EXTRADITION PLAYS CORNER is an ongoing project of the Extradition Ensemble, exploring the work of seminal American experimental composer Philip Corner.

Its first phase was EXTRADITION PLAYS CORNER: THE FESTIVAL, five concerts staged over five consecutive Saturdays between January 21and February 18, 2023.

Phase 2 is EXTRADITION PLAYS CORNER: THE ALBUM, a 61-track Bandcamp compilation featuring all live recordings from the festival plus additional Corner compositions recorded by Extradition musicians, friends, and peer ensembles from the U.S., Colombia, the Canary Islands (Spain), Germany, Greece, and Tajikistan.

Phase 3 will be EXTRADITION PLAYS CORNER: SECONDA PARTE, a follow-up recording featuring 20 to 25 additional Corner compositions, tentatively planned for release in 2025.

This page highlights some of the background materials generated for the project, including quotes by and about Corner and his work, a short biography, and an article exploring the composer’s key compositional themes and ideas.

Quotes By & About Philip Corner

"He could destroy people with his mind but chooses not to.” — Stanley Brakhage on Philip Corner

“There were other people who wanted to enter the group and enjoy the exchange of ideas and so forth, but Morty [Feldman] refused to let that happen. He insisted on it being a closed group. It was through my acceptance of Earle Brown that Morty then left . . . [He] was literally furious that anyone else was allowed into the group. Another one who might have been in it, but wasn’t, was Philip Corner.” — John Cage, interviewed by William Duckworth

“Here again, be recognizant with gratitude to John. Cage. Was he, one night in a taxi said ‘You must have closets full of scores.’ ‘I do, I do.’ I did. The next day a call from his publisher, he had called them—Don Gillespie said ‘John never does things like that.’ He said they should do what they’d done for him: take everything. No need to add that they did not.” — Philip Corner, In and About and Round-About in the 60s

“My music is not difficult to understand. Neither is my writing. Not-at-all. The problem, when there is one, is only the clash with familiarity, a not-being-the-same-as-what-one-is-used-to.” — Philip Corner, In and About and Round-About in the 60s

“It has taken me quite a while to appreciate the unassuming art of Philip Corner. One must acquire the taste, and this does not come easily, as Corner’s music involves a kind of subtlety that one does not find in other current music. It is never at all showy, and it requires a unique type of performer who knows how to keep his personality out of the way of the music. Aesthetically the attitude seems to have more to do with Zen and nature than with our musical past.” — Tom Johnson, Village Voice, May 30, 1974

"I gave myself the task to test this: What are the limits of 'interesting.' And I found this, once and for all proved: There are none.” — Philip Corner, LifeWork: A Unity

“It was the early eighties, and Phil and I were discussing the wonderful Cape Breton (Nova Scotia) fiddle tunes which I had arranged and Phil was to accompany on piano— which he did, successfully embodying that folk style of piano-playing. This folk music, like much other in the pantheon of world music, uses a pungent redaction of classical (European) harmony to serve its own purposes. One formula in Cape Breton style is to alternate the dominant chord (V) with the chord on the lowered seventh degree of the scale. I off-handedly asked Phil where he thought the idea of the ‘dominant’ chord came from and, likewise, why the ‘lowered seventh’ chord was used as a substitute for the dominant. He said, without skipping a beat: ‘The Dominant (V) comes from the Harmonic Series, and the lowered V11 chord comes from its proximity to the Tonic, meaning your finger has only to move a whole step down from the Tonic to find it.’ Somehow, I was struck dumb with the probability of this as the truth, simple and stark. I’m still thinking about it! What more can I say about a certain instantaneous clarity which Phil has about musical matters!” — Daniel Goode

“Working with Philip is a strange and joyful experience. His music is full of creative exuberance. . . . On the one hand he allows you to experiment with the parameters and underlying concepts of his music while at the same time you have to be really serious about playing by the rules.” — Silvia Tarozzi & Deborah Walker

“The freedom allowed to be taken with some restraint. I.e., not limited precisely—but no funny stuff.” — Philip Corner, from the notes to “148 Equal Measures for 4 Instruments”

