Composer, multi-instrumentalist, theorist, educator, and visionary Anthony Braxton can be considered one of the most influential musical figures of the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Yet, despite Braxton’s enormous creative output and the considerable amount of scholarly work that confirms Braxton’s position as a unique creative mind, his work has scarcely been recognized within the field of post-war Western art music.1 His entire body of work, which he describes as a Tri-Centric Thought Unit Construct, stands as a metaphorical elephant in the room, especially when considering the growing body of literature that highlights how the perception of the post-war Western art music canon is influenced by a constructed (or discursive) dichotomy that effectively keeps Western art music distinct from the radical experiments found in jazz and African American music. This became all the more apparent to me as I tentatively began exploring Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music system several years ago. Having barely scratched the surface of this unique musical system as a performer, I quickly became aware of the depth and magnitude of Braxton’s entire body of work and the unique challenges it presents for the contemporary performer, regardless of their musical background. This realization, combined with the lack of existing performance practice outside of Braxton’s own immediate circle of (former) students and colleagues, motivated me to expand my ongoing research into a practice-based doctoral research in the arts, centered on two general research goals: (1) to gain a deeper understanding of Braxton’s unusual compositional work and integrate it into my practice as a performer, and (2) to contribute to filling in this gap and broadening the existing canon of post-war Western art music.
The first research goal required a deep dive into Braxton’s extensive musical output, theory, and concepts. It meant embracing Braxton’s holistic view and reexamining my own performance practice, which is rooted in the tradition of classical Western art music and largely focused on the repertoire and its development since the second half of the 20th century until today. In a broader sense, as will be elucidated in this presentation, it also inevitably required reexamining the taxonomies of music itself: how it is defined, identified, or categorized into genres, how it is intricately linked to its socio-historical context, and how our perception is influenced by it. This led to evaluating how I, as a musician, was taught, how it is still taught in conservatories today, and how the music is programmed and presented in concerts, festivals, by record labels, press, and media. This immediately connects to the second research goal, where I aimed to apply this knowledge to my practice as a performer to actively contribute to broadening the canon by bringing Braxton’s repertoire, whenever possible, onto the stage, into the recording studio, or into the classroom through collaborations with various actors and institutions in the field.
This presentation offers a collection, or "assemblage", of the different research outcomes in the form of texts, images, and, of course, a lot of music. Not unlike Braxton’s own holistic concept of the Tri-Centric Thought Unit Construct, everything is interconnected, and there’s no linear sequence of how to navigate the material presented here. I would simply like to emphasize that these outcomes are by no means a definitive way of how Braxton’s music is to be performed. As is necessary when engaging with Braxton’s work, they are often the result of highly personal interpretations and choices linked to my background as a musician and human being, as well as those of the incredible community of collaborators I was fortunate to work with during this research. Nevertheless, my hope is that this collection can serve as a source of inspiration for future performers and researchers interested in Braxton’s work.
Literature and Theoretical Framework
When I began this research, there was already an extensive amount of literature and scholarly research documenting Braxton’s life and work. To begin with, there are Braxton’s own extensive theoretical outputs, including the three-volume Tri-Axium Writings, which lay out the general philosophy underlying his music, and the five volumes of Composition Notes, which provide detailed analyses of his compositions (up to composition No. 119). Additionally, Braxton’s own writings on later works and systems can be found in several liner notes accompanying recordings, such as the extensive descriptions of Ghost Trance Music ("Six Compositions (GTM) 2001" and "Anthony Braxton Quartet (GTM) 2006"), Echo Echo Mirror House Music ("3 Compositions (EEMHM) 2011"), or ZIM music ("12 Compositions (ZIM) 2017"). My initial interest in Braxton’s work was sparked by his text “Introduction to Catalog of Works,” written in 1988.2 This particular text and many other writings and essays by Braxton can now also be found on the website of the Tri-Centric Foundation.
