Fred Lonberg-Holm live in Rotterdam 2008. Photo by Jan Besselink.
Fred Lonberg-Holm:
Tasting a Single Sound
It was Hamid Drake who first introduced us to Fred: "If you're doing interviews, then you definitely want to talk to this man. You'll find out he's full of surprises." It took five years of bumping into each other at festivals and exchanging the occasional e-mail before we finally invited Fred to play and talk with us on-the-record, in January 2008, at our humble home and even humbler venue in Rotterdam. We discussed, in no particular order, whether to kill or not to kill one's evil masters and influences, the art of preparing for an interview, the real value of traditional learning and technique, why the cello is a better instrument than the balloon, acoustic vs. electronic music, Chicago vs. New York, the idea of free collective improvisation as a free-market competitive dynamic, shopping at Wal-Mart and making a living on Myspace, and of course the secret life of... goats.
So tell us about the goats.
This was recorded at my dad's place... He quit his job relatively young and he moved to a little patch of land, to a house half the size of this room, and then he just slowly kind of found things to do, and so now at this point he's 76 or 77... And he's got about 10 goats and 20 sheep and a whole bunch of chickens and some geese and he lives out in the middle of nowhere and takes care of them all day, and that's what he does. So I was visiting him, and he asked me if I could help him move a doe, a female goat, into one of the buck stalls. And I thought, well, this could be interesting... I've got a tape recorder, I'll set it up and I'll just leave it alone, and we'll bring in the doe and I'll just capture what it is. So that's basically it, we brought in the doe and you hear the sounds in the barn and... They have an outdoor area, and they're constantly moving back and forth, so they go outside and you don't hear it so much, and when they come back in they're closer to the mics... There's no editing, and no... It's not that much of a story. And it's when I got home that I listened back to the recording and thought, hmmm...
It's good you didn't tell us any of this when you gave us the CD. At first we were wondering how literally we should take this whole goats idea. Maybe you were somehow doing all this on the cello, with some electronics... There's also this subtle percussion counterpoint, like somebody else doing a really abstract minimalist kick-drum solo, or maybe you stomping the chair or grinding the cello endpin against the floor...
Well, that's the thing, it's – I don't know if I'm so musical, but I found what they were doing very musical, and very, in a weird way... You know, the cello also has something very – human, in a way that is kind of embarrassing for humans. It's interesting, some people I've played it for, or given it to, they love it. And some others who've heard it, they're just like, arrggh, turn that off! And you kind of wonder what goes on in their stall, with their doe... I wish there was a better story.
So when you release something like this, do you call this... Is it a Fred Lonberg-Holm CD, a found art thing, or a scientific naturalist field recording? It brings up some nicely absurd questions about authorship...
I doubt that this one, I would do anything other than credit myself for recording it. In the fine print. I don't know if I'd put my name too closely under the goats, even.
And of course, in case it turns out to be a huge hit, where do all the royalties go to? A nice stall for the goats?
Well, I don't know if those particular goats would still be alive by the time that it would get released. But yeah, we could set up a foundation, a farm animal rescue shelter, for animals that don't work out good...
And now for something completely different...
Sure.
Believe it or not, we actually did a bit of preparing for this.
I figured I didn't have to tell you guys, but I always tell people when they want to interview me, well, read at least a couple of the things online... I don't mean like serious hardcore preparation, but just have some idea, so it's not just totally starting at ground zero, over and over again...
Then again, sometimes we deliberately try to come in as fresh and open-minded as possible. So it doesn't become too much of a serious career retrospective kind of thing.
I had an interview show in the late eighties in California. I even interviewed John Cage, and we talked about all kinds of nonsense... And he was very happy with it, apparently he told other people that I know, how much he enjoyed it. But we had lots of phone calls complaining at the station – "Terrible interview, you guys hardly talked about music at all!" And then I had another interview with a – nowhere near Cage's status, but well-known within the scene. And just so hung-up about, you know, "my latest project" and "you gotta ask me about this and this and this..." And he seemed pretty irritated that I hadn't really done all the up-to-date research on him. "So, you're gonna just edit that down, right, to, like five minutes?" – "No, that was it. It's an hour show. And it's live!"
So in the course of our little research on everything except your latest project... These references to Anthony Braxton and Morton Feldman kept popping up. So would you say these two were important early influences or...
