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Henry Flynt: Steel City Boogie
Henry Flynt is by well-known for a genre he calls new American ethnic music, combining sounds from his native North Carolina with an avant-garde sensibility honed in New York City's loft scene in the 1960s. As a student of Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath alongside La Monte Young and Terry Riley, and even a live collaborator with the Velvet Underground, Flynt was a major part of the downtown New York political and artistic conversation. Starting with the release of Graduation in 2001 followed by a steady stream of archival recordings dating as far back as 1963 (Acoustic Hillbilly Jive), the world has just started to get a glimpse of Flynts contribution to 20th century's richest art and music milieus.
Blank Forms in partnership with Swiss Institute is pleased to present Flynts composition Steel City Boogie for double lead electric violins performed by Flynt with Australian composer and violinist Adam Cadell. Steel City Boogie is a rock instrumental, with a nod to Night Train and other great double-lead instrumentals. It has been in development since Flynt premiered it on guitars as Rockin Midnight in 2008 alongside Libby Flynt. Since the premiere of Rockin Midnight Flynt added elements of raga and more funky country (see Lonesome Train Dreams recorded in 1975), leading him to change the title from Rockin Midnight to Steel City Boogie in 2009. In 2014, Flynt rescored Steel City Boogie for electric violins as part of Flynts lifelong project of reinventing the violin. The violins weave lines over a minimalist rock riff, ending with a shout-out to La Monte Young.
Adam Cadell is well known as an alternative violinist. Recently he has been studying the Flynt method, adding Flynt compositions to his repertoire in turn Flynt has been taking lessons from him in mechanics of playing.
Henry Flynt
Henry Flynt's biography is so full of ideological one-eighties and unexpected syntheses that pinning him down has proven to be just about as impossible as it is pointless. The myriad forms of Flynts intellectual output over the last half centurywhich have encompassed everything from philosophical tracts to North Indian influenced solo violin pieces, from country rock to concept artare by no means indicative of a casual, flippant temperament. The upheavals that characterize Flynts body of work are less the product of whim than of the relentless and unsentimental reappraisal of his own ideas.
Flynt was born in Greensboro, North Carolina to middle class parents in 1940. It might make sense that he was born in the American South, given that much of his musical project has been devoted to the radical reinvention of Southern music, but in actuality, Flynt spent most of those formative years immersed in classicalnot countrymusic. "I had to learn the music of my native region of the US as an assumed identity" he wrote in his improbably titled 1980 essay, "The Meaning of My Avant-Garde Hillbilly and Blues Music". Flynt arrived at Harvard at 17 with aspirations of becoming a mathematician-philosopher. After a brief undergraduate sojourn there where he studied mathematics, tried his hand at composing serious modern music and befriended Tony Conrad, Flynt concluded that the academies had little to offer him intellectually or otherwise and dropped out of school to focus on his first major monograph, Philosophy Proper. It was to be a decision that would set a precedent in Flynts life for opting out of what he saw as intellectually bankrupt structures, the first of many refusals in what would amount to a careerif one can really use this word when talking about Henry Flyntfull of refutation.
Heading to New Yorkwhere he has been ever sinceFlynt met the composer La Monte Young and through him entered into the epicenter of the New York post-war Avant-Garde. From his early conversion from serious modern composer to Bo Diddley fan, or his admonishment of the sectarian Left for their lack of appreciation of African-American music, or his embrace of American Southern roots music, Flynt has always striven for a certain universality in his music, be it through his radical reinvention of popular forms or in his embrace of transcendental "ethnic" music, or through an intriguing and unlikely combination of the two. This is not to say that his music isnt challenging at times in the elements it brings togetherscathing political critique and primitive rock music, hillbilly figures and minimalist repetitionbut Flynts musical delivery always possesses a certain emotional quality, a grit that has more to do with folk feeling than the clinical coolness one generally associates with the avant-garde. I have always wanted to do an affirmative and sort of exalted music, Flynt says, though if he ever made overtures to the populace they were certainly always on his own terms and, as a consequence, often went unheard.
One of the ideas that helps form the basis of Flynts musical world is his conception of Ethnic Music, a term he has been using to describe his own genres since the early 1960s. There is a sense, which is strongest in the musicology departments, that Europe is a unique civilization that has an art music that somehow is not ethnic, Flynt says. What is called musicology was an ideology for European art music. I mean it was created to lionize Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. They took the position that European art music was the music of all music [...] I am now dedicated to what you would call Regional Traditional Music and its refinement and its renewal. North Indian Classical Music is one such regional tradition that has proven to be a wellspring of ideas for Flynt. His principal teacher, the North Indian singer Pandit Pran Nath was a master of the Kirana school of Hindustani singing who came to the United States in the early seventies and left an indelible mark on everyone who studied with him. The influence of Pran Naths teaching can be heard most explicitly on Flynts long form pieces like C-tune [Locust 03] and Purified by the Fire [Locust 67] which find his amplified violin exploring the all the permutations of finely tuned scales that reflect both hillbilly fiddling and Indian ragas, backed by Indian tambura drones provided by Pran Nath disciple, logician and frequent Flynt collaborator C.C. Hennix. But a more subtle influence can be heard in both Flynts country rock music and singing style on pieces like Graduation [Graduation and Other New Country and Blues Music, Ampersand 08] and Marines Hymn [Raga Electric, Locust 06]. If Indian music provided the model for Flynts opening of country blues music to extended melodic improvisation, then it was African-American music that provided the model for an ethnic music capable of constantly revitalizing itself in the face of the stresses of industrialized society.
But aside from a few close friends, Tony Conrad, C.C. Hennix and LaMonte Young among them, Flynt's contrarian restlessness ensured that his musical activities were mostly a conversation with himself. Critical, let alone commercial success eluded him and in the mid-80s he hung up his violin. Archival recordings began surfacing in the early 2000s on labels Ampersand, Locust, and Recorded but public performances have been few and far between.
In the 21st century, Flynt found a new challenge in rock drone music, leading him to return to guitar, developing a one-hour double lead instrumental for himself and his niece Libby, eventually returning to the violin in 2014. Aside from developing an electric violin performance of the Shostakovich Cadenza and writing a manual on violin technique, Flynt has devoted his recent efforts to translating the Steel City Boogie lead from guitar to violin.
Adam Cadell
Adam Cadell chronicles underground violin practitioners in his spare time, and plays full time (solo and with The Scrapes). As a member of The Scrapes, and as a soloist, Cadell has released over a dozen recordings independently and via labels such as Wood and Wire, Duskdarter, All Is Number, Soft Abuse, Cabin Floor Esoterica, Conquest of Noise and 267 Lattajjaa. Aside from these activities he is a prolific collaborator, recording and performing live in various bands and ensembles, including in a duo with drummer Tony Irving (Ascension) with whom Cadell has released two records. Since 2012, Cadell has spent some time living and traveling in West Africa, studying the fiddle traditions of Ghana and Senegal and collaborating with local artists. Cadells latest recording Bush Songs for solo violin, will be out as a limited cassette release through Soft Abuse in late 2016. He began studies with Henry Flynt in 2015.
Presented by Blank Forms in partnership with Swiss Institute Contemporary Art.
http://blankforms.org/
https://www.swissinstitute.net/
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LocationSwiss Institute Contemporary Art (View)
102 Franklin St
New York, NY 10013
United States
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