The Brooklyn Rail

Trying to connect music and visual arts is always a tricky proposition, and often a foolish one. The way music sounds is different for everyone, and the way that sound might look, might stimulate visual perception, is just as individual (and doesn’t necessarily even mesh with how many people experience music). Then there’s musicians who also make visual art—do Schoenberg’s paintings sound like his music? Do his visual values reflect his musical ones? Well, it depends on who you ask.

Still, if you’re interested in a musician, and they make visual art, it’s too tempting a question to ignore. And it’s a compelling one with John Zorn: Hermetic Cartography, the first exhibit of his drawings, graphic scores, and more at the Drawing Center, up through May 11. The show’s title is not just a description of what’s on view, but an insightful look into the core of Zorn’s music making. As prominent an artist as he’s been—easily the most public, influential, and important avant-garde musician of the past forty years or more—there is an impenetrable core to his ideas that is something like the Voynich manuscript: fascinating and alluring to decipher, but in the end something so intrinsically personal that only he himself can truly understand it.

There are delicate, precise drawings that are lovely to view and made with admirable skill, many recognizable as what might be alternate versions of several of his album covers, like for The True Discoveries of Witches and Demons (Tzadik). What might that title say about the music? Probably not that it’s pumping, exuberant, heavy prog/math rock. And what is the true discovery of witches and demons that music expresses? Only Zorn knows. But it’s easy to dig nonetheless.

Drawing on paper does have a corollary with Zorn’s composing. He has made himself into a notable composer in the classical tradition, and the meaningful details in his music—especially given not just speed (tempos) but his hairpin-turn structures—demand absolute clarity and precision in a symbolic language that’s just as much drawing as it is writing. The drawings seem a natural extension of his compositional skill.

This fine thinking and eye-hand coordination come through the samples of Zorn’s early scores, which combine types of graphic notation with specific pitches and rhythms on ledger lines drawn out by hand. Zorn’s music, as avant-garde as it often is, is built on traditions that came before him, and someone with the ability to read a score and with knowledge of twentieth-century music can see this. The one fault of the show is the catalogue essay from Jay Sanders and Olivia Shao, which shoves notational methods—ways to preserve and transmit information and instructions—into the aesthetic viewpoint and critical language of graphic arts. And in terms of pure information, there are hand-drawn fliers for music performances that give the reader everything they need to make it to the show, and are also so dense in their lettering and design and so elegant in their form that it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees.

A side room has the hermetic mysteries, a display case full of tiny objets, many laid out on a grid like some Cage-ian chance operation. How to interpret these, and even what they mean in terms of Zorn’s own compositional planning and process, is impossible to determine; but then, cabinets of curiosities are personal affairs. Zorn’s public face is in the music.

And that is a highlight of the exhibition, and in this context it is the manifestation of the physical objects and images through a series of performances. It opened with his New Masada Quartet, and the final concert is JACK Quartet playing Sigil Magick and Prolegomena on May 3. (In January, Tzadik released the two-disc John Zorn: The Complete String Quartets, played by JACK.) The first Saturday in April, he stood in front of a group that was essentially several small rock bands put together; drums, basses, guitars, cello, and vibraphone, mostly electric, with Zorn stalwart Ikue Mori’s laptop full of the usual uncanny and mercurial sounds for a rare and very welcome performance of Cobra, the finest in his series of pieces that organize group improvisation through game structures and rules.

Cobra can be heard on recordings but should always be seen, as this performance confirmed. There’s nothing like Zorn and musicians throwing signals at each other in real time while the music—which was explosively energetic and at the kind of volume that was physically exciting, even punishing—is thrashing through them and around the audience. To see him pointing back and forth along the row of players, quickly, sound moving at a split-second pace, is seeing how his frenetic, jump-cut style is made. It’s thrilling. It’s jarring in a way that knocks you off kilter, like a fun house.

This was a blunter and often more monotonous—in the sense of lacking variety in sound and style—performance than one has heard Cobra either in person (two previous performances) or the available studio and live recordings. The spirit in the playing was only going in one direction, Zorn prompting but doing little shaping. He clearly found a lot of delight in this, but in the end seemed to sense that he wanted to hear something else.

He turned to the audience and asked “How about one more?” Maybe something clicked off in the minds of the musicians: they still had the same positivity, but their concentration was perhaps a bit too relaxed—you have to absolutely be on your toes to play this music—and when Zorn wrapped it up after a few minutes, it was unsatisfying. He clearly felt that way too, and with a nod and a slightly disconcerted look on his face, whipped up one more go.

This was the best of the night. The energy was high again, everything was quick and sharp, and toward the end the ensemble, via cellist Jay Campbell, found its way to a weird, enigmatic drone. Zorn framed this with a series of short, loud hits, reinforced the drone textures, and let the musicians follow their own logic to a magical and beautiful finish. In that moment, there was a solid, logical connection between the music and the mysteries of the drawings surrounding the audience.