No. I was already writing music and improvising long before I met – or knew much about – either of them. I was also really interested in patterns and structures as a kid. In addition to studying music, I was really into photographing patterns and textures and flat lines... A funny thing though, after I'd been studying with Feldman, I showed somebody all these photographs and he was convinced that I was lying about the times, that this must have been after – influenced by the evil Morton Feldman! This person wasn't a Feldman fan... At all.
Okay, so tell us some more about this evil Morton Feldman influence...
Frank Rosaly & Fred Lonberg-Holm live in Rotterdam 2008. Photo by Alex Hart.
There I was, a cello student, and this was not the life for me at all, classical orchestral music, this was not what I wanted to do. So I quit school, quit the cello... Gave the cello that I grew up with to my parents, and they sold it, and that was the end of the cello. So I played bass in a rock band, and synthesizer, I was doing music for theater, and doing some electronic music composition wherever I could, in electronic studios... Then I decided I wanted to go back to school and study computer music. And at that time, one of the best schools in the city for electronic music was actually Brooklyn College. My composition teacher happened to be Bunita Marcus, and she was a pretty significant student of Feldman's. And so then, through her, it sort of slowly morphed... Almost like where you study with the assistant of the master and then every now and then you get a lesson from the master, and if the master likes you, you get another lesson... So the thing with Bunita, as much as with Feldman... I really fell in love with – with real instruments. You know? How an instrument sounds at a particular register, and the way a room responds, and the way... The timbre is very delicate, tasting a single sound, hearing a sound. The acoustic world, and the electro-acoustic world, it's really... How incredibly complex and fantastic an acoustic sound is, and how mysterious that world is, as opposed to electronic music which is, once you know the box, the device, the algorithm... You hear it and you know it. Especially in that day – to this day still, and those are very sophisticated devices compared to what we had then. It's funny, I went to school to be a computer music person... It wasn't so much that I went totally hardcore to the strictly acoustic world, but... I started writing pieces – I wrote a piece for two electric cellos and one acoustic cello, and things like this. So that was the main real influence, if it was an influence, was sort of reminding me – back to my roots. Also, in school, they were going to make me sing in the choir, but then we cut a deal where if they gave me a cello I'd play cello in a contemporary ensemble. So that was also, you know, a re-acquaintance with an old friend, but on different terms.
And what about the evil Anthony Braxton influence?
I'd studied some with Pauline Oliveros, who had a big impact on – a great encouragement on opening up the ears. I was all set to go to grad school, and she had suggested that I look into Mills College... So I did, and saw Anthony Braxton, who had maybe some totally different answers than what I've already been given by a different group of people, and still at the same time very valid answers. I admired the music of Anthony, and so I sent the application, and I was lucky enough to not only get accepted but become his assistant. So I had a kind of a inside-eye look at a lot of what he was doing. Braxton seemed, of composers that I admired, one of the ones who had grappled the most with the question of integrating compositional structures with improvising, and had found ways – and those structures were great, I've enjoyed listening to and playing them... But I was interested in more fluid relationships, non-teleological relationships, especially for the improvised part, where it wouldn't just be the bit after you're done – which is its own challenge, if there is going to be a set material at the end of the improvisation, it's nice if it doesn't feel totally like an alien force smashed into the planet. So that's overriding the question that we're improvising to see where we're going... And if we don't know where we're going that's one thing, and if we know where we're going we have to kind of respect that so we do know... Where we're gonna go. But I was more interested in the way where you have written structures, yet somehow you didn't know where you were going... or when you might get there.
Which some less enlightened minds would not even consider composition at all. Except maybe for the fact that someone is dictating the general direction we're going in... Even if he doesn't know where we're all going to end up.
If you're gonna have a composer, then composers are going to have to be some kind a dictator. Or do away with them, which is totally fine, but every now and then it's... There's a Braxton thing if anything is: don't leave behind the idea of control for the open space all the time. And I like that as a performer, you know, I'm happy to submit to someone else's dictation. I think it's interesting when you have one person who decides, or a pair of people who decide: this is what it is, and we're all going to work and try to realize this particular vision. Other than always doing the more free-market, everyone's vision is competing in the same time, which creates a whole other competitive dynamic which sometimes... You know, the drummer is gonna make sure that we play loud! And we can't do anything about that. But if you're the composer you can say no, the drums have to play very quietly... Think of a tin can just being blown in the wind, that's how I want it. And that can be a beautiful thing. So there's room for both.