“His work is always rooted to a statement of intent that is so encompassing and inclusive that there is no doubt in the performer’s mind at all about what (and why) he is doing when he does something (or nothing).” — Dick Higgins

“Self expression’s supposed to be out. But there’s this link between the objectivity of listening to the world as it is, to sounds as they really are, and seeing in that self expression and feeling all the direct correlates of that in the human body, the human being. The wind blowing or the waves have the same quality as someone screaming or sighing. What’s coming from the inside of somebody’s experience is definitely related to how the world is working.” — Philip Corner, quoted in Marcus Boon, “Philip Corner: A Long Life, Endless as the Sky,” The Wire, June 2004

“John Cage’s house [in Stony Point]: Spirit of the stones made up his walls, set to be maximally unsmooth, the contrary of a brick. Let be seen for exactly what it is. Let every note be heard for exactly what it is!” — Philip Corner, In and About and Round-About in the 60s

“Marian Zazeela, La Monte Young’s wife, called up trying to get disciples for Pran Nath. I said, ‘Well, I’m really taken. I’m working with this piano teacher in Brooklyn.’ That was Dorothy Taubman. And she said, ‘Oh, well I mean is Western Music a spiritual path?’ I said yes, it certainly is. That was my spiritual path, I didn’t need Pran Nath.” — Philip Corner

“Not to imitate the forms of another culture But to learn-from. What iz apropriate. What iz right, and use-full.” — Philip Corner

"Refusal to refute the traditional . . . has been a major sign of everything that I've done." — Philip Corner

"I am essentially a traditionalist. But I never could find my real tradition. So I make it myself. And it turns out to contain all that is best in the history of humanity." — Philip Corner

“My scores have become basically like a picture of the possibility that can be translated into sound. I feel like that would be a good definition of the essence of most of my work.” — Philip Corner

Philip Corner: A Short Biography

Philip Corner was born on April 10, 1933, in the Bronx, New York, and has lived in Reggio Emelia, Italy, since 1992. A composer and performer, a visual artist, a writer, a teacher, and much more, he’s worked throughout his life toward achieving a unity he calls “lifework”—a blend of his creative activity, his everyday life, and the constant flow between thinking and the sensitive realm. From post-Cage compositions that explore unintentional sound and chance activities to pieces for piano, gamelan, voice, gong, alphorn, objects, and every size and type of ensemble, his work is an ongoing dialogue between the most radical avant-garde expressions and his deep engagement with both Western and non-Western musical traditions.

Many of his scores are open-ended, with some elements specified and others left partially or entirely to the discretion of the performers. Some employ standard notation, whereas others employ graphics and text, the latter typically rendered in his own distinctive calligraphy. Improvisation is accepted as a natural part of the performing experience, with some scores leading musicians variously toward a Zen spaciousness or a near-ecstatic trance. At the other end of the spectrum, his music has been deeply influenced by immersion in works of the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras, as well as by close collaboration with artists in other media, especially dance and the visual arts.

After attending the High School of Music & Art in New York City, Corner received his BA in 1955 from the City College of New York, where his most important teacher was Fritz Jahoda. In 1955–57 he studied with Olivier Messiaen at the Conservatoire Nat'l de Musique in Paris. Back in the U.S., he studied with experimentalist Henry Cowell and formalist electronic music pioneer Otto Luening at Columbia University, from which he received his Master of Arts degree in 1959.

During this period, Corner’s compositions reflected the music in which he’d been trained but also began to show an interest in new forms and possibilities. His piano sheet music from the 1950s includes twelve-tone pieces as well as others which refer back to classical forms, including preludes and fugues, a fantasy, a scherzo for wind instruments, and a rondeau for trombone. His "Etincelles" (sparks) for piano is one of the first examples of repetitive, proto-minimalist music, and includes dissonant elements whose variation lies in the strict indication of nuances for each note. The 1950s composition "Homage to Couperin" for clavichord and tape references the French Baroque master whose work would continue to illuminate Corner’s own for the next half-century. In pieces such as “Different Durations,” “Flux and Form,” and “148 Equal Measures for Four Instruments,” he introduced the kinds of generous interpretive freedom that would come to characterize much of his mature work.

