Frog Peak Music (A Composer's Collective) began over 20 years ago in the Bay Area, the brainchild of Composers Larry Polansky and Jody Diamond. During these last two decades it has served as a model for the independent control and distribution of an eclectic range of experimental art music. Composers are invited to join the collective, and once they are members any music they choose to place with Frog Peak is guaranteed a home and a distributor for life. I recently sat down with Larry and Jody at a small restaurant near their home in Lebanon, New Hampshire to discuss Frog Peak's beginnings, as well as what's in store for the future.

Splendid: I thought the way we should start is for you to give us a little history of Frog Peak, where it came from and where it is today?

Larry Polansky: Well it's a good question. There's a kind of practical answer, which is that we just started it in the early '80s in the Bay area when we were working with a lot of composers and a lot of different types of technology, and it just seemed like a logical thing to do to take matters in our own hands and use appropriate, interesting, guerilla technologies to support experimental work. It's been going on for 20 some odd years now and it's gotten tremendously bigger, in terms of numbers of artists' work supported. But it deliberately has not grown much in terms of infrastructure -- that is, we try to keep it small and we've always used the word "sustainable" as a model. So small, appropriate technology, sustainable economy, sustainable technology. That's because we don't want to turn it into a full time business. We want it to be something that a couple of composers are doing more or less part time, so that we don't hate doing it, so that we can keep doing our work.

The longer answer is that at least I am aware, I think Jody is too, of the history of this kind of activity, and I'm particularly interested in the American history of it. There's a very conscious effort on our part to not so much mimic the history, but to be a part of it and extend it in various ways. In fact in some ways we're not even the current manifestation of it. I mean I think more of Web kind of activities, that are solely Web activities, as more the current stage. We're a sort of semi-previous stage but still fulfilling a pretty valuable function. But when we started it we were the next stage. I mean we took it into appropriate uses of computer technology. The Web, we were sort of coincident with the onset of the Web, and things like that -- you know, kind of cheap manufacture recordings and publication. I think one of Jody's main contributions to it was guerrilla technology but not bad design. Jody really dedicated herself to sort of like what the guys at Illegal Art do -- sort of a very specific, very beautiful, simple, design philosophy. We were noticing at the time -- this was the early '80s, so it was the heyday of things like FactSheet Five and OPtion, or OP actually -- a tremendous outpouring of technology that used cheap photocopying. At that time there weren't CDs, there was a lot of vinyl being pressed but again…

Jody Diamond: …cassettes…

Larry Polansky: Yeah, the cassette network was huge at that time. We were noticing that there was kind of a turn a page, change a font kind of design mentality -- you know, the typical first Macintosh posters you saw where everybody got MacDraw and you saw these posters with boxes floating around in the middle of nowhere and grayed-out areas…we were really dedicated to the idea of a simple, cheap design. Not to do sort of fine art small press…

Jody Diamond: …cheap but elegant…

Larry Polansky: …cheap but elegant. Open Space does that very beautifully too I think. But that was sort of part of it, that people would feel good about their work and we would just keep it out there. So that's the long and the short answer.

Jody Diamond: Just to add something about the design. I think our feeling about design actually came from (composer) Carter Scholz. He was a member of Frog Peak, but he was also the designer for a journal that I started, on Indonesian arts and International spinoffs, called Balungan. Carter was the designer for that and he showed me how much good design makes a difference in how people perceive things. So we thought it was important that the things we made didn't talk about the tools we used to make them, but talked about what the actual art content was. So you shouldn't pick up a score and say, "Oh this person uses Finale" or "This person has a Macintosh", but what are the musical ideas. So I kind of think the function of design is to get out of the way and make you think, "Oh, this person really knows what they're talking about, and I'm going to listen."

Larry Polansky: Great!

Splendid: Well the other question I have is about this American independent publishing culture that you are involved in. Perhaps you distinguish that from…I mean is this a peculiarly American thing, or is there something peculiarly American about it perhaps?