So these influences by these evil towering giants of twentieth-century music... Was it a problem to find a way to move on beyond all that? Possibly there was some necessary killing of the masters involved...
Nah. See, I'm not like that. I didn't have to kill them. They just kind of receded. There's so many other teachers that came before them, and experiences, I've had so much – so many encounters with really interesting and intense people, that they all balance each other out. During the period with Bunny (Bunita Marcus) and Feldman, I was still playing the electric cello in basements with a lot of other freaks... And Braxton probably influenced, or permeated, me in so many, non-musical – if there's such a thing as a non-musical way. If there's such a thing as non-music. That's the Braxton thing, is that you start seeing buildings as music, and trees as music...
And goats.
And goats. Everything becomes kind of related to music. So it's been a slow, gradual evolution. It wasn't like, I'm rejecting all that, I'm only gonna embrace this one world... And then at a certain point then I've gotta free myself of this world... I'm free now! You were wrong... Dad!
We were surprised to find a quote where you said something like – excuse us if we don't have the exact quote here – that at one point you used to feel that, as a musician, before you can dare think of playing "free", you first have to really master the conventional techniques...
I said that?
Well, you were talking in the past tense.
Are you sure I said that? I'd have to see the context. I don't really... I definitely don't agree with that now.
Again you'll have to excuse us, we haven't got the exact quote... And it was surprising to hear that coming from you, even in the past, because it's something we've heard mostly from players who seem to be struggling with finding their own voice, their own language, and think maybe that if they just take enough lessons and practice enough scales...
Yeah, I might have thought that at one time... A long time ago. Well, here's the thing which you probably already read some of, but... My dad was trying to build guitars, all of which were failures if one wanted to play, you know, Woody Guthrie songs on them. But they were kind of interesting strings-with-necks-and-bodies. And those became toys for me, and so I played them, quite a lot. That was probably more damaging than anything. I mean, really, like the frets were usually laid out like one inch apart the whole way up the neck...
Yeah, that might have a strange effect on your concept of tonality...
And my mother had a friend who was a hippie artist, he moved somewhere far away, and he had been dragging around a cello, and he gave it to my mom. I was about two, and I became obsessed with the cello. It was just like – the magical thing. I could just like make some sounds on it, but – "When you get bigger, then maybe you can take cello lessons." Really, you couldn't get a cello and take it home and mess with it, you had to get signed up to take lessons, and play in the school orchestra, and... So that was sort of building a foundation, a structure where I felt like, to play the cello, this was the way you went about it. Even if you played what later I would realize was free improvised music, but at that point it was just making sounds. But I did feel like, if I was going to be a cellist, I would follow that path. And if you're any good, then you get passed up to higher and higher levels, and you get caught up in this circuit that isn't really what you wanted to do, what you set out to do, at all. Initially I just wanted to play the cello, and before you know it you're going to Julliard pre-college, and playing Beethoven and Brahms and Tchaikovsky, and that's kind of like – well, if you're going to be a cellist, that's what you do, right? And for a while in my life, if I was going to be a cellist, the way you learn is through the classical system. That's one reason why cello will probably never really be a "cool" instrument. Because it's usually played by some nerd who just broke free from that classical world...
So is there any value to traditional learning and technique? As opposed to finding your own technique, creating your own tradition, all the way from the start?
Fred Lonberg-Holm live in Wels, Austria, 2002.
The only reason that I can give for not doing that all the time... At a certain point, you get tired of what you're able – you get bored with yourself. You do the same thing every time, and then it gets boring and then you put the cello away, because – "Yeah, I did the cello, I did everything I can do on the cello". I have a friend who – I don't know if she is anymore, but she was a very highly developed balloon player...
I think we've heard her.
Judy Dunaway? Right. I knew Judy before she started playing the balloon. But last time that we had a conversation about the balloon, which was almost ten years ago now...
Yeah, that was about the time we saw her live. She obviously put a lot of thought into this.