The first book to offer a comprehensive insight into Braxton’s life and work was Graham Lock’s seminal Forces in Motion, a part journalistic survey of a 1985 tour with Braxton’s quartet in the UK, part biography and part musicological analyses and documentation of Braxton’s work up to then.3 In the 1990’s, several scholarly studies emerged by Ronald M. Radano, Peter Niklas Wilson, Michael Heffley and Alun Ford.4 Graham Lock continued to publish on Braxton, starting in 1995 with Mixtery on the occasion of Braxton’s 50th birthday. This collection of writings by many of Braxton’s longtime friends and collaborators, edited by Lock, became an important resource for future study of his work.5 In 1999, Lock published the highly informative and, in my opinion, severely undervalued academic study Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington and Anthony Braxton, which included the first scholarly inquiry on Braxton’s Tri-Axium Writings as well as his ambitious opera-cycle Trillium.6
In the mid-1990s, Braxton’s development of the Ghost Trance Music system was seen as a break from his previous work. It wasn’t until 2010 that the first book publication appeared to address these new developments in Braxton’s music with Stuart Broomer’s Time and Anthony Braxton.7 In 2016 Nate Wooley dedicated an entire issue of his Sound American magazine to Braxton, addressing the need for more study on his later musical systems:
Many admirers tend to fixate on the music from [1970’s-1980’s] with a kind of deepening nostalgia for work that, for lack of a better term, is more jazz-like. To do this, however, means overlooking the opportunity to explore and understand how vibrant the constellation of Braxton’s compositional system has become.8
This edition of Sound American became a foundation for my own research into Braxton’s music, notably Taylor Ho Bynum’s insightful introduction into the overall philosophy of the Tri-Centric Thought Unit Construct, Nate Wooley’s writing on Language Music, Erica Dicker on Ghost Trance Music and Carl Testa on Echo Echo Mirror House Music. In 2017, composer Katherine Young published her outstanding doctoral thesis on Braxton’s opera cycle Trillium.9 Later on, after I had already started my research, more publications appeared, notably Timo Hoyer’s impressive and to this day most comprehensive study of Braxton’s life and work, including detailed insights into the most recent developments up to ZIM music.10
Given the vast amount of readily available documentation, research, scores, texts, and recordings, several of which are frequently referenced throughout the texts presented here, it is striking how very little of Braxton’s theory, music, and its performance practice have trickled through in the prevailing discourse on post-war Western art music, nor in terms of performances by ensembles other than his own, or found its way into conservatory courses, workshops, repertoires, and programs centered on post-war Western Art Music.11 In various segments of Braxton's writings and in the aforementioned books, articles, and studies, it is made clear that Braxton’s identity as an African-American composer, along with the multiple underlying issues linked to social conditions often defined by race, significantly contributed to this situation. Far from being an isolated case, I realized it would be necessary to address some of these larger issues in the context of this research.
There is a growing body of literature coming from different fields of study that documents and clarifies these underlying issues. The first to mention here is George E. Lewis’s A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music,12 which provides a detailed account of the history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a cooperative musicians’ collective founded in Chicago in 1965 of which Braxton was a prominent member. In telling the story of the AACM, Lewis’ seminal book redefines the historiography of experimental music and its relationship to post-war Western art music. Part of my task in this book, he writes in the introduction, is to bring to the surface the strategies that have been developed to discursively disconnect African American artists from any notion of experimentalism or the avant-garde. He cites literary critic Fred Moten to clearly identify one of the central topics:
The idea of a black avant-garde exists, as it were, oxymoronically—as if black, on the one hand, and avant-garde, on the other hand, each depends for its coherence on the exclusion of the other. Now this is probably an overstatement of the case. Yet it’s all but justified by a vast interdisciplinary text representative not only of a problematically positivist conclusion that the avant-garde has been exclusively Euro-American, but of a deeper, perhaps unconscious, formulation of the avant-garde as necessarily not black.13
This discursive disconnection is also expressed by Braxton in his Tri-Axium Writings where he discusses the concept of what he calls ‘the grand trade off’:
In this concept, black people are vibrationally viewed as being great tap dancers—natural improvisors, great rhythm, etc., etc., etc.—but not great thinkers, or not capable of contributing to the dynamic wellspring of world information. White people under this viewpoint have come to be viewed as great thinkers, responsible for all of the profound philosophic and technological achievements that humanity has benefited from—but somehow not as “natural” as those naturally talented black folks.14
The same observation was just recently echoed by composer and AACM member Henry Threadgill in his biography:
There’s a tendency to underestimate the intellectual component in Black music across the board, as though we don’t possess a sophisticated understanding of what we’re doing. We’re just playing.15