Larry Polansky: Well it's not uniquely American, obviously. I mean a group like Feedback from Germany is a good example of a similar kind of European metric, but it's definitely got an American flavor, and we're very American sort of artists. I think it has to do with a kind of frontier mentality here. Things in America are kind of on the fringe whether they want to be or not. We don't really have a choice of giant publishers. There are no big publishers in the United States, and the ones there are don't pay much attention to new music. So, whereas in Europe a composer might have much more of a shot at getting into a state publisher…like in the Netherlands…we don't have any Dutch composers because all Dutch composers are published whether they're famous or young. There's a state publisher and they publish everything…

Jody Diamond: …you mean Donemus?

Larry Polansky: Yeah, Donemus. Canada has the same thing, there are a lot of Canadian artists that would be perfect for Frog Peak, but they already have the Canadian Music Center which publishes everybody's work. There's nothing like that in the United States. There's no support of the arts. So there's been, consequently, a history of people publishing it themselves. I like to trace it from Billings, who was the first American publisher and also our first great composer I think, who published his own books because no one would go near them. And he wrote these diatribes about doing it yourself. Cage was also interested in that, although he later went with a big publisher, and so was Gaburo. Peter Garland is one of our direct predecessors, and in the early part of the century Arthur Farwell, who was a wonderful composer who started something called Wa-Wan Press with the expressed idea that American music was not being paid attention to, and specifically the modern stuff. He just went around the country on a train with a suitcase and sold the stuff. He also, by the way, out of 38 composers on Wa-Wan Press, 10 of them were women at around 1900. It's an amazing kind of history and we've been involved in so many of the fringe publication groups over the years, small journals, small record companies that we're sort of natural to be part of that world and to support it.

Jody Diamond: Frog Peak was started kind of in response to one part of the independent publishing mechanism, which was distribution. The really amazing thing about the development of independent publishing at the time we were doing it was that some of the real obstacles to publishing your own scores had been surmounted. So you didn't need giant blueprint machines and Osilid and you didn't need a publisher who said, "Well I think I can make money off of this piece but not this piece…" With the advent of the high-quality copy machine, that whole barrier was destroyed, which was really fantastic. So you had your own printing press, and then once the Macintosh showed up with desktop publishing and music writing software, then you didn't need the typesetters and printing presses anymore. So you could really make, under your own control and through your own artistic expression, you could make the thing, whatever the thing was. At that time cassettes were you know…you could make your own cassette, you could make a beautiful label, you could make a cover for it, we used the local copy store as like our printing department. The one thing that still wasn't quite clear how to crack was, once you make these things because you believe in them, how you get them from where you are to where other people are. You know you go somewhere and you do a gig and someone says, "Oh, I really love your music, can I get the score?" And then you have to go home and remember where the copy master was and save their address and, you know, can you afford the postage? And it was like all that stuff. So I think the formation of Frog Peak was partly in recognition that we'd gotten to the point where we could make our own stuff but that we still had to find a way to work together to give it legs so it could get around the world.

Splendid: So how was that problem surmounted by Frog Peak? What is it that Frog Peak does that makes that problem of the past as it were?

Larry Polansky: Again, it was a decision to use appropriate technologies. It really wasn't an issue of like making the stuff, because that was pretty easy -- it was question of just having it in one place where it could be sent out. So we became sort of a clearing house and we just invited all our friends to give us stuff that had been sitting on their shelves. And this was famous people like Lou Harrison and Anthony Braxton and Tenney, who were in exactly the same situation as some of my graduate students at Mills. So everybody kind of came together at a kind of a multi-level, which was nice. The other thing we decided was to eliminate the notion of what we call imprimatur in a lot of ways. We weren't, except for letting someone into the collective, and that was sort of based on not so much whether we loved their work or not, but whether we thought they were a nice person and they were generally in the spirit of how things work. Once we let them in we don't have anything to say about their work -- it's completely self-controlled. And that got rid of so much of the mechanics of publishing because we didn't have to approve things or comment on them or anything. It was just somebody sends us something and it's in. And the other thing I think was to get rid of the notion that we would have an imprimatur ourselves. That is we really struggled against becoming important, you know being used for people's vitas or things like that. We…it's really important for us that we keep a low profile and just serve as a way that people get the stuff. It's important that people know we exist and that they can get it from us but we really do our damnedest to work against any kind of phony or artificial imprimaturs. You don't want someone to say, "I'm published with Frog Peak. That gives me a certain credibility." We're very careful about that, don't you think?