She put a lot of thought into it, but one day she told me – "I figure I can do everything you can do on the balloon. I totally know the balloon, I can make every sound..." As for me... I don't feel anywhere near that on the cello. And if I felt I could do everything on the cello that can be done, then I'd stop, you know? And it was sort of sad, she invested all this time and energy for a number of years, and then she finds it – everything that she can do, she does. There's nothing "outside". At least in her mind – I'm not saying that she's even right about it. But even having that set of mind – why would I get out of bed? One thing I love about the cello is, I'm still, you know, at ten percent of the possibilities. But that's exciting, I think humans like things with growth potential over things that are static...
The balloon does seem a bit limited in that sense.
Right, and so – that's why I think the cello is better than the balloon. Tom Cora is a very good example. He was a jazz guitarist, and then he started playing the cello – fantastically. He used to invite me over to play classical duets, fully notated. "Come over to my house, we can improvise together, if you'll play some duets with me." Sometimes people who are from outside of what you do all the time, bring new information, which keeps it interesting and exciting. Other structures, that you have to try to figure out how to deal with: that keeps things a little bit less predictable for you. I know that most musicians that I work with are always looking for the next level or the next step – beyond the palette that they work with, and the esthetics that they're comfortable with.
So first you get caught up as you said in this tradition, and then you break free... It still sounds like a long detour. Which maybe brings us back to the idea of killing some masters and gods...
That's one thing I'm grateful about, the years that might have felt wasted at one point... If I rebelled and killed a god, it was definitely the classical cello. For two years I didn't touch it, and then when I went back – I've never had a cello lesson since then. And I killed the whole idea that to be a cellist I had to follow those other people's rules. That was the problem in music school, that you'd have the jury, and – "Sounds good, but the shifting on the third finger in measure twenty-seven, I think that's bad... And I think you should do two up-bows in measure twelve..." And the other teacher would say, "Ah, but you know, Felix Salmond, he did up-down in measure twelve..."
And your job is to try and please them all.
You just want to pass the jury, you want to get a good grade. But you're playing by their rules. You're not playing music, you're following a set of very minute instructions of gymnastics, in this high-caliber conservatory setting where you have these monsters now, these steroid-driven athletes... I can make music or I can follow rules. I really admire those who can do both. I'm not one of them.
On one hand there seems to be less and less room for live music played by actual live musicians. On the other hand, the mass consumption of recorded music as a throwaway commodity is bigger than ever. A record used to be something special, even if you were lucky enough to have a lot of them, they were all precious. Nowadays it's just another download. And there's music everywhere – people want to hear music all the time. And musicians have to produce it, if possible without getting paid...
Everybody wants everything, as much as possible for as little as possible. In the US we're kind of collapsing under the pressure, so everything is now coming from China. And people are sort of happy, because they feel like: "This is great, as long as I have a job, I can still go to Wal-Mart and buy twice as much stuff as I used to be able to buy. Until my job goes too, and then..."
And then we're all working at Wal-Mart, and no one can afford to shop anywhere else. Which is when Wal-Mart's secret plan for world domination will be realized...
When we're all working at Wal-Mart, no one will be able to afford anything at Wal-Mart, because, as cheap as Wal-Mart is, they pay even less.
Do you think it's getting harder for musicians to make money?
It was always difficult for me! I don't remember those "good old days when I was makin' money..." Yeah, on so many levels – we're screwed.
In a way, we might actually be fortunate that we're not making a product that has much commercial appeal. So even if you do get screwed on a deal sometimes, no one out there is seriously thinking of getting rich exploiting you – because that kind of money just isn't there to be made. So hopefully whoever is putting out a record or setting up a gig actually cares, at least a bit, for the music. And what you're making maybe isn't quite as likely to get twisted into just another commodity...