The discursive disconnection can be observed in the way the canon of post-war Western art music was shaped by the antagonistic relation between post-serial modernism and experimental postmodernism by the end of the 20th century. In her book Rationalization of Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde,16 anthropologist Georgina Born provides a detailed description of the cultural legitimization of high art institutions like the computer music center IRCAM and how, under the charismatic leadership of Pierre Boulez, it established and maintained a hegemonic position that stifled aesthetic alternatives. Compounded by its association with technological advancements and progressive scientific discourses, it was often regarded as universal and led to the establishment of a distinct canon of what was considered legitimized modernist Western art music. In contrast, Born describes experimental postmodernism as the “negation of musical modernism,” reacting against the perceived elitism and exclusivity of modernist aesthetics. It prioritized plurality, hybridity, and diversity in musical expression.17 Postmodern experimentalists typically held a more open attitude toward popular and non-Western music, including radical experiments in jazz and African-American music, while still maintaining a certain distance from the original sources. Despite advancements towards ‘open form’ compositions, from aleatoric procedures to more radical concepts of indeterminacy and chance operations, these works remained firmly rooted in the 19th-century Western ideal of the ‘work concept,’18 thus perpetuating the status of popular and non-Western music as "other."19
In contrast to the (post)modernist debate in music, Anthony Braxton consistently maintained that his music is not a rejection of anything.20 Braxton began experimenting and developing his own compositional ideas and concepts in the late 1960s. Following the philosophy of the AACM, Braxton did not confine himself to any specific strand of experimentalism but drew inspiration from a wide range of sources, including the latest developments in Western art music, such as Cage and Stockhausen, as well as avant-garde jazz figures like Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, and various musical cultures. But there are other reasons why Braxton’s contributions to experimental music have largely been overlooked within the discourse of post-war Western art music. While many of Braxton's scores are fully notated and could be analyzed using theoretical tools based on the Western 'work concept,' such an approach would only scratch the surface of his work and overlook the social dimensions, or what Braxton refers to as the meta-reality context, that are integral to it. As noted by Peter Niklas Wilson, [t]here are intrinsic factors (...) of Braxton’s rather unorthodox conception of a musical “work”, which account for a great deal of the difficulties Braxton has encountered in the realms of New Music.21
To address these social aspects of Braxton’s work, I found a more suitable theoretical framework in Georgina Born’s recent research on music’s social mediation. Born's approach challenges the notion that music is created in isolation and emphasizes its deep embedding within social processes, structures, and institutions. She highlights the limitations of the Western work concept and argues that a defining feature of the ontology of Western art music has been a neglect of music’s social mediations. Born introduces the concept of the assemblage to describe musical practices, particularly those involving improvisation, as dynamic configurations of elements, encompassing both human and non-human actors, technologies, and cultural artifacts. Her approach encourages a situational analysis that considers the specific conditions and contexts in which music is produced and consumed, recognizing that the properties (or meanings) of music must be cognized in terms of the assemblage—or constellation of mediations—of which it is composed. 22
Expanding on Lewis’s research and utilizing Born’s social theory of the assemblage, musicologist Benjamin Piekut has made significant scholarly contributions in his exploration of music historiography. Piekut's work challenges established discourses and taxonomies surrounding experimental music.23 He employs Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and, more specifically, Latour’s directive to "follow the actor" as a method to transcend the limitations of idealized notions of musical genre. This approach seeks to move beyond persistently maintained and often racially biased binaries such as classical versus jazz, composition versus improvisation, and structure versus spontaneity. Piekut articulates his methodology by stating:
"To follow the actors, one must abandon the limit of limit, which is different from “pushing boundaries” or “taking it to the limit.” Whereas the frontier mentality of pushing at limits can naturalize those boundaries by channeling theoretical expansion to only occur in one direction (“over the edge,” as it were), throwing out the idea of limit places us in an entirely different critical topology. Abandoning the limit of limit means disregarding any artificial and normative separations among fields and actors and embracing the messy assemblages that result."24
Placing myself in that same critical topology, seemed a good starting point in order to approach Braxton’s music entirely on his own terms. In other words, my intention in contributing to broadening the canon of post-war Western art music was not so much to push its limits in one direction and confine Braxton’s Tri-Centric Thought Unit Construct within its extended, yet still restricted boundaries. Rather, it was to dismantle these boundaries, embrace the complexity of the resulting "messy assemblages," and explore how Braxton’s concepts could reshape the underlying terms by which such canon is formed. In this research, my role was not passive observation within a network of actors but active participation as an actor within my own network. Drawing from the aforementioned literature and theory, I developed a multidisciplinary framework encompassing musicology, historiography, anthropology, and sociology, which served as the foundation for my practice-based artistic research on Braxton’s music.
