Curated by Professor Timo Hoyer and myself, the first international conference on the music of Anthony Braxton which took place as part of the bi-annual Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt in August 2023, was the culmination of several previous attempts. As early as 2020, Timo Hoyer had arranged a conference under the title “50+ Years of Creative Music: Anthony Braxton – Composer, Multi-Instrumentalist, Music Theorist” , slated for June 18th to 20th, 2020 at the ElbPhilharmonie in Hamburg, to coincide with Braxton’s 75th birthday. I was not involved in organizing this conference, as I had just begun my research on Braxton’s music, but I was scheduled to participate. Hugo De Craen forwarded me the "call for papers," and I was selected to present a lecture-performance on my solo interpretations of Ghost Trance Music.1 However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was canceled and, in the ensuing weeks, it became apparent that it could not be rescheduled.
In early 2021, when plans to invite Braxton to DE SINGEL in Antwerp materialized, I approached Timo with the idea of reorganizing the conference around this event. Timo agreed, and we used the Hamburg conference plan as a blueprint for this new version, scheduled for June 3rd to 5th, 2022, with DE SINGEL and the Royal Conservatory Antwerp as host organizations. I drafted a new call for papers and applied for additional external funding since Timo no longer had access to the funds for the Hamburg conference.2 By fall 2021, despite securing a small grant from the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO), it became evident that realizing a full international conference as originally planned was not feasible. I opted for a scaled-down version consisting of lectures and an exhibition, presented as part of the "Anthony Braxton’s Gambit" event on June 5th at DE SINGEL in Antwerp.
Also in fall 2021, I contacted Thomas Schaeffer, the director of the Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt.3 By then, I knew Mr. Schaeffer was interested in inviting Anthony Braxton to Darmstadt for the next edition of the Ferienkurse in 2023 and was aware of our plans to organize a conference on Braxton’s music in Antwerp in 2022. When I explained the challenges we faced with organizing the conference in Antwerp and proposed hosting the full version in Darmstadt instead, he readily agreed. The bi-annual Ferienkurse für Neue Musik has historically been very influential for the development of post-war Western art music and is still considered one of the most important gatherings of the international new music community. In many ways, especially in the context of my research, the Ferienkurse provided the ideal setting to organize this conference and give Anthony Braxton’s life’s work the attention it deserves. Timo and I revised the previous conference schedules; there was no need to create a new call for papers. In collaboration with Thomas Schaeffer and the people from IMD (Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt), we proposed a two-day conference to be held from August 8th to 9th, 2023, following the premiere of Braxton’s Thunder Music. Holding the conference as part of this major international festival also had practical advantages. Several of Braxton’s longtime collaborators and members of the Tri-Centric Foundation, such as Carl Testa, James Fei, and Anne Rhodes, who were scheduled for the conference, also participated in the performance of Thunder Music and were already in Darmstadt. Additionally, other conference participants, such as Katherine Young, Tyshawn Sorey, and George E. Lewis, were already in Darmstadt as tutors at the Ferienkurse.
We aimed to assemble a conference program that provided a comprehensive overview of the various aspects of Braxton’s work, offering much-needed perspectives of analytical research concerned with his extensive compositional and theoretical output. The main difference from our previous conference plans was the inclusion of two interactive workshops and a conversation between George E. Lewis and Anthony Braxton. The conference was announced with the following text:
For more than half a century Anthony Braxton has played a key role in contemporary and avant-garde music as a composer, multi-instrumentalist, music theorist, teacher, mentor and visionary. Inspired by Jazz, European art music, and music of other cultures, Braxton labels his output Creative Music. This international conference is the first one dealing with his work.
Braxton’s career can roughly be divided into two working periods. The first one started when he joined the AACM in 1967 and lasted until the early 1990’s. Inspired by Muhal Richard Abrams and his fellow AACM colleagues he quickly developed his own methods for improvisation and composition using a system he called “Language Music”. He released his landmark solo album For Alto, toured with the band Circle, created his own ensembles and recorded music for a variety of labels, mostly European minors as well as for the international major Arista. In this period Braxton became a “superstar of the jazz avant-garde” (Bob Ostertag), even though he acted as a non-conformist and was thus perceived as highly controversial. As a composer he wrote music for piano, small and large ensembles, 100 tubas, orchestra, multiple orchestras and more. During these years he published his philosophical Tri-Axium Writings (three volumes) and Composition Notes (five volumes).