Yeah, even if they totally rip me off blind on some record, maybe it means that they get to go out to a fancy restaurant one night with their wife... But it's good to keep in perspective the small amount of money that there ever was. I worked in not-for-profit administration, and for a record label, and for live concerts in New York... And I saw how little money there really is, and how impossible it is for all those organizations to exist without some sort of support from somewhere else – and still, even with that, they're just barely holding on by their fingernails. So I tend to be a little more sympathetic than some people towards these organizations. It's maybe nice in a way, and in another way maybe I'd get more if I was just as demanding and insistent that "I need more, you need to do more for me..." But having seen it from their point of view, I always feel like "I'm so grateful that you do anything at all." And I don't know which is the correct approach in the chess game of life, but... I'd like to leave the planet still feeling good about how I was. You've seen that Sun Ra movie, Space Is The Place? Of course. I love the employment agency that he opens, remember? One of the challenges is, he has to staff Saturn or something. The devil tells him: "You have to open an employment agency and get people to move to Saturn to work there..." So these people come in, and one's kind of a middle-aged-white-sort-of-administrator-dude, and he really needs a job. "Okay, well, we could use you, your color is a little bit less in demand on our planet, but I think we could probably find some kind of position for you..." – "Great, how much does it pay?" – "Pay? The creators are never compensated!" And this is really – you're compensated other ways than what the pay is. As long as you're able to manage to somehow keep it all going together... And keep your priorities about what really matters to you, and not what the larger culture says you need to do, or need to have, in order to be a successful human. I bumped into a guy in a BMW – no damage done to anybody, but he was furious, and then he started criticizing my car: "Your car's a piece of shit! You're piece of shit in a piece of shit car!" You know, my car's a piece of shit, therefore I'm a piece of shit.
Well, obviously. You know? The inference was, "if you were an important, good person like me, you'd have a nice car like me." If I had damaged his car, maybe there'd be an issue, and then we'd have to solve that one way or another... And you know, I can get angry at people – but this was just stupid. So we could both stand there and call each other a piece of shit all day. I just drove away.
Aside from the fact that there's not a lot of money to be made... It's depressing sometimes to see how little interest or attention there is for all the good work that so many talented people are doing.
Fred talking with Vanita & Johanna Monk, Rotterdam, 2008.
Photo by Frank Rosaly.
Sometimes it feels like there's more interest than there is money. I get much more depressed about things that I don't understand, that are beyond my control, in terms of geopolitics and – you know, humans, the way that they relate to each other. And the feeling that there's a person just like me living in Baghdad... Just like me. You know? I get to live in Chicago, I get to fly to Europe, and they're stuck in Baghdad. But otherwise they just want to play the cello the best they can, play music with other people, or – whatever they do, draw, write a book... And there's forces way outside their control that are making their life so miserable. Or just driving around Chicago, and seeing how rude people can be to each other, how inconsiderate and thoughtless and selfish... And this depresses me much more than: "Oh, not as much people pay attention to my gigs as I'd like!" The fact that not many people come to a gig – that's the marketplace, structuring things in a mass-consumption way that excludes not just me and my comrades, but many many other kinds of people that are doing interesting work, but that doesn't fit. And then you have to be afraid, when it starts to fit in, you know? I mean, MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch. And as much as we might all find MySpace an interesting and valuable tool, and a way to put up some music that you made, and hear a little music that was made by other people that you've never heard of or met... The whole structure is owned by a pretty vicious capitalist who has other intentions, I'm sure. And so then you have to be a little bit concerned about that – there's some structure that's sort of supporting us in a weird way, and what... what do they want from me?
Maybe nothing at all. Maybe we just happen to be a very small and very accidental side-effect, way out on the margins of their operation...
I don't know. Because I think then it would be very easy to build barriers to us...
Which probably wouldn't even be worth the trouble. Whatever their grand scheme is, what's a couple of freak musicians putting up a couple of outside tracks – who cares?
I wouldn't be surprised if – Rupert Murdoch doesn't necessarily know me or you, but is interested in tracking the dynamics of a community like this. And how do we all know each other, and what do we have in common, and what is our unified stance on this, and how can that be leveraged or manipulated into another market? Every life is sacred, and every life can be a profit center... And that they can spread out, to the point where all six and a half billion of us on the planet are somehow wrapped up, and that it's important that they don't want to waste one grain of gold. Maybe we're just one grain each, but it's still like – they're just collecting all of them together into this one big block, and that we're fooling ourselves if we think that we're so irrelevant to the larger structure. Maybe. I wouldn't put it past that organization that – it's not necessarily an evil scheme, but that there's an awareness of underground culture as being an incubator for the next mainstream culture... Which as you know from reading history is definitely the case.
The freak starving in the dark today is the next big mainstream thing of tomorrow...