From 1959 to early 1961, Corner played trombone in an Army band during service in South Korea, during which he developed a deep respect for that country’s art, music, and culture—an experience that would mark his whole subsequent creative life. During his tour of duty, he studied calligraphy with master Ki-sung Kim, who would re-christen him with a name as poetic as it was apropos: Gwan Pok, which translates as "contemplating waterfall.”

After Korea, Corner returned to New York, where he would develop increasingly experimental work and be a central participant in one of the most fertile and productive periods of the American avant-garde. Three events stand out during this period: the forming of the Tone Roads Chamber Ensemble, Corner’s participation in the Judson Dance Theater, and his association with what came to be called Fluxus.

Tone Roads was founded by Corner and two other young colleagues and friends who would also become outstanding figures in experimental music: James Tenney and Malcolm Goldstein. Tone Roads took as its starting point American experimentalist masters such as Ives, Ruggles, Cowell, and Varèse, while also bringing in more contemporary masters such as Cage, Feldman, and Earle Brown, along with the international avant-garde represented by Messiaen and Webern. With Tone Roads, Corner acknowledged the greatness of the past while opening new paths towards the future—an approach that would come to underscore the whole of his career.

The Judson Dance Theater grew out of a composition class held at Merce Cunningham's studio, taught by Robert Dunn, a musician who had studied experimental music theory with John Cage. A Concert of Dance, the first Judson concert, took place on July 6, 1962, and included the work of 14 choreographers performed by 17 people, including members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as well as visual artists, filmmakers, and composers. The concert included works by, among others, Yvonne Rainer, Elaine Summers, and Ruth Emerson. Starting in the fall of ‘62, the group held weekly workshops at which they performed and received critiques. These meetings were held first at Rainer's studio, then at the Judson Memorial Church, for which they named the group in 1963. Throughout the next two years, nearly two hundred works were presented by the collective, following an aesthetic that rejected spectacular, virtuosic, narrative, and expressive choreographic approaches in favor of democratic structures, improvisation, and “everyday” movement. Corner fell in with the group early on and became a regular performer as well as the group’s composer-in-residence, creating a body of indeterminate and often graphic and/or text-based scores and tape music.

During this period, artists such as Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, and Jackson MacLow attended John Cage’s now legendary Experimental Composition course at the New School in NYC. From that intellectual ferment, they would extend Cagean concepts of indeterminacy into the realms of conceptualism and minimalism, frequently centered on simple actions, ideas, and objects from everyday life. This was the genesis of Fluxus. In 1962, at the Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik in Wiesbaden, Germany, a performance of Corner’s piece “Piano Activities” made headlines after performers Higgins, Knowles, Benjamin Patterson, Nam June Paik, George Maciunas, Wolf Vostell, and Emmett Williams—taking the score’s instructions to their most extreme interpretation—destroyed the piano on which they were performing and auctioned its pieces off to the audience. Corner, who was not in attendance, was horrified on hearing the news (a pianist himself, he has for many years bowed respectfully to the instrument before beginning a performance), but later admitted the validity of the interpretation and took part in similar performances of the piece, taking care to use pianos at the end of their usable lives.

Though Corner did not attend Cage’s New School class, he eventually became its fourth instructor, following Malcolm Goldstein, Richard Maxfield (during whose tenure Corner had served as teaching assistant), and Cage himself. His long teaching career had begun years before at a New York high school, and during Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964, Corner traveled to Meridian, Mississippi, to be a Freedom School teacher and civil rights volunteer. Beginning in 1972 and continuing for the next twenty years, he held a professorship at Rutgers University, first at Livingston College and then at Mason Gross School of the Arts.

During the 1970s, Corner developed a deep interest in gamelan, culminating in his co-founding of Gamelan Son of Lion in 1976 (with Barbara Benary and Daniel Goode) and the creation of the more than 500 works in his gamelan series. The vast majority of these are structured on gamelan principles and aesthetics but are playable on other instruments, though some are specifically intended for gamelan ensemble. In the 70s and 80s, Corner also delved more deeply into text scores, intermedia pieces, and meditation-based music, blurring the line between composition, calligraphy, drawing, conceptual art, and environmental art. Performance-based compositional formulations such as “Elementals,” "Gong/Ear,” and “Bells” explored the (non-existent) limits of sonorous, meditative, and/or repetitive sound spaces.

