for any number of performers
duration and tempo variable
Instructions to the performer(s)
– At any tempo, recite the names of 500 20th and 21st century musicians.
– The names may be free-associated and spoken in any order, but must not be memorized.
– Do not recite the names from a sheet of paper. Avoid risk-averting aide-memoires (projected text, cue cards, mnemonic memorization, audio piped into an in-ear monitor, etc.). The names should be familiar to you and embody music you know and love.
– Amplification is optional; speak (and/or sing) so your audience can hear you. Do a dry recitation only if it suits you; if the names (and/or concomitant associations) are beautiful to you, make them beautiful.
– Do not preface the performance with any comments or introductory notes. Just go. Optionally you may conclude your performance by stating “500 Icons. Thank you.”
– To count exactly to 500, you may enlist an assistant to give a discreet signal, or finger some pebbles (or beads) stashed in your pocket or devise any other furtive method to keep count cardinally. This is optional.
Notes 2006
Apart from indicating areas of interest, bias, expertise, adoration, and ignorance, 500 Icons offers a way for musicians to perform a musical autobiography, at once outlining, seeking, and improvising a musical genealogy or at least conveying the fecundity of 20th and 21st century music. A composition for musicians and others who love and know music, I hope the allusions and associations as well as the contrast of known and unknown names in 500 Icons will percolate in the ears of listeners and performers.
Postscript 2008
I did not know of Robert Ashley’s tape piece In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women when I composed 500 Icons, though in this work, the words are the music. 500 Icons is a close cousin carrying a debt to contemporary poets who employ inventories in their work, notably Vanessa Place, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Robert Fitterman as well as John Barton Wolgamot, and of course, the inclusion of evocative catalogues from the assorted lists (genealogies, laws, inventories, Temple dimensions, etc.) that permeate the Bible to various chapters harbored in Moby Dick (“Cetology,” “the Grand Armada,” “Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton”).
I believe 500 Icons to be most effective performed solo, however the score reads “for any number of performers” in case a group manages to realize the piece without devolving into competitive, name-dropping recitation, comical antiphonies, or other theatrical actions that defer attention from the names. Limiting names to 20th and 21st century musicians (composers, performers, improvisors, etc., I deliberately did not provide a definition) is a rhetorical tactic aimed at excavating the recent past; a performer who cannot name 500 Icons (or at least makes the attempt) is not likely to (be mature enough to) perform the piece anyway.
Documented performances by a single performer, especially over the course of several decades, of 500 Icons might prove useful to scholars as well. Accidental repetitions, mispronunciations, and flat-out failure by falling short of naming 500 Icons is not encouraged yet should be accepted—and in retrospect, welcomed by the performer.
Postscript 2020
A decade down, this piece has opened unexpected treasure. Many names named in my own performances have since died, several of them during the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. Written while the internet was becoming a stupefying catalog, 500 Icons may eventually harken back to a forgotten form of perception.
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When Daniel Sack sent me the score for Chris DeLaurenti’s “500 Icons,” the first thing I thought of is the list of names included in the gatefold notes for the Mothers of Invention’s first album, Freak Out! (1966). (Perhaps I made the connection because I was unconsciously reminded of the title of Frank Zappa’s 1971 film 200 Motels.) There are not 200 names on the list, more like 150, but I think the list could be regarded as a textual performance of “500 Icons.” Clearly, such a performance lacks the dimensions of “500 Icons” that relate it to performance art, endurance art in particular, but perhaps something of that experience passes on to the reader of the liner notes since reading a long list of familiar and unfamiliar names takes time and requires a certain commitment. I imagine that one of the hazards of performing “500 Icons” is the difficulty of avoiding repetition, which requires remembering which names one has already spoken. Although the context is different, the experience of reading a long list of names also involves the receding of the earlier names into (and perhaps out of) memory as one presses on.
At any rate, the intention behind the Mothers’ list seems to have been very close to DeLaurenti’s suggestion that an exhaustive list of names can constitute a musical autobiography or genealogy. It is an open question whether the list is an index to the group’s collective sensibility or primarily to that of Frank Zappa, the band’s leader and composer of all of the songs on the album. In violation of the interdiction of introductory remarks in the instructions for “500 Icons,” The Freak Out! list is headlined: “These People Have Contributed Materially in Many Ways to Make Our Music What it is. Please Do Not Hold it Against them.” By retroactively reframing this list as a performance of “500 Icons,” I am treating a set of program notes intended to elucidate a body of music in some way as music in itself.
As per the instructions for “500 Icons,” the list focuses on contemporary figures, including composers with experimental tendencies like Pierre Boulez (who would later conduct some of Zappa’s compositions for a recording), Mauricio Kagel, and Karlheinz Stockhausen alongside jazz musicians such as Eric Dolphy, Roland Kirk, and Charles Mingus. Given Zappa’s fondness for 1950s R&B, it is not surprising to find some prominent figures from the post-war Los Angeles scene, including saxophonist Big Jay McNeely and the musician and club owner Johnny Otis. The names of a number of West Coast radio disc jockeys also appear: Hunter Hancock, Wolfman Jack, and B. Mitchel Reed. Would they, should they count as “musicians”? Although DeLaurenti states that he “deliberately did not provide a definition” of the term musician, this statement follows immediately after the parenthetical list “composers, performers, improvisers, etc.” What does that etcetera make possible? Does it open the door as wide as does Christopher Small with his concept of “musicking,” outlined in the book Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998) in which virtually any relationship to the production or consumption of music makes one a “musicker” (my term, not Small’s)? Or would I have to argue that the composer of a piece in which “the words are the music” should be able to appreciate the rhythmic verbal art of the classic disc jockeys the Mothers name and be willing to count them as musicians?
More surprising, at least to me, than the presence of classical, jazz, and R&B musicians on the Mothers’ list are appearances by figures such as David Crosby and Joan Baez, whose folky earnestness might seem to be at odds with Zappa’s own snarky demeanor. In a way, this statement and the previous paragraph constitute an exercise in hermeneutics, since I am reading a list published over 50 years ago at the start of the Mothers of Invention’s career against a horizon formed by my knowledge of the entirety of Zappa’s eventual oeuvre and my sense of the musical persona he presented and refined over the years. As DeLaurenti suggests, such a persona can be defined autobiographically or genealogically, presenting the musician’s current identity as a sedimentation of past influences and associations, as does the Freak Out! list. At the same time, however, any performance of “500 Icons” is a presentation of musical identity in the present tense, as it stands right now, constituted through the act of performance itself.