Composer Elodie Lauten has consulted the I Ching–the ancient Chinese “Book of Changes”–every day since 1975. “At this point,” she says, “I no longer have to consult the book for the reading.” Composer John Cage made the I Ching famous among musicians by throwing coins to arrive at random procedures for his music. Lauten, however, is more interested in the oracle’s meanings than in its randomness. In her Tronik Involutions she depicts 12 of the book’s hexagrams in music that’s mellow, modal, detuned, rhythmic, cosmically expressive. On Saturday she’ll play that music in her first-ever Chicago appearance.
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For years Lauten has been one of the best-kept secrets of New York’s new-music scene. Daughter of jazz drummer and pianist Erroll Parker (a Duke Ellington sideman), she was born in Paris and moved to New York in the early 1970s, where she found herself in the midst of a whirlwind drug-music-poetry scene. She worked with Allen Ginsberg and was one of the few musicians to study with that guru of sustained drones, La Monte Young. Fronting an all-female band called Flaming Youth, she shaved her head before such a thing was heard of, and performed at CBGB next to the Ramones and Talking Heads. With her video opera The Death of Don Juan–a powerful feminist statement despite its muted, mystical ambiguity–she emerged as a premiere postminimalist composer.
More often, Lauten begins by improvising at the piano, but her improvisations succeed because so much prior thought goes into them. On Lauten’s wall in Albuquerque hang elegant diagrams that form a basis for her music. Color coded and illustrated, the charts correlate the months of the year to the 12 keys of the scale, the astrological signs, and selected hexagrams from the I Ching. For all her immersion in the New York rock world, she’s a musical magus in the Renaissance tradition, with a philosophy of correspondences like that of Pico della Mirandola or Robert Fludd. “I don’t know how it comes,” she says. “I don’t force it. That’s why I compose so slowly. I just have to wait. When it comes, I put the first take in the computer, and then I can manipulate it. I work from that.”
