Dear Grace,

You invited me to provide a playlist, or a mix, of meaningful music that inspires my work. Thinking about your request, I began to reach into my deep past to reconstruct listening experiences that affected me, that altered my consciousness of music, or of listening; and to try to identify the recorded instances of these that might be assembled in a playlist. I immediately realized that I am poorly suited to this task, for a few reasons. First, I am actually not a very frequent music listener, especially to recordings. Weeks pass during which I do not take time to listen to music. I may even actively avoid it. Listening is hard for me, I reflexively shut out everything else and become trapped in listening. So I have to really want to do it. For example, I can’t read and have music playing at the same time. When I’m over at a friend’s place and they have music playing as we visit, I have a very difficult time, caught between two cognitive states, visiting and listening, neither of which I can gain full access to. Further, I remain slightly in awe of the recording as a medium; I think I still feel that there’s something uncanny or bewitched going on. This includes some fear and suspicion, in addition to devotion. I most certainly do not collect records. The records I own are mostly the accumulation of happenstance. If I buy records, I may buy them in the 1$ or 50¢ bin, or at the Salvation Army, and this reflects a preference for valueless, uncurated, ‘randomly selected’ items. I see something, and I think, that might be nice to listen to. It could be Viennese waltzes or Rogers and Hammerstein. I know these selections are not really random, some unconscious imperative is at work; but this is the conceit that grants me permission to acquire them. And then I may never even listen to them.

The most intense listening events for me have been in performances that I witnessed, mostly in the 1980s, when my consciousness of music shifted from the childhood fantasies and rigors of practicing the cello, to a site of reality and wonder. Borbetomagus opening for Sonic Youth at CBGB in 1988, the state of awe at frequencies palpably vibrating the room, and my body with it; the Butthole Surfers at Danceteria, mid-80s; various unidentifiable bands at the Mudd Club, early 80s; Alan Licht playing with Rudolph Grey and the Blue Humans, etc. La Monte Young playing The Well Tuned Piano in 1987 at Dia on Mercer Street, six Sundays in a row, of which I saw at least three. The second time I had to leave the space for about an hour in the middle of the performance and walk around outside, so confounded and disturbed was I, so shaken up by the mysteries of what I was hearing.

In 1985, at the Marlboro Festival, Rudolf Serkin played the opening of the Mozart Piano Trio in G major, K. 496, in a tempo that at first seemed implausibly slow, but by dint of which I fancied that I could hear both the musical logic and the acoustical reality of the tones at exactly the rate at which they were coming toward me. Time was exactly equal to experience. A rare moment in which my perceptual faculties and the articulation of music as formal artifice aligned, synchronized; a syzygy. I will be forever grateful to Serkin for those 30 seconds of my life. In 1987, in Tokyo, I heard the pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski, then probably in his 90s, play the Scenes from Childhood of Schumann. The image of a man born in the nineteenth century, reenacting in old age Schumann’s dream of innocence, at this cultural and chronological remove, was haunting and disturbing. It brought to mind another image, that of my mother playing the zither when I was very small, singing simple folk songs or hymns, painfully displaced from her idealized Franconian home. For me, one of the only images of reconciliation I carry of my mother. Both of these images, Träumerei in Tokyo, Breit aus die Flügel beide in Southern California, share qualities of distance and faintness, of something out of reach or lost, along with unspeakable beauty.

Many of my most memorable listening experiences have been while sitting on stage. Very recently I participated in concerts of a selection of Radigue’s Occam series with Dafne Vicente-Sandoval, Robin Hayward and Rhodri Davies. The four of us would sit on stage for the length of the concert and take turns in solos, duos, trios and one quartet. When I was not involved in the particular piece being played, I could sit quietly holding my cello, looking down, dwelling in the constantly changing sound images surrounding me. This over several rehearsals and six concerts made for an experience I would call hyperreal, even if I don’t know exactly what that word is supposed to mean. The experience was one of familiar sounds and sound-shapes that were more different each time than they were familiar. Dafne’s solo in particular, which opened every concert, made me feel that sound was being invented, or discovered, each night anew. A creation event.

In the 90s, when I was principal cellist of the North German Radio Orchestra in Hamburg, we often toured with the conductor Günter Wand, and after a few concerts of the same piece I could relax and take in the proceedings while still managing to play my part reasonably well. Sitting in the front, right next to this willowy, slightly wobbly octogenarian, I could see his elegantly bent knee and gentle waving motions just past my music stand as he shepherded us through Schubert and Bruckner. I felt as much a recipient as an activator, a listener as much as a sound-maker. On occasion i would get stoned for the Bruckner concerts. A certain tour of Bruckner 8th may have been the high point in this part of my musical activities. It was a very good orchestra, and the soft brass sound, soft even at the highest dynamic, the blur of the vast string sections (34 violins, 14 violas, 12 cellos, 10 basses), the long phrases and build-ups, the stops and starts and silences, made a space to get lost in. In a way, all of my surroundings would disappear, and the final chords and applause were like coming down. Playing in La Monte Young’s and Marian Zazeela’s raga ensemble in the early 2000’s was like this too. Here, in the severe geometries of the justly-tuned intervals, matching pitch to the partials of the recorded tamboura and to La Monte’s voice, and with the considerable amplification of the summed sound, I could play and not hear myself at all. In fact, not hearing myself was a provisional guarantee of being in tune; the unisons were matching up, the energy of my arms was being directed toward and through a collective flow, being subsumed, consumed; like feeding a fire.