Concepts & Methodology
Anthony Braxton has consistently forged his own path in defining the terms through which his music can be comprehended. To grasp Braxton's work, it is important to get a sense of some of the terminology and concepts he has developed over time. Although the intricacies of his writing and the complexity of his concepts may initially appear daunting, Braxton's intention has never been to impose fixed truths or rigid performance guidelines for his works. Rather, he extends an invitation to performers, listeners, or readers—whom Braxton terms "friendly experiencers"—to creatively engage with his creations and form their own interpretations.25 However, the sheer scale of Braxton’s output makes it difficult to comprehensively summarize the defining terms of his work and philosophy. Most of it is covered in the extensive literature I mentioned above and some aspects are addressed in greater detail throughout the writings presented here. For now, I will limit myself to Braxton’s holistic approach to music, the understanding of which is elemental to the performance practice of his work. He describes his entire body of work as one organic sound world state, a holistic entity in which everything is connected and constantly in motion, incorporating past, present and future into a seamless whole.26 He refers to this holistic entity as a Tri-Centric Model, or Tri-Centric Thought Unit Construct. The number three takes a central place and the term Tri-Centric refers to his emphasis on three primary elements or "logics" which, I believe, are key to understanding Braxton’s overall musical philosophy. These three elements are Stable Logics, Mutable Logics and Synthesis Logics, each respectively represented by the symbol of the square, circle and triangle.27
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Stable Logics
These are the "defined components" of his music which are represented by the written scores. It encompasses over 500 scores ranging from solo to chamber music, multiple orchestra’s and a full-scale opera cycle. These scores can be played in their ‘origin state’, but within the context of his holistic Tri-Centric Model all these compositions can be connected, combined or superimposed. All parts are autonomous and can be played by any instrument, sections can be repeated or placed within other compositions. As Taylor Ho Bynum wrote: Performing a full orchestral performance of Composition No. 96 is a beautiful thing, and sight-reading the violin part from 96 on tuba as tertiary material in the midst of a GTM performance is an equally beautiful thing.28
The detailed scores imply a performance practice which, on first account, seems quite close to that of the Western art music tradition, but Braxton emphasizes the importance of interpretation as a process of creative exploration and experimentation: if the music is played too correctly it was probably played wrong.29 The traditional concept of ‘Werktreue’, or fidelity to the work,30 therefore does not comply here, which is compounded by the fact that the Stable Logics in Braxton’s Tri-Centric Model are never separate from the Mutable and Synthesis Logics.
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Mutable Logics
This refers to the practice of improvisation which for Braxton not only takes a central place in his musical practice, it is central to life itself.31 In his music, Braxton doesn’t rely on completely free improvisation, however. Very early on in his career, he developed his own system for improvisation based on a long list of "sound classifications" which he developed in his solo-saxophone playing. He eventually reduced these classifications to a list of twelve sound parameters or Language Types as a sort of ‘post-serial’ parametric framework for improvisation. In the context of his Tri-Centric Model, Mutable Logics can be inserted at any given moment using the Language Music system. Language Music also informed Braxton’s compositional process; they became the DNA of his musical concepts. On a larger level, Braxton describes the Tri-Centric Thought Unit Construct as a twelve-story building where each story is linked to one of the twelve Language Types, which are then connected to the different compositional systems. The twelve Language Types are also each connected to one of the twelve main characters in the Trillium opera cycle. On all levels in Braxton’s holistic construct, the Mutable Logics are therefore constantly intertwined with the Stable Logics.
