I thought everyone would like to see the article in today's UK Gaurdian. This is just a rough OCR of the paper so there may well be a few errors. I make no comment on the content. ________________________________________________________ Shuffle and cut What do you get when you cross a tango, a symphony and a Warner Bos catoon soundtrack? John Zorn tells Tom Service how he puts together his multi-genre 'chopped-up' chamber works It is impossible to categorise a track by John Zorn. You're likely to hear fragments of everything from classical masterpieces to thrash metal, from jazz licks to film music soundscapes. This music is the soundtrack of postmodernism, the aural equivalent of surrealist collage. "I've got an incredibly short attention span," Zorn says. "My music is jam-packed with information that is changing very fast.' As is his career. Just when you think you've got hold of it, he does something completely unexpected. Zorn, who is 50 this year, made his name in the late 1970s in New York's free improvisation scene, then founded a postmodern rock band, Naked City. He recorded an album that exploded the film music of Ennio Morricone, and another that blew apart tracks by Ornette Coleman. Then he created Masada, a Jewish jazz combo, and is now a figurehead of radical Jewish culture. And over the past 15 years, having established himself as a noisy iconoclast, he has been writing classical pieces, including works nominated for Pulitzer prizes. Much of Zorn's music is defined by a cut-up aesthetic. He is influenced by the block-like structures of Igor Stravinsky, death-metal bands such as Slayer and Napalm Death, and film and TV editing. But there is another important source: Carl Stalling's scores for Warner Bros cartoons. "To separate Stalling's music from the image and dialogue and listen to it in the abstract is to enter a completely new dimension;" Zorn says. Zorn's music takes Stalling's "new dimension" to another level. In his cut-up pieces, he plays around with musical genres as other composers play around with notes. The 1989 chamber orchestra work, For Your Eyes Only, is typical. (The work forms the climax of the Britten Sinfonia's current tour, in a concert conducted by Stephen Drury.) Snatches of cartoon music are juxtaposed with jazz licks, outrageous tangos and bits from classical works. The whole 14-minute piece is an unstable riot of quotations and original material. It is as if it had been put together by chance, with pilfered sounds and ideas crammed indiscriminately into place. This is the music of a composer who can't throw anything away. And there is some truth in that observation: Zorn's flat in New York reached a state of critical mass recently, when there was no room for any more books, records, or CDs. Instead of moving somewhere bigger, Zorn - who always eats out - simply removed his kitchen to make more space. For all its volatile energy, For Your Eyes Only is not an undisciplined, postmodem melange. The piece was composed using a system that Zorn calls "file-card composition". He says: I write in moments, in disparate sound blocks, so I find it convenient to store these events on filing cards so they can be sorted and ordered with minimum effort.' Each block of music - and there are dozens in this piece - has to find the right place in the structure. "Pacing is essential. If you move too fast, people tend to stop hearing the individual moments as complete in themselves and more as elements of a sort of cloud effect.' Once he had decided on the sequence of file cards, Zorn then had to Orchestrate them. "I would start early in the morning, and the TV would be on. At that time, Channel 9 was showing re-runs of Hawaii Five-0 and McHale's Navy - shows I knew and loved from my childhood - so I'd work right in front of the TV. I worked 10 to 12 hours a day for a week, Just orchestrating these file cards. It was an intense process - one I don't want to go through again." Drury, as conductor of the Britten Sinfonia's concert, has the job of negotiating the relationship between the individual moments and the whole structure of For Your Eyes Only. "Each fragment needs to have its own integrity and intensity," he says. "When you're in a particular phrase it has to sound absolutely convincing. So when you play the little quote from The Rite of Spring in the piece, it has to sound like it could actually be part of a whole performance of Stravinsky's piece." For Your Eyes Only is huge challenge for players, who have to master the genres of individual fragments and then change from one to another instantly. "You have to feel like you're in charge of the remote control for the television," says Drury, so that each section does not anticipate the next one. 'I Listening to the piece is equally bewildering. Like the volatile structures of his music, the twists and turns of Zorn's career have alienated some of his fans. For some, his classical pieces are evidence of a sell-out to the establishment; and for the classical world, his reputation for irreverence is problematic. He sees things differently. 'All the various styles are organically connected to one another. Im an additive person - the entire storehouse of my knowledge informs everything I do. People are so obsessed with the surface that they can't see the connections, but they are there.' One thing common to all the aspects of his work is Zorn's attitude to performers. "I'm not going to sit in some ivory tower and pass my scores down to the players. 1 have to be there with them, and that's why 1 started playing saxophone, so that 1 could meet musicians. 1 still feel that 1 have to earn a player's trust before they can play my music. At the end of the day, 1 want players to say: this was fun - it was a lot of fucking work, and it's one of the hardest things I've ever done, but it was worth the effort.' The next chapter in Zorn's musical biography is also one of the most surprising. "I feel I'm in a transitional space at the moment," he says, "and I'd like to move towards abstract music, something just called Sextet, or String Quartet, or Symphony no 5. But at the same time, it's not something 1 can just put on like a suit of clothes. I came from a very honest place in the 1980s, writing pieces like For Your Eyes Only, and this abstract, spiritual music has to come from another very specific place. It's a process of simplifying, and I don't think I'm there yet. But when 1 am, 1 want to write fewer and fewer notes ~ so that there will just be a few notes on the page, but they will really be the right ones!' John Zorn as postmodern spiritual minimalist? Watch this space. Britten Sinfonia perform music by John Zorn at the Corn Exchange, Brighton (01273 709709), tonight, then tour to Oxford, London, Cambridge and Birmingham.