importance of the issue goes up by orders of magnitude.

New York is a noisy place, and although there’s little acknowledgement of this in public policy and even less in action, noise is by definition a pollutant, stressful and an actual health-hazard. Everyone knows this intuitively because everyone experiences it. I don’t mean the stressful conflict between someone’s desire to sleep late and their neighbor’s desire to playing something loudly at 7am, I mean the basic problem of noise in public spaces; car horns, screeching subway trains, construction sounds, sirens, garbage trucks. Those things are, to the vast majority, obviously obnoxious.

But while it’s easy to develop a public consensus against things like trash in the streets, it’s much, much harder to separate one person’s signal from another person’s noise. That car driving down the street? All I can hear from the sidewalk is the sheer sonic weight of the sub-woofer shaking the plastic trim, while the driver is enjoying the envelope of the song. That’s the issue in this story that describes how the Central Park Conservancy and the Parks and Rec Department are trying to make sections of the park ‘noise’ free by banning music-making. I sympathize with the desire to created quiet in a city where it is so hard for groups of people to find, but, as a musician, I loathe that anyone thinks of music as noise. It is also disappointing, there’s no other word, to see that a sign has been put up at the Bethseda Terrace, which is such a wonderful physical space for acoustic music. It has tremendous resonance and, since it’s semi-enclosed, it’s ideal for quiet instruments whose sound would evaporate almost immediately on a lawn or in an open plaza. It’s also the site of the Mass Appeal: Flutes music for Make Music New York, so at least for one day the restriction will be lifted, and I’m confident that many people will enjoy what they hear.