I walked into the basement of a Wesleyan University studio and sat down at the piano for day one of Anthony Braxton’s small ensemble rehearsal. We were handed Composition 169. I opened the part to reveal 1,100 measures of relentlessly unison rhythmic clusters. Reading it for the first time, my fingers were annihilated by rapidly fluctuating successions of time signatures — 9 over 2s, 13 over 4s, 5 over 2s.
After a few weeks of rehearsal and division practice, the ensemble sounded “together.” But there was still a strange disconnect. I was concentrating so hard to play each cluster correctly, and when my brain lapsed it all fell apart musically. “Professor Braxton,” I said, “I’m sorry. I’m still having a tough time getting these rhythms to feel right.”
“Don’t worry,” he replied. “I’ve been looking at these rhythms for 300 years, and it’ll probably take another 300 years before I can play them correctly.”
We all smiled at Braxton’s sincerely unconventional sense of time, but his comment was enlightening. It wasn’t worth focusing on each individual rhythmic phrase, even though the piece demanded it. Instead, we were forced to internalize, putting the unnaturally complex rhythm in our bodies instead of our minds. The less we counted, the more it locked in.
Returning a few years later to 169, my feelings about it are intensified. Like playing it, 169 demands extremely precise listening and extremely detached listening. It invites analysis while laughing at you for even trying. It creates a world of visceral feelings through an unromantic process and concept. I believe it will retrospectively be regarded as one of Braxton’s most important works.
