S.E.M. Ensemble at Paula Cooper Gallery

Seriousness is a foremost value of composer Petr Kotik (b. 1942), who splits his time between New York and Ostrava, Czech Republic. It’s a value he extends to others – and in 2017 when he programmed my quite wild string quartet (which features two of the players dismally facing a wall, a spoken Kafka-regale of a dead man and semi-automatic hand clapping) he immediately took my music seriously. He has done the same for generations of composers by providing support and the transmission of knowledge to an international community through the S.E.M. Ensemble, the Ostrava Days Festival (applications are open for 2025, by the way), and New Opera Days Ostrava. I have a lot to say on the topic and the invaluable impact of Petr’s mentorship and my time spent in Ostrava – but this is primarily a concert invitation and an interview with Petr.

S.E.M. Ensemble’s annual December concert at Paula Cooper is December 18 at 8 PM (purchase tickets here; $19 in advance, $25 at door). It is closing out the “Year of Czech Music”, which Petr speaks about here. 

Here is the program: 

The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble
Petr Kotik, Conductor

performs

John Cage - Concert for Orchestra and Aria (1958)

Rudolf Komorous - Olympia (1962)

Anna Heflin - The Man Who Owned the Forest also Owned the Racetrack (2023)

Luboš Mrkvička - Quartet, Part A (2021)

Morton Feldman - Structures (1951)

Petr Kotik - Why Melody? (2024 - premiere) 

There will also be a preview performance on December 16 at 8 PM (reserve tickets here; free admission) at Willow Place Auditorium (25 Willow Place, Brooklyn). I’m in town for the performances and am playing viola in the Cage Concert for Orchestra. My piece is a borderline trumpet concertino, with Sam Jones violently reeling and shredding (shoutout to Sam) while two pairs of instruments (violin + flute vs cello + bass cl) face off – until something gives and space makes way.

I hope to see you there, if you attend please say hi!

Anna Heflin: Can you share a brief history of S.E.M. Ensemble’s history with the Paula Cooper Gallery?

Petr Kotik: In the early 1970s, I saw a La Monte Young concert at Paula Cooper Gallery (the Gallery was then still on Prince Street, on the 2^nd floor). I performed La Monte Young’s music way back when I was still living in Czechoslovakia and when I arrived in the U.S., we saw each other often. I liked the whole setup and afterwards, I approached Paula to ask if she would consider having a concert with the S.E.M. Ensemble at the gallery. She was very nice and asked for recordings of the music we do. The next time I was in New York (I lived in Buffalo, NY at the time), I brought her some recordings and her response was positive. We first performed at the Paula Cooper Gallery on April 14, 1976. The Gallery was already on Wooster Street and the first concert featured a collage of my compositions, Observing With Variations 15 for voices and instruments. Since the 1986-87 season, the S.E.M. Ensemble has been performing a series of concerts there.

A footnote – how likely would it be today that a young, unknown composer from out of town, would be given such a chance in New York? The same thing happened at the Whitney Museum in 1979, where my complete 6-hours Many Many Women was premiered in 1979.

AH: How many times have you conducted John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958)? How do you rehearse the piece?

PK: Countless times. The first performance of the Concert I was involved in was in 1964, in Prague, where I played the flute in the orchestra with Cage conducting and David Tudor at the piano. I regard this composition to be one of the cornerstones of music of our time. 

A footnote – the fact that today, almost ¾ of a century later such music does not exist for the conservatories (meaning practically no one from the young generation of musicians has ever seen the score and is totally at a loss on how to play the music) – it tells us something about today’s musical mainstream. For more information, see the Ostrava Manifesto 2023.

AH: You told me a story last month about conducting the Cage without rehearsal, as Cage strongly insisted, and how that experience taught you an invaluable lesson. For those who haven’t heard, can you share the story?

PK: Cage had an intellectual approach to making music. It does not mean he lacked musicality! Not at all. He also strongly believed in equality and non-interference of one person into what other people are doing. This was the basis for his concept of anarchy. Being serious was the highest principle and was expected from everyone he had worked with. When he would make a critical remark about someone, which happened extremely rarely, his critique would always focus on their lack of seriousness. 

His music – and I am referring to the period of the 1950s and 60s ­– is more or less based on being individually prepared as a soloist. He expected the musicians to be “seriously” studious, prepared, ready to go. In this situation, there is not much to rehearse. Rehearsals mean one person telling another what to do. That is what he was trying to avoid all his life.

I am not trying to make an apology, just an explanation, of how I observed Cage for so many years, working with him and wanting to understand what was going on, instead of having opinions and criticism (that might be his influence on me). 

The result (of Cage’s attitude) is for everyone to see: no tradition was developed, very few people know how to perform the music, etc. The fools and fakes fizzled out (obviously) and now, in the canon of the present music life, we have a great void. Since the very early 1950s until 1970, Cage closely collaborated with David Tudor. In fact, one can say that all his compositions from this period were written either directly for Tudor, of with Tudor in mind. Tudor was fearlessly independent, extremely serious, able to work out everything by himself (no one was to be around when he worked) and above all, brilliant with a virtuosity close to perfection. There is a strong possibility that Cage expected the same commitment and capabilities from all the musicians who performed his music.