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Synthesis/Correspondence Logics
On a basic level, the Synthesis Logics refer to the aspect of intuition and the unknown outcomes when Stable and Mutable Logics are combined or juxtaposed. In a broader sense, this third side of the Tri-Centric Model exemplifies Braxton’s multi-dimensional way of thinking in music, never contenting to fixed definitions and always leaving space for the unknown. The Synthesis Logics are linked to the Ritual & Ceremonial Logics of his music, part of which emphasizes the importance of community and collaboration and the way different musicians with different (social/musical) backgrounds can come together, each shaping the music in their own way to unforeseen results. The discipline for the unknown then also becomes a shared responsibility. The Synthesis Logics in Braxton’s Tri-Centric Model embodies the many social dimensions that are at the heart of his music and which are not written in the scores. They foster a sense of shared purpose and collective identity among musicians, encouraging a spirit of openness, curiosity, and mutual respect. From this point of view, and despite the complexity of Braxton’s theories and scores, the music is actually very accessible for anyone, regardless of musical level or background, willing to engage with it.
Braxton’s Tri-Centric Thought Unit Construct is not a fixed entity, it constantly evolves, not unlike Born’s notion of the assemblage or, as anthropologist Alexandre Pierrepont recently noted, it is a socio-musical construct.32 But, in keeping with Braxton, it is first and foremost a system of becoming (not a system of arriving).33 The performer is required to navigate their way through this multi-logic sound universe, connecting and exploring the different compositions through improvisation and embracing the unknown, a process which Braxton refers to as navigation through form.34 Aside from examining the documentation that is available in the many books, articles and documents as well as the extensive recorded output, as a general incentive to my methodology in coming to a deeper understanding of Braxton’s work, I found it crucial to immediately explore Braxton’s concepts through my practice as a performer, to learn it while playing the music and navigating this fascinating musical universe.
The Ghost Trance Music (GTM) system became a major case study during the entire trajectory of this research project, and there are several reasons for this. First of all, from a conceptual standpoint, GTM represents the foundation or ground floor of Braxton’s Tri-Centric Thought Unit Construct. It provides a navigational structure to put his holistic ideas into practice and allowed me to integrate several other compositions from Braxton’s extensive repertoire into the process.35 Secondly, GTM is the most documented of his recent compositional systems. There are several scores available, and the evolution of Braxton’s own performances of GTM has been documented in a large selection of recordings, often accompanied by extensive liner notes providing deep insight into the system. Thirdly, from a practical point of view, the open instrumentation of GTM allowed me to explore the repertoire in a small lineup, from solo to small chamber ensemble. Expanding on my research on GTM, the second focus in my choice of repertoire was then to work with larger groups of musicians to explore Braxton’s concept of the Creative Orchestra. While these compositions represent only a fraction of the totality of Braxton’s compositional output, exploring the Tri-Centric Model and its Stable, Mutable, and Synthesis Logics through GTM and the large-scale Creative Orchestra repertoire gave me a representative overview of the different facets of Braxton’s work and the many ways it can be approached.
Concurrently, I aimed to place these practice-based research outcomes on the agenda of different actors connected to the field of post-war Western art music, from festivals, venues, new music ensembles, to conservatories, record labels, and press. This resulted in several live concerts and events in festivals and venues in Belgium, France, Germany, the UK, US, and Luxembourg, two studio albums as well as several workshops, lectures, article publications, a documentary, an international conference, and an exhibition. The present thesis is a comprehensive collection of these different activities, with which I hope to show how and to what level this research ultimately has contributed to a broadening of the canon of post-war Western art music through my practice as a performer.