In the second period Braxton enhanced some of his compositional principles from the earlier period, and partly redefined and reshaped some of his thoughts about music. It starts in the mid 1990s with the creation of his so-called Ghost Trance Music, a musical concept that creatively fuses elements of composition and improvisation. It became the foundation of the twelve components of a holistic system he called Tri-Centric Modeling. As a basic premise for this period he built up his Tri-Centric Foundation and founded a record label (Braxton House / New Braxton House). As of today he works on his not yet finished opera cycle, Trillium and, in addition to Ghost Trance Music, he developed other compositional systems within the holistic Tri-Centric Model, such as Diamond Curtain Wall Music (a study of interactive electronic sound), Falling River Music (a system of graphic scores), Echo Echo Mirror House Music (an interactive sound collage consisting of Braxton’s complete recorded output) and his latest prototype Thunder Music, which will be premiered as part of the Darmstadt Summer Course (7 August 2023).
The conference will address a variety of topics which are central to Braxton’s work. In addition to an interview with Braxton himself and a roundtable discussion with some of his close collaborators and experts, there will be several lectures by performers and leading researchers in the field, as well as two interactive workshops to give Summer Course participants a chance to directly engage with Braxton’s Creative Music.
Conference Schedule:
Tue 08 August 2023, 09.30 – 16.00
Lichtenbergschule (Mensa), 16.15–18.00 Akademie für Tonkunst (Wilhelm-Petersen-Saal)
09.30 Arrival & Greeting
10.00 Welcome address Thomas Schäfer, Kobe Van Cauwenberghe & Timo Hoyer
10.15 Timo Hoyer: Tri-Centric Modeling: “A system of becoming, not arriving”.
11.00 Marc Hannaford: “He Sees Beauty in that Everlasting Struggle for Truth”: Anthony Braxton as Music Theorist
11.45 Break
12.00 Paul Steinbeck: Braxton the Theorist
12.45 Nina Polaschegg: How to analyse Braxton’s music?
13.30 Lunch Break
14.30 Katherine Young: The Trillium Opera Cycle
15.10 Kyoko Kitamura: Syntactical Ghost Trance Music (remote)
15.35 Anne Rhodes: Pine Top Aerial Music
16.00 Break, 🚀 Room change to Akademie für Tonkunst (Wilhelm-Petersen-Saal) across the street
16.15 Elisabeth Harnik/Timo Hoyer: Anthony Braxton’s compositions for solo piano. A performance-lecture
17.00 George E. Lewis in conversation with Anthony Braxton
Wed 09 August 2023, 10.00 – 18.00
Lichtenbergschule (Mensa)
10.00 Kobe Van Cauwenberghe: The possibilities of a Creative Orchestra
10.45 James Fei: Navigating Systems and the Unknown
11.30 Break
11.45 Workshop with James Fei for singers and instrumentalists: (Syntactical) Ghost Trance Music
13.15 Lunch Break
14.15 Round table discussion on Anthony Braxton’s legacy as a composer and thinker with James Fei, Anne Rhodes, Tyshawn Sorey, Katherine Young, moderated by Paul Steinbeck
15.30 Break
15.45 Carl Testa: Designing Software for Anthony Braxton’s Echo Echo Mirror House Music
16.30 Workshop with Carl Testa: Echo Echo Mirror House Music
The various lectures, talks, and workshops offered at the conference were intended for a broad spectrum of interested participants, composers, instrumentalists, musicologists or general friendly experiencers. Despite the busy festival agenda—ranging from courses and workshops to lectures, open space presentations, and concerts—the conference sessions were well-attended. While it is still early to gauge the full impact of this event, alongside the premiere of Thunder Music, a 4-day Creative Orchestra workshop and the Ghost Trance Music performance with Ictus and Rosas, all held during the 2023 Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, it is fair to say that the conference significantly contributed to integrating Braxton’s music into the discourse of post-war Western art music. The findings and insights from the conference will be compiled and published in a book scheduled for release by the Darmstädter Beilage series in spring 2025.
Here on the right you can read my opening statement for de conference. Below are video captations of the conversation between Anthony Braxton and George E. Lewis, the roundtable discussion (with Tyshawn Sorey, Katherine Young, Anne Rhodes and James Fei, moderated by Paul Steinbeck), and lastly my presentation on Creative Orchestra. Kyoko Kitamura''s presentation can be seen online here. Further below are more pictures (click to expand).