Jody Diamond: Well I think the answer Larry gave you was actually the answer to several other important questions, like how do you become a member and…but I think the imprimatur has arisen of its own accord, not through our design, but through our perseverance and the people we have in. Now for some people, it is a big deal to be in Frog Peak. But I…you said what did we do to actually address the problem of distribution, and I want to clarify two things, which is that Frog Peak actually has two identities. First, it is itself a publisher. One of the first things we did was choose, edit and design a book that we believed in, that we would publish ourselves and it was subjected to our judgment and our own work and our own ideas about language and design. Also the CDs that we produce as Frog Peak CDs, we do make our own judgments about those. So in that sense Frog Peak is a publisher, except that we are an artist-run publisher. We do have things that we make and we control and we decide about.

Larry Polansky: That's true.

Jody Diamond: So we wanted to be a publisher. But the answer to the distribution question is that, that's the collective part. So we became a distributor of artists works in two categories. Artist-produced works, that is you made your own cassette, it's all finished, you send us 50 of them, we put them on the shelf and send them out when an order comes in. So that would be an artist-produced work. And the other category is an artist work that we take the responsibility of producing, but not judging in any way. That would be like a score where an artist sends a copy master, we store the copy master and when there's an order we send it out. So we really actually have those two roles (publisher and distributor) and we have all along. At that time we were quite postal. We made a catalog of everybody's work, we put everybody's name on the cover, we put Frog Peak stuff in there and we mailed out, like companies still do, less and less, but we mailed out hundreds of catalogs. Then we'd get a special item and we'd make a postcard and we'd mail out hundreds of postcards…

Splendid: So how do the Frog Peak CDs come about? These eight or so CDs that you guys have put out, many of which have been reviewed by Splendid -- how do they come about? Is it just sort of unique circumstances? Do you approach people, or how does that work?

Larry Polansky: Well, I think there are ten CDs and about ten books if you count everything that we've got. Those are the things that, Jody points out, we exercise an enormous amount of editorial control over. That's part of the bargain if somebody does a CD with us. We're in charge and we get to do it exactly the way we want to do it. As you say they've been special circumstances. We don't really do a CD if someone else can do it. I mean we're out to kind of fill the holes, so they're very, very special. A lot of them have been collaborative projects with lots and lots of people, or a group of artists that wanted to work together, or like the Randy Hostetler CD, which was a very unusual circumstance where you had this artist who had passed away and the work really needed to be kind of saved and his estate came to us and we seemed like the logical people to do that. Because we have no profit motive whatsoever -- I mean, we don't really care if we ever make a penny, we can just do things purely for artistic purposes. And I think that's how the CDs come about. If an artist wants to only concern themselves with the CD as an art-form, not as a product, then we're ideal for them. If they're interested in the product aspect of it, the selling of it, the representation of themselves as a performer, then we're not appropriate for them. For example, we won't even let artists put their pictures on the CDs and we discourage bios and things like that. We're really interested in the CDs and the books and allowing works to exist that didn't exist and really needed a place to exist. We say, "A home for artists' work", and that's a kind of good analogy, don't you think?

Jody Diamond: Yeah, and I was just kind of thinking that while we thought we'd really solved the distribution problem, it was like, okay, you put it all together in one place, you make a big list, you decide on a price, you put the postage on, it's really clear how to get it…the next piece, the piece that goes with that, that we don't work so hard on, that we expect artists to work on, is the promotion piece. So it's like we have a way for it to be distributed but we rely on member artists for people to know to a great extent that we're the place to get the work. And that was kind of the idea…

Larry Polansky: …availability over promotion…

Jody Diamond: …availability over promotion. We just really believe that certain things deserve to exist. That's the bottom line and we want to help them exist and that's where our satisfaction comes.

Splendid: So the focus of Frog Peak, the collective and so forth, is really experimental music and not other forms. Maybe you could talk about that a little. I mean, what's experimental to you? What makes something appropriate for Frog Peak as opposed to something else?