Once, on stage in Paris performing La Monte’s solo piece, I had a kind of black-out. It was at about the half-way point in a 3-hour performance. My field of vision narrowed to a very small space and I saw nothing around me. A hallucination of being alone, in a tiny and utterly dark closet, nested within the larger, crowded theatre. I kept playing, and eventually the stage and the situation around me returned.

Most of the music I have lived with through my adult life I first encountered by playing it, not by first hearing it. My family rarely went to concerts, and we didn’t listen to much music at home either. I heard my brother practicing the piano, so I recognized solo piano repertoire. At the age of 17 I flew to New York to participate in a youth orchestra conducted by Alexander Schneider with concerts in Carnegie Hall. Peter Serkin was to be one of the soloists; I knew who he was because I had seen a suggestive photo of his group Tashi in which they looked like hippies. During a break in the rehearsals, on stage at Carnegie Hall, a man in a white suit with glasses, short hair and a moustache started to play soft individual notes and chords on the piano; I assumed he was the piano tuner. But when the musicians all returned from the break and Schneider started the first read-through of the Bach Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, and the man did not leave, I had to assume that this was Peter Serkin with short hair. This was concerning enough to me; but then we plunged into Brandenburg Fifth and I was caught in a swirl of rhythms and sonorities that I had not only never heard, but never even imagined. I wonder how I was even able to play, or if I was able to. At a certain point everyone stopped but the piano, and then a few seconds later Peter Serkin also stopped, and turned to ask Schneider if he should keep playing. Schneider said yes, and Peter Serkin continued to play, a kind of archaic-sounding fantasia-like solo that continued and continued and became stranger and stranger as it went along. I thought he must be playing a different piece and that I had not been informed of the plan. Cascades of beautiful piano runs and meter changes and a massing of piano tones echoed in the huge empty auditorium. When the orchestra came crashing back in I’m sure I was completely lost – notationally, textually, culturally – like I’d been sent to play on a team sport that I knew none of the rules for.

I have always hated CDs. The ones that I own I would like to throw out, preferably at a toxic waste site. Cassettes take me back to my childhood, and a Vivitar device with which my parents would record examples of childhood singing and cello playing for the relatives in Germany. At Juilliard, concerts were recorded on open-reel decks. The few LPs that I remember buying with real enthusiasm were The Feelies’ The Good Earth, David Munrow’s The Art of Courtly Love, Firehose’s If’n, Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea, and PIL. The last because I had briefly met Keith Levene. Someone gave me a Robert Wyatt EP which I loved and played over and over because it was so calm and slow and deep in pitch, until a friend pointed out to me that it was a 45 and I had been playing it at 33 rpm. I liked it only slightly less at 45 rpm. In all respects, my relationship to recordings has been awkward and unresolved.

Recalling this, I wonder if I am not a holdover, or a castaway, from the generation that approached music with hands on, a relic of the bourgeois European tradition of Hausmusik, the dream of personal and social improvement through beautiful sounds. When a music history instructor at Juilliard referred to William Byrd’s Mass for Three Voices as ‘miraculous,’ I was in a hurry to buy the score and find a couple of friends with whom to sing it in my apartment. One of them was Michael J. Schumacher. I did not look for a recording of the Byrd Mass, but for the score, in order to experience it by singing it (badly). Growing up we had only a borrowed mono record player that my father requisitioned from the high school where he worked, and records were checked out from the local library. Somehow John Cage and David Tudor’s Indeterminacy was one of these; when we listened to it, my father stood by briefly, shaking his head, and declared it ‘the music of the deranged.’ It was not until my senior year in high school, I believe, that we purchased a stereo set with a Marantz receiver and small Advent speakers. Not sure what to listen to or buy, we heard Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Bob Seger, and Bad Company, my older brother’s choices.

So for me to choose a ‘playlist’ of recordings that might map or characterize my influences and inspirations seems a bit of an imaginary task. That being said, what follows are tracks that came to mind as I made the attempt. The exercise proved strangely absorbing, as a sojourn in spaces out of time; and it took an inordinate amount of time. If nothing else, it forced me to listen to music again. There is no logic to my selections, the pieces simply exemplify the desire I have to lose myself in the presence of sounds. Some of these persist in my memory as moments of exceptional beauty. For whatever reasons. For reasons that I would not be able to detail. Thus, without further commentary, here they are.

Hoping to meet you someday,
Charles