In 1992, facing an increasingly unwelcoming teaching environment at Rutgers, Corner took early retirement and moved to Europe, where he enjoyed a more receptive audience for his work. He eventually settled in Reggio Emilia, Italy, with his current wife, dancer and choreographer Phoebe Neville. They remain there to this day. In Europe, Corner began learning the alphorn, putting his early-career trombone knowledge to use in what he called “Earth Breath” performances, performing outdoors with the environment. He and Phoebe also collaborated extensively in music and dance performances.

In the 2000s, Corner began mining his deep engagement with ancient music, the Baroque masters, and the piano literature of the Romantic period for a series of daily, personal meditations. Employing favorite passages from the classical literature as source material, he would explore their depths in sometimes hours-long improvisations that would evolve spontaneously, often going far afield from their roots. This practice was documented in his “. . . as a Revelation” scores, which set up situations for extrapolating from Mozart, Bach, Chopin, Mussorgsky, and many others. His “Through the Mysterious Barricade,” which takes François Couperin’s "Les Barricades Mystérieuses" as its starting point, is another work on this theme. In 2019, Corner began writing a new series of minimalist, abstract piano meditations called The Art of No-Art, all of them structured entirely on octave multiples. As of October 2022, the series comprised nearly 400 short pieces, including a few for percussion or strings.

Still enthusiastic and engaged at ages 89 and 81, Philip and Phoebe recently attended their first post-lockdown performance of his music, by a Florentine ensemble in Pistoia, Italy. At the train station waiting to return to Reggio Emelia, Philip wrote a new short piece, “Trying No Noise.” And on any given day, his list of collaborators and interpreters around the world might find in their inbox a new Philip Corner composition—the latest manifestations of a lifelong waterfall of creativity, still flowing after nearly seven decades in the composer business.

This bio is based on direct input from Philip Corner and from multiple sources including Daniel Varela’s “Philip Corner: About Lifework” (August 2013) and Marcus Boon’s “Philip Corner: A Long Life, Endless as the Sky” (2004).

Key Compositional Themes & Ideas

Many if not most of Corner’s pieces can be grouped within a number of overarching concepts with which he’s been occupied at various points in his life/work. The list below is organized by theme, and does not include his early (1950s) involvement with traditional composition, twelve-tone methods, or the influence of John Cage and the New York school. Most material is sourced (though sometimes lightly edited) from Corner’s short book Lifework: A Unity (1993) and his A Few (Old) ‘Cornerfluxes’ (2000) and Through the Mysterious Barricade: An Old Thing—But to Remember! (2010), all of which are available from Frog Peak Music.

From each of these starting points
a line leading out without limit.
Expect from me ever-new manifestations
of the Creation Principles stated here;
each title may turn into a large collection,
or many.

ONE NOTE ONCE: The name says it all: any note or noise sounded only one time / with a chosen style of presentation, preparative actions, manner of terminating, duration of context of surrounding silence.

One Note Once had been played even before I realized that the title—just that title—was enough
All possible variations contained in a single clear vision. One note or noise = one sound once:
Here are the polar dimensions of sound joined to cover the field of sonic possibility in a most essential manner.
Also to be noticed (and hence to be made explicit) the presence of that silence
which (it must) surrounds. From this, all else follows.

AS A PIECE OF REALITY (Visual): Making visible or putting in evidence A Thing, a single object surrounded by space. Includes the ways of making that thing visible: It could be lit up and left there, or include the act of bringing it before an audience; also framing, collaging, printing, embedding, printing, preserving, tracing, projecting, photographing, casting, rearranging, isolating, pointing to, pointing out.

AS A PIECE OF REALITY (Rhythm): The extension into time. Prolongations and repetitions. And then, the psychic side too: perception, awareness, subjectivity, and “expression.” Repetitions of, for instance, “One Note Once” (which becomes “One Note X Times” or “One Note Once Each: X Notes, X Times”). Also accumulations, sequences, superimpositions for exhibition, performance, public participation.

ELEMENTALS: An indefinite prolongation of an absolute constant. Any single thing—a sound, a tone, a repeating (even) pulse, an action—continued/prolonged for an indefinite time without any intentional change. Contains space for duration, pitch (noise or tones), intensity (spiritual as well as acoustic), pulsation speed with inner silences (if not sustained), location with direction, colors, materials.

