Learning Walter De Maria's "Cricket Music"

Drummer/writer John Niekrasz will be performing Walter De Maria’s Cricket Music (1964) at Extradition’s 2020 Winter Concert, on Saturday, January 18. He kindly provided some thoughts on the process of learning and practicing the piece.

Any good work of art should have at least ten meanings.
— Walter De Maria

I want to both laugh and bow in respect at De Maria’s stated attempt at quantifying artistic viability through relative interpretability. I think there is some precedent of religious texts using “ten” to mean a redundancy of dualities and, thus, infinity. Like, if an artwork has at least ten meanings (according to whom? I don’t know), it’s probably infinitely interpretively rich. Alright, Walt.

Matt Hannafin invited me to perform the late transmedia artist Walter De Maria’s 1964 composition Cricket Music for his Extradition music series through the Creative Music Guild. De Maria is a curious and central figure in the Western art canon. He studied music in his youth and painting at Berkeley, wrote essential essays, and contributed instrumentally to the earthworks movement with pieces Mile Long Drawing (1968) and Lightning Field (1977). His creative commitment to minimalism, conceptualism, scale, and genre-bending certainly cement him as an artist of ongoing influence in the contemporary art world. A survey of De Maria’s work calls up both Donald Judd and the Fluxus artists, so it’s no surprise that he counted them among his friends. And, exemplary of NYC art world polymathia, he played drums in Lou Reed’s band The Primitives, a precursor to The Velvet Underground.

De Maria composed only two sound pieces, Ocean Music (1968) and Cricket Music (1964), both of which feature nature-based field recordings and repetitive drum set patterns. The drumming on Cricket Music is decidedly minimalist, operating through long-form repetition of a few variations. But it has polyrhythmic complexity and employs established tropes and idiomatic genre nods to the repertoire of 1960s drum set.

Cricket Music is a difficult piece of endurance to perform, requiring a long roll and then execution of twenty-odd minutes of non-stop, uptempo ride cymbal playing that would tire even an every-night jazz bandstand performer. It is equally difficult as a mental exercise, requiring both sustained focus and a sense of flowing trance state to accomplish well. Cricket Music is the sort of piece my channel-surfing compositional aesthetic would never create; that’s why I agreed to learn and perform it.

Hannafin provided a 2016 transcription of this piece by Jason Treuting of Sō Percussion. It provides an overview of the form and glosses over some problematic and enriching intricacies. In rehearsal, I privileged the audio recording over the Treuting’s transcription.

De Maria’s only recorded performance of Cricket Music is gloriously imperfect. From within the warmth of old tape, we hear the ride cymbal mic’d so hot it bleeds and distorts, but charmingly so. I believe in listening with generosity, and also that the composer is the piece’s authority and should be given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to intention. De Maria’s playing has great feel, but the beat occasionally hiccups and even turns around once or twice. Likewise, there are many seemingly unintentional tempo modulations (some with swings of up to 15 bpm), and a few of the transitions are decidedly slippery, if not sloppy. After several listens, I began to wonder if the drum track was edited together and not recorded in a single take — a few spots sound like tape splices. That could help explain De Maria’s continued musicality throughout the marathon. A dozen minutes in, the [now entranced?] listener starts to hear an ominously crescendoing field recording of banshee-esque insect calls buttressed by the eventual drone of an overhead prop plane. Over the final ten minutes, the field recording slowly overtakes the drums before both fade out.

I began preparing this piece more than a month ago and am glad I did. Though there’s risk in studying other people’s treatments of a piece (it can sway a performer’s approach or overshadow the unique voice a performer may bring to a piece), I did some research.

Polish drummer and sound artist Krzysztof Topolski (aka Arszyn) performed a very loose rendition of Cricket Music in 2016 at Centrum Amarant, Poznań. I caught myself initially taking offense at Topolski’s playful treatment, his filigreed cymbal work, slower tempo, and bass and hi-hat interplay, but then laughed at my own rigidity. It’s a more-than-50-year-old piece and surely there’s nothing wrong with using it as inspiration for creative elaboration.

Texas-based drummer and educator Stockton Helbing’s 2017 rendition at the Dallas Museum of Art is much more faithful. Though we use the toms differently, Helbing really captures De Maria’s propulsive feel, tempo swells and all. I found it reassuring to know the piece can be played well live — but that reassurance faded when I remembered that Helbing is a professor at notorious drumming bootcamp UNT.

I play drums every day, often for several hours and so, for the first run-through, I decided to attempt to play the entire piece from beginning to end, along with the field recording, with no stops, just to prove to myself I could.

And I did.

It wasn’t pretty. I learned how tricky this piece can be. Over the 25 minutes, I lost focus a few times. I fumbled a stick. I grew tense, then tired, then sore. Someone knocked on the door. But I didn’t stop. I thought of Kenny Werner’s Effortless Mastery advice to occasionally play a new part very fast just to know what it will feel like in the body at full speed. That’s what I tried to do, just get this piece in my body.

But it got in there a little too deeply. The next morning, I woke not being able to breathe well. Felt like a vertebra was out of place from a diaphragm cramp. Heat and massage helped. As the day wore on, it became clear that I’d over-used the muscles around my right scapula. I was forced to treat my right arm gingerly for days. Even after building the piece up much more slowly over the following ten days, when I tried to play the whole piece straight through again, I was put out of commission for another few days. I wish I could say my body feels great in the lead-up to this performance but it doesn’t. So here I am, humbled, nearly prostrate, in my attempted embrace of De Maria’s spirit in Cricket Music. Thanks for listening.

— John Niekrasz