Thesis structure and overview of different sections
The research findings presented here are divided into sections corresponding to different repertoire components or 'case studies', with the largest chapter focusing on Ghost Trance Music. This repertoire served as the starting point for my research and remained a significant focus throughout the project, evolving in various forms. I began with a solo version, which I quickly expanded into a septet featuring a specially assembled ensemble. My initial experiences and analysis of GTM were documented in the publication "A Ritual of Openness: The (meta-)reality of Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music." In addition to live performances, it was crucial within the context of this research to produce studio recordings of this repertoire. The process of creating these recordings is detailed in the text "Performing and Recording Ghost Trance Music". The unexpectedly large number of reviews that followed provided an interesting insight into the impact of my research, as described in "Impact: Analysis of reviews". Invited by the Ictus ensemble, I had the opportunity to explore new paths with the GTM repertoire, this time collaborating with dancers from the Rosas Dance Company. This unique experience is elucidated in the text and interview "Ghost Trance Music meets Rosas Toolbox". The extensive artistic output can be found under "Event Space". In addition to various solo and septet concerts and studio recordings I initiated, there are also performances that were commissioned by the Ictus Ensemble (with students on 06/03/2021, Wild Gallery, Brussels and with "Rosas Toolbox" on 18/08/2023 Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt) and the Plus Minus ensemble (Café Oto, London 18/02/2022). A notable finding is that Composition No. 255 was the most frequently performed. Being able to compare the different versions of this composition provides an interesting insight into the radical openness of Braxton's GTM concept. Additionally, I made a short documentary about GTM, filmed during rehearsals and the concert with the Ghost Trance Septet at the Rainy Days Festival in Luxembourg (13/11/2021). Finally, there are several (written) interviews as well as radio broadcasts (BBC New Music Show) and an interview for the podcast 'Soundmaking'.
A second focus of my research zooms in on Braxton’s Creative Orchestra repertoire. I aimed to provide a clear understanding of the historical context and performance practice associated with Braxton’s Creative Orchestra concept in the article "The Possibilities of Anthony Braxton’s Creative Orchestra". I had three opportunities to perform this repertoire. The first was a performance with students from the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp. This was followed by a workshop and performance with Braxton himself and students from the Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt. Finally, there were two performances with the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra and the Ictus Ensemble, conducted by Ilan Volkov. In the text "Performing Anthony Braxton’s Creative Orchestra", I delve deeper into my experiences in performing this repertoire. The performances were documented on film, except for the Darmstadt performance which is only available as an audio recording. Additionally, Sinéad Hayes documented this performance and the four-day workshop that preceded it in an insightful podcast for the festival’s “words on music” program. All these videos and recordings can be found under "Event Space".
The first year of my research was heavily influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. I took advantage of this unusual situation to realize a performance of Braxton’s Echo Echo Mirror House Music system. This resulted in an exceptional live-streamed performance on February 1, 2021, led by Carl Testa (Tri-Centric Foundation) from his studio in New Haven, with five live musicians at the conservatory in Antwerp interacting with a sound collage on a server in Amsterdam. Although limited to one performance, this was a valuable experience within this research, offering an additional perspective on the unique possibilities of Braxton's holistic and visionary musical vision. Carl Testa and I wrote a text about this shared experience. The concert, which was reviewed in the New Haven Independent, can be viewed under “Event Space”.
Subsequently, two major events are given separate mention here, as they represent milestones in this research and reflect its impact. The first, Anthony Braxton’s Gambit at DE SINGEL in Antwerp on June 5, 2022, was an event celebrating Braxton’s music and for which I curated lectures, an exhibition and three concerts featuring the Antwerp Conservatoire student orchestra playing Creative Orchestra Music, the Ghost Trance Septet and Braxton’s own saxophone quartet. The second was the International conference 50+ Years of Creative Music which took place from August 8 to 9, during the Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt and co-curated by Timo Hoyer and me. All the artistic outputs previously mentioned are available under Event Spaces. On this page, the friendly experiencer is invited to discover, explore or compare the many different interpretations of Braxton's work that resulted from this research.
In the Epilogue I formulated some final thoughts on my research trajectory, evaluating the process and outcomes through Braxton's own terminology and assessing its impact. I also described the gaps which went beyond the scope of my research and will require further investigation.