Extensions of the concept could include “Near Elementals” (with roughnesses, approximations of constancy) and “Out from Elementals” (which might evolve, go further).

OM: All the ways possible to play with (or sing with) a single tone. This is the ultimate limit of melody.

PULSE: All possible versions of acting on materials by steady beating. This is the ultimate limit of rhythm.

GONG!: Music with very resonant metals (or waterfalls). They resound! Particularly those with broad pitch-spectrum complexities. Let die away. . . . . . . This is the ultimate limit of harmony.

All the major themes set out. Their basis in nature. A time to theorize, some. The immutable dimensions of the world.
I gave myself the task to test this: What are the limits of what is “interesting.” and I found this, once and for all proved: There are none.
Thus the distillation to an unending meditation on the ultimate simplicities of music: melody & rhythm & harmony. Here is truly a theory in practice.

I CAN WALK THROUGH THE WORLD AS MUSIC: You can walk through the world as music. We may all walk through the world as if present at a permanent concert. And looking too. And smelling, tasting. And feeling (touch—innerly and outward), senses of all the senses.

Or:
I CAN LIVE IN THE WORLD LIKE A WORK OF ART
Will be of course “just” more Pieces of Reality. But isn’t everything?

SOUNDSARROUND: And when sitting . . . A diary: notated selected sounds. A class—on wall-board writing them down—a lecture. Sounds that are always there. Sounds that disappear. A book for children.

EAR HERE: And when close enough . . . A recording. An annotated space.

When just-listenings are played with . . .
Singing back to them; singing them back.
Imitation of sounds-heard by voicings, and body actions.
Not necessarily immediately. Not necessarily exactly.
Transcriptions for instruments. Exact shapes as drawings.
Recording. Amplified environment.
Played with by live musicians simultaneously.
SCORES GIVEN BY NATURE: Flowers’ scatter. Starry sky (note points).
The linear continuities of grasses, branches, cracks.

SOME SILENCES: Complete the sentence which begins with “Some silences. . . .“ How many there are! Has taken the form of a book, lecture, wall hanging, slide installation, etc.

Some silences . . . just come.

Some silences . . . hold an image.

Some silences . . . keep their eyes open too.

Some silences . . . are not so quiet after all.

etc.

THE MUSE (or MY MUSE): She touches surfaces . . . makes lines and curves, playing with the shapes of substances—may make sound on them, may make the sound (they are instruments whether built for music or not) by flesh direct or silently make traces with color on fingers or invisibly over a body (loved).

SOUNDS OUT OF SILENT SPACES: The need for community. A group coming-together . . . found a ritual. A space for silence at the center (call it “meditation”), entering from the outer world; bringing the liveliness of that reality in. Approaching the stillness . . . an appropriate music. And the right sounds for the return . . . intaken energy outering.

WITHINSTASCYS: A need for ecstasy too. The spirit lives spontaneously in a definition which is more the mere presence of physical limits than of a pre-thought concept. However—particularly pregnant sound-matters, discovered during improvisation, might be notated as a preservation of what will remain “impulses to realize,” “outways toward ecstasy.” (The ways of moving, as well as being moved, too will form a part; this works very well with dance.) Naturally there is no limit to length.

I have a whole series that I call Withinstascys. But instead of saying “in ecstasy” I wasn’t thinking about the outside, but the inside,
so I invented this word withinstascy. I have a whole folio of things based on improvisation provocations.
Statements of, ‘You can do this, you can do that.’ You can also just say, ‘You can do anything,’ right? That’s a piece too.
But on the other hand you don’t want to say ‘just do anything’ because there’s too much of anything to leave at that! (laughs).

Even improvisation can be conceived.
No play so free or full of passion that it cannot be possessed
(as you be “possessed” by it) by supreme clarityOFmind.
. . . Always that eternal dialectic between the gods of Energy and Form—
striving (as Heraclitus would say it) yet never anyotherthing
than the polarities-of-same.
Sometimes Sitting; sometimes in th’Dance
Both the Mirror
and the Contents of the mirror.
World.

