Project overview
No More Songs writes a history of British experimental music in the 1970s through the lens of the ensemble Henry Cow. Formed by two Cambridge University undergraduates in May 1968, Henry Cow existed for ten years, producing some of the most complex, varied, and imaginative music of the 1970s. The group cycled through more than ten musicians in various combinations, but its steadiest membership included multi-instrumentalist Fred Frith, saxophonist and keyboard player Tim Hodgkinson, percussionist Chris Cutler, bassist John Greaves, oboist and bassoonist Lindsay Cooper, vocalist Dagmar Krause, and bassist Georgina Born. Its music ranged widely across different styles: precise, electrified chamber music; jazzy solos with accompaniment; wild group improvisations; live electronic music and studio experimentation; rhythmically propulsive rock; art and cabaret songs; and multi-sectional suites comprising several or all of these styles. Although they released several albums, Henry Cow was primarily a performing ensemble, and toured extensively throughout Europe and Scandinavia, where they found enthusiastic audiences and likeminded musicians working in the spaces between traditional musical genres.
Henry Cow and its former members recorded and performed with a wide variety of musicians. In the rock world, their partners included Robert Wyatt of Soft Machine, Dave Stewart of Egg, Mike Oldfield, Captain Beefheart, Faust, the Residents, and Brian Eno. Among the classically trained composers with whom the band engaged were Roger Smalley, Heiner Goebbels, Michael Nyman, and Cornelius Cardew. The list of well respected improvisers who collaborated with members of Henry Cow included Derek Bailey, Lol Coxhill, Annemarie Roelofs, Steve Beresford, Irene Schweizer, Phil Minton, Maggie Nichols, Sally Potter, Zeena Parkins, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. This broad network of cultural production evidences a web of attachments characteristic of British experimentalism.
The members of Henry Cow often remarked on their indebtedness to American experimental music in the 1950s and 1960s. These transatlantic connections originated in three sources: John Cage and his successors in the downtown New York milieu, Ornette Coleman and the free jazz movement, and the adventurous rock-identified ensembles of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart. A central issue for this study, then, is how Henry Cow, as well as its wide range of collaborators, received these American musical traditions and adapted them to fit into a British cultural context. This project will not, however, limit itself to matters of reception, for its overall goal is to document and analyse the entire field of British experimental music in the 1970s. In what ways did the jazzers, rockers, improvisers, and composers interact with each other?
Although Henry Cow performed many pieces of through-composed and notated music, its prevailing musical practice was improvisation. Unlike many of their contemporaries in the British free improvisation scene, the band often added recognizable licks and vamps into its spontaneous music making, creating space in its group dialogues for a sense of musical history and style. This kind of referentiality was anathema to the free improvisation movement, which was more invested in purging all recognizable musical signs from their playing in search of a 'blank slate' state that could condition the interactions of the group. I will seek to investigate further the different meanings that improvisation acquired for the various scenes of spontaneous music-making in the UK, and what different musical protagonists-rock bands, 'free' music ensembles, and trained composers-felt they could gain by turning to improvisation in this period.