Like Bach, who in his day was – you know, he had crappy gigs, he didn't work in the major centers, he worked with low budgets in small towns, and he kept sending out the demo tape of the day, which was his scores, to all the hot centers of civilization... And could never really score a good gig. And after he died, two of his sons were much more famous than he was, and it wasn't until after they had died – all of a sudden, Johann Sebastian Bach became the definition of great art. If you're interested in making money, you're interested in how this cycle works, of obscurity and redemption and celebration. I'm talking about, like Rupert Murdoch, he sees this pattern, and he knows that there's got to be some way where, by following how these structures work on a minute level, that you can learn a lot about how this happens. He doesn't really know, but he's studying it, or he's got a staff, there's probably a couple of hundred people that sift through data every day from MySpace...
So we're all Rupert Murdoch's laboratory rats.
Exactly. Which is why, for a couple of friends on MySpace, I've left pictures of a bunch of rabbits in cages, and: "Welcome to MySpace." We're marginalized, and at the same time we're probably studied more than we might even know, or like to know...
We'll probably never find out. Okay, now try to imagine the bleakest possible scenario – where the thing you're doing is so unfashionable that you can't even find anyone to play with, let alone get a gig. You do what you do because – well, because you know you have to do it, but you're living in a world where there's no money for what you're doing, no subsidy, no gigs, no one to play with...
There's no community...
... no nothing. So what do you do? Sell your instrument and get a regular job? Or go on starving and toiling all alone in the dark?
I thought once in my life that I was going to experience that, and I was wrong. I don't even know if there's such a thing. Not having had to do it, I really couldn't... I could tell you what I think, but...
Please do.
But I can tell you, when I moved to Chicago, I wasn't sure what I was getting into. I moved there because my wife got a great offer to go to grad school there. I lived in New York, which is a very provincial little place, where we think that nothing happens outside of New York. And especially in the eighties... If it's really important it happens in New York. People come to New York to hear music, and so we tour even when we're not touring. I played a solo gig on Christmas Eve once in New York to an entire audience of tourists, there were no New Yorkers, no one I knew. So I was always on tour without having to leave my town... So I'm moving to Chicago, and I was expecting to move there and just sit alone and play the cello and make solo pieces. I even had a very naïve idea that Chicago was surrounded by cornfields... So I was going to sit in my little crappy house and play the cello and I was sort of ready to try it, at least. I almost thought that I would try it and I'd say, screw this, and move back to New York if I had to... But then I got there, and within two days I played a gig with Michael Zerang, and then he invited me to play another gig a few days after that with Kent Kessler and Jim Baker, and before you knew it I was playing every little kind of small weird venue in Chicago that existed at the time for this kind of music. And so I felt very at home very quickly, and had a community of people that I really liked playing with... I don't know how I would have dealt with it if I had moved there and it really had been a moonscape, just me and the cello. Maybe I would have just done something else, I don't know. But even my grandfather – long before fax machines and easy international phone calls, through letters – kept a very active conversation going with a lot of friends of his from all over the world. They all knew what each other were doing, and they kept each other up to date, it was a slower process, but not that slow... And nowadays it's much easier, so even if you're living in the middle of nowhere, if you're really the only person on the planet who's interested in what you're doing... Maybe there's something wrong with what you're doing.
Or something wrong with the planet?
Maybe... But then you've got some other special weird saint complex or something, I don't know. At six and a half billion people, if you can't find some people that are close enough to what you're interested in – maybe you have to compromise a little bit. Be a little bit socially – well, we're not gonna agree on everything... But if you can't find some people who have a similar enough idea about how things could be, that they're willing to work with you and you're willing to work with them... Then you're probably more of a sociopath than really an artist with a special vision. For me. But that's again probably my own psychological disorder. As much as I have a misanthropic streak, I still like people. I've always been more interested in that. I even dabbled for a while in religion, I'd go to different churches as a kid, without my parents. Looking for – this is a community, right? I don't really like this community, I'll try the church down the street, maybe that's the community I've been looking for...
Is there anything else you'd like to say that we haven't talked about?
Whenever there's anything I really have to say, I write it on my MySpace page!
Monastery photo galleries:
Find out more about Fred Lonberg-Holm
on his MySpace page (www.myspace.com/fredlonbergholm)
or his website (http://www.lonberg-holm.info)
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All words and images copyright 2010 by Vanita & Johanna Monk except where noted.