THROUGH THE MYSTERIOUS BARRICADE: Reestablishing one’s connection to what is great in the past, so well as what stays forever true, by adopting as a personal theme and daily meditation a mystical masterpiece such as “Les Barricades Mystérieuses” of Couperin or other works from the Western piano literature [Including Prelude III, C# Major, Well-Tempered Klavier Vol. 2 (Bach, of course); also the famous first; also particular preludes by Rameau and Purcell; search Satie], around which a reverential improvisation may arise as prelude and completion. Such has to come out of a state of mind which has deliberately eschewed any previous “great ideas” and yet whose complete openness to the fullness of desire recognizes immediately everything which experience has been able to prepare and is perfectly satisfied with the results. Seek no novelty, but let every innovation happen.

AS A REVELATION: In the 2000s, Corner would improvise privately using phrases or chords from his favorite pieces in the classical literature, doing everything possible within and without them.

Hours go by (or at least many minutes), but what is normally lost as passages fly by in concerts can be preserved . . .
held on to in concentration of pleasure and then brought out into the world (and hidden beauties bring out).
Some of the classical passages saved by joyful repetition: “The Mozart Material” (C minor Concerto) (source for Solo VII of Cage/Hiller’s HPSCHD),
Chopin “Prelude I” (the V9 chord which opens it) & “Prelude II” (the F# section),
Satie’s “Sonneries de la Rose+Croix” (part 2 of “French Tri-Tone Dominants” of which the first is from Berlioz),
“The Mystic Chord of Scriabin”; also from the trio of Ives’ “Over the Pavements” and the Webern Variations.
The Coronation of Boris is already it.

The related piece “C Major Chord” extends this concept. Anything, in the right pattern, can become “a revelation.” Or, as in the first formulation, “You can do anything you like as long as it is (that).” Any repetitive pattern. Variation by emphasis of details.

GONG/EAR: Is another ideal part of spiritual practice, completing itself by the action which had generated the vibrations finding the listening ear to feed responsiveness in return to the doer who by that is prepared again, to. . . . Simplified, the idea is to perform sound in an environment and then to let the perception of each performed sound, in combination with the environmental sounds, influence what the performer plays next.

“Through the Mysterious Barricade,” “Gong/Ear,” and “. . . As a Revelation” may be regarded as kinds of “Withinstascys,”
the inner state of which is necessary, hence a part of the score. The openness previously described is to be extended to all relations with the world:
no more pretenses—an admission that one has no more knowledge of what has passed through ones fingers or arms or voice, than any listener—
and any judgement might be true; and never an attempt to justify—though the “proof” is enthusiasm. Another way of saying:
Never doing, nor intending to do, anything other than that which is being done.

IMPULSES TO REALIZE: Imaginings of improvisations; may also be memories. These distinguish themselves from “compositions” in that something remains over after the instructions—they escape their definitions—they can complete themselves only in the act.

GAMELAN: From the ‘70s onward, Corner has written hundreds of pieces in his gamelan series. These were written not only for those wonderful orchestras of Java and Bali but, written down as “open scores,” are capable of translation into many other forms—Western instruments and tuning bring one; also possible natural sounds, voicings, etc. Of course such versions may be further written-out as needed. There may come to be hundreds of these. What they will all have in common is the use of a clear principle of correspondence between time and tone. Each finds another way to bind durations and pitch by a common scale. Measure is added, without any sacrifice of suchness. Freedom remains no matter how strict.

Possibly occupy yourself almost exclusively with this for something like ten years.
Possibly change your style completely by this, by addition, by growth—not by dogmatic sacrifices!
Possibly write hundreds of them. Possibly have quite a few of them performed.
Possibly be a regular member of a group which is dedicated to new music with these instruments.
Perhaps be open to being influenced in other dimensions of your life.
Perhaps after long experience making at last that trip to Java and Bali.
Perhaps working with musicians there. Perhaps having your music played by them.

(Personal note from Extradition artistic director Matt Hannafin:
“Perhaps record some of those with a gamelan orchestra.
Perhaps a guy named Matt in Portland, Oregon, buys that CD around 2009.
Perhaps listening to it changes the way he thinks about music.
For which: Thanks.”)