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Cat O’ Nine Tails (Tex Avery Directs the Marquis de Sade) (1988) 

By John Zorn (b. 1953) 

Turning a self-described short attention span into a creative asset, the ever-daring composer, saxophonist, MacArthur Fellow, and New York “downtown” music czar John Zorn developed a unique approach to composition in the 1980s and early ’90s. Starting with discrete musical ideas—or “moments”—jotted down on file cards whenever inspiration struck, Zorn would create a new work by assembling the cards in a specific order. The resulting music is both endlessly surprising and relentlessly pulse quickening—an experience often compared to rapidly pushing the pre-set buttons on a car radio, or to the constantly shifting, “jump cut” imagery of modern films and music videos. 

“Cat O’ Nine Tails” is a perfect example of the form. In under 15 minutes, the piece brings together 51 distinct moments, from gently plucked tones to razor-sharp dissonance, and from stately classicism to country hoedown to cartoon zaniness—with few passages daring to challenge the 10-second barrier. 

“It’s a fun piece to play and a fun one to listen to,” Zorn says. “A piece with a lot of drama and humor and many musical games hidden in the web of its inner details. Sly quotes and secret codes are scattered throughout my classical repertory, serving as both special tributes to the composers and compositions that feed my inspirations and, more importantly, as unifying devices to create structural integrity.… This piece is subtitled ‘Tex Avery Directs the Marquis de Sade,’ for obvious reasons.” 

Beyond finding an echo of the infamous 18th-century author in the gleeful violence of the classic Warner Brothers cartoons of the 1940s and ’50s, Zorn has long drawn stylistic inspiration from the soundtracks of composers like Avery’s partner in cartoons, Carl Stalling. As Zorn describes it, when you listen to Stalling’s music apart from the animated visuals, you “enter a completely new dimension: you are constantly being thrown off balance, yet there is something strangely familiar about it all.” 

Zorn’s own résumé would seem decidedly off balance, if there weren’t something so strangely ingenious about it all. Already a budding composer of contemporary classical music by his mid-teens, Zorn dropped out of Webster College in St. Louis, inspired to pursue avant-garde jazz improvisation by the likes of saxophonist Anthony Braxton and other members of Chicago’s influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. By the early 1970s, he had settled in Greenwich Village, performing solo sax concerts and beginning to compose the structured improvisations he called “game pieces.” From early works like Lacrosse (1977) and Hockey (1978) to 1984’s Cobra, widely considered the ultimate game piece, Zorn perfected a process of cueing musical events according to ever more sophisticated sets of improvisational rules. In keeping with sporting events, while the rules of a game piece remain the same over time, no two performances of a Zorn game piece ever sound alike. 

Beyond creating and directing (or “prompting”) the game pieces and composing and recording other noted file-card works like Godard (1985) and Spillane (1986), Zorn has led and written for a number of his own ensembles, including the Noir-infused Naked City and the hard-core improvisational trio Painkiller. Beginning with his 1992, album-length composition Kristallnacht, Zorn embarked on an exploration of his Jewish identity. This work has reached its fullest expression in the 10-year-old performing quartet and book of compositions called Masada—a project that weds traditional Jewish scales to a brash style of jazz reminiscent of Zorn’s saxophone hero Ornette Coleman. Since the mid-’80s, following in the tradition of composers such as Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota, Zorn has also been a frequent and typically eclectic composer for film. To date, he numbers more than a dozen volumes of Film Works releases on his own Tzadik record label, with styles ranging from rambunctious cartoon music to elegiac strings to bossa nova riffs traded between guitar and Chinese pipa—often, of course, all on the same album. 

John Zorn’s “Cat O’ Nine Tails” appears on Kronos’ Nonesuch recording Short Stories. 

Note by Matthew Campbell (courtesy of the Kronos Quartet). 

Escalay (Water Wheel) (1989) 

By Hamza El Din (1929–2006) 

Realized by Tohru Ueda 

In the society of what once was Nubia, the water wheel was the oldest mechanical device used for farmland irrigation. When Nubian musician Hamza El Din was commissioned by Lincoln Center to compose his first piece for the Kronos Quartet, he sought to recreate both the sounds and the images of that ancient culture. “My country was flooded after the construction of the Aswan dam,” El Din explained, “and we lost it after a recorded history of 9,000 years, so I have a nostalgia for that place. Escalay is a representation of how to start the waterwheel and let it run.” 

Born in Nubia in 1929 and educated at the Fouad Institute of Music in Cairo and the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, El Din was living and teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time of his death in 2006. For “Escalay,” he drew upon both the musical and the cultural traditions of his homeland. “Our music system is Afro-Arab—we are a bridge, musically and culturally between Africa and the Middle East,” he said. “I wanted the Quartet to represent the sound of my instrument, the oud. The challenge was to make audible the overtones that only the musician can hear from a solo instrument—the ‘unheard’ voice. Amazingly, Kronos perform it as if they are from that place. 

“I was in New York when the Aswan Dam was finished. I lost my village. When I went back and saw my village and my people in a different place, I saw in their eyes the loss. I saw my people were lost. They had moved to an almost semi-desert place. When I came back I was lost myself. I was playing my oud, doing nothing except repeating a phrase. I was on the water wheel, the oldest surviving machine in our land. Whoever sits on that machine will become hypnotized by that noise. 

“Terry Riley introduced me to Kronos, who asked me to write a piece for them. They liked the idea of the water wheel. Everyone who sits behind the oxen which help the water wheel go round wil express himself according to his age. If it’s a child, he’ll sing a children’s song. If it’s a woman or a man, they’ll sing a love song. If it’s an older man, he’ll sing a religious song. I wrote this as the sound of the older man, so with Kronos it becomes a religious song.” 

“Escalay” is included on Kronos’ Nonesuch recording Pieces of Africa. Sheet music for “Escalay” is available in Volume 1 of the Kronos Collection, a performing edition published by Boosey & Hawkes. 

Note by Derk Richardson (courtesy of the Kronos Quartet).