AH: S.E.M. Ensemble will be performing Luboš Mrkvička’s Quartet, Part A (2021) and Rudolf Komorous’ Olympia (1962) on the December concert. Can you tell us a little about these composers and these specific works?

PK: Luboš Mrkvička is one of the younger Czech composers, I would say – serious, intelligent, and committed. We performed his Quartet last October in Ireland and I thought that his music would well fit into the concept of the program concept at Paula Cooper. I had the chance (and time) in Ireland to get to know him better and I think his music should be heard. Music by Rudolf Komorous is another case – specifically Olympia from 1962(!). I have been working with Komorous since 1960 to about 1964. This was the time when we turned our backs on Darmstadt-type of new music (nothing else was available in Prague at that time). Putting Komorous, who is now 93 and living in Canada, next to music composed 10 years earlier (in 1951) will make a nice context to the “Year of Czech Music.”

AH: I was talking with Kamala Sankaram at my Experiments in Opera workshop last month – she’s singing in your new work, Why Melody? (2024), and told me that your new piece somehow involves rat data. Separately, I’ve heard you tell the story about the drunken rat-graphs and it always makes you laugh quite a bit. Can you talk about your new piece and the tools that you used to arrive at the score?

PK: The rat-graphs! I had been drawing graphs myself and working with them since I started to compose. The graphic material determined many aspects of the composition, form pitches, timing, timbre, etc. The longer I worked this way, the better I became at it, and in the early 1970s I became less and less interested to continue. What drew me to the graphs was the unpredictability and ambiguity of the result. After acquiring the skill to work in this method, some of the unpredictability was lost and so was my interest. At that time, my friend Dr. Kučera was doing research at Roswell Park Hospital in Buffalo and in 1971, he was about to return to Prague. He was working on effect of alcohols on nervous system, using rats. Before leaving Buffalo, he took me to his lab, where I saw a cardboard box, full of graphs –results of his neurological experiments. When he told me that these were to be discarded, I took the box and started to work with what was in it – the graphs looked like seismographs. I derived pitch and duration from the shape of the lines. To this day, I have no idea what got me to ask for the graphs. That they could be useful it was on the first look not obvious at all. All throughout the 1970s, I composed with the aid of this material. Today, my method includes a set of steps, one of them is the use of the Markov chain of probabilities, which is in the end edited and intuitively shaped. It reminds me of Xenakis, who at the end of his life didn’t need to use his stochastic method. Yet, there is not much difference between the early and late compositions.

Intuitively shaped sequences of pitches are the essence of my new piece Why Melody? This piece (a new composition I finished on December 6) will be superimposed on/with older music – solos for Violins and Viola (composed earlier this year) and also sections for voice, a very short excerpt from opera Master-Pieces and two short segments from There is Singularly Nothing (that was composed with the aid of the rat-graphs in early 1970s).

AH: Feldman’s Structures (1951) predates his association with Cage and is written in an intuitive fashion rather than systematically. Do you find any commonalities between Feldman’s works pre and post Cage? Is there a difference in how you conduct them?

PK: Feldman continued to compose intuitively before and after meeting Cage. What is so interesting about the 1951 string quartet are some aspects that were, at that time, rejected by everyone (including Cage). Repetitions, for example (!). This is almost twenty years before repetition became an accepted tool in composition. As far as conducting something like a string quartet, I try to be in the background as much as possible.

AH: You’ve expressed frustration to me about how music schools sidestep or minimize donor and patron relationships in music history – which mistakenly paints a picture of composers working outside of contextual and social frames. What are three of the most important patron/composer relationships of the 20th or 21st century that you wish more people knew about?

PK: Among the arts, music is the most demanding. Yet, is seems that the academia is getting more and more divorced from the reality. It regards music with the same attitude as the one toward other forms of art, painting in particular. Making music, crafting a composition and realizing it – performing it for the public (public performance is music(!) – everything else is just preparation, including the piece of paper called the score), all that involves many extremely important tasks that musicology pushes aside as unimportant. Support for music, i.e. the support that leads to realizing a composition, has the same importance as the composition itself. Without it, there would be no reason to compose. But you wouldn’t be able to tell, if all you know is what the teachers in the music schools tell you.

We do not have a space and time in this short/quick set of questions and answers to go into details. The relationship between the composers and his/her patronage today is not that much different than in the time, say, of Beethoven (here, Beethoven should serve as a prime example. He was the first truly successfully independent composer in history). The difference between the late 18^th century and today is not in the substance. It is in the institutionalization of the whole process. Basically, without a chance for music to be realized/performed, there is no incentive for anyone to compose it. Why do educational institutions neglect this part entirely? You must ask someone else. I don’t like to make assumptions.