Larry Polansky: That's obviously a pretty gray area, and any answer will be unsatisfactory. I mean, even terms like experimental music and independent music mean so many different things to so many different people. I guess the most honest answer for Frog Peak, and I think it would be for almost any such venture, is that it comes out of a community of like-minded artists, or friends, or friends of friends. We're not out there to find every example of such an idiom or genre. We mostly grow like a town would grow. That is, friends say, "Hey we think this person's interesting" and we think they're interesting too, and they come in. So it's a difficult decision. I mean to say something's experimental is sort of a loose…(we are interrupted by nosy waiter who thinks he recognizes Larry and Jody)…so I think that we're 40-ish something people and maybe other composers on Frog Peak are older, much older. To say something's experimental…we don't have a lot of 20-year-olds on Frog Peak, just because we don't…

Jody Diamond: …it doesn't mean we wouldn't like some…

Larry Polansky: …we'd love some, we have some, but it tends to travel with a community and with friends and with people we know. We actively look for it and we travel around and ask for people but it's hard. First of all a young person might not have the kind of body of work that would be appropriate for Frog Peak. If you've only got two scores, I mean, we'll still take them if we feel they're interesting, but it tends mostly to be people who have a lot of work that needs a home now.

Jody Diamond: I think Frog Peak artists all have a common aesthetic, a personal aesthetic more than a musical one, which is that they're more interested that their stuff exists and is available than they are whether they make money from it or not. The urge to create something so that it will make money, I think, doesn't drive many of the people that we work with…

Larry Polansky: …prestige too, I mean I want to say that. There are a lot of composers out there who would want to be in this kind of thing not so much out of a belief in their art as sort of a stamp on their art to be used for purposes which I'm not all that interested in, like tenure or something like that. We tend to shy away from being an academic stamper or imprimatur. I think one of the main criteria for people is that we like them personally. We have to work with them so closely, and we depend on their good will not to bug us too much and for us not to bug them because we're so small and we just do our muddling best to get this stuff out there. If we've got someone who's going to be driving us nuts, we tell them to go somewhere else. And one of the original motives for Frog Peak, and I'm not sure this is still operable, was to be an example for other people. We were saying, "Look we can do this in our back room, so can you! So if you think your music doesn't fit here then start your own and we'd like you to do that and we'll show you how to do it." We were very open about our techniques and methods; we still are. The idea was that it should be a very pluralistic, democratic kind of enterprise and that style or aesthetic shouldn't matter much. I mean nobody…it's just energy…whoever feels like working hard enough to…if you're a bunch of serial composers, you know, start your own and put out your own serial music collective and that's great we'll help you do it in a way…

Jody Diamond: I think another key word is perseverance. We really admire people who just keep doing it, you know? Without even looking too much at what they do. But that's the hardest thing, and in some ways the most important thing about being an artist is to not stop working. Things come and go and you work and don't work but for me a lot of what defines someone as an artist is that they don't give up.

Larry Polansky: Yeah, that's true.

Splendid: So we've got a pretty good picture of things Frog Peak-wise, is there anything you'd like to give us in terms of a summary or concluding statement?

Jody Diamond: I think for me that the most important phrase, when I'm describing to someone who wants to become a member of Frog Peak, is that we take people and not pieces. To me that's really key, and it's unlike anything that a regular publisher would do. So out of all the things we've been discussing, you know, respect for somebody's perseverance, kind of commonality of vision about what making art is about. We take a person into the collective out of respect for them as artists, and once they're in, as Larry said, we don't ever judge their work or look at it. They can send bottles of olive oil, which we have. They can send little plastic boxes full of seaweed, which we have. They can send books that light up in the middle when you open them, which we have. Pieces of paper that they found in the street and signed their name to, which we also have (laughing)! So the idea is that once we've sort of baselined and said, "Okay, we respect you as an artist, you're in", then anything the artist wants to put in Frog Peak is taken in. Mostly CDs, books, scores, writings, some art objects…but the idea is that it's a permanent home for the artist's work as wide as that work might care to become.

Larry Polansky: Well, I think what's almost the most important thing to me about Frog Peak, and the reason I started it with Jody, is it's almost a moral or ethical or quasi-spiritual obligation to tithe a certain amount of your time and effort to the works of other people. So as a composer you benefit, as a person, and I think as a composer, if you're not always thinking about yourself and getting your work out there and promoting yourself. It seemed like given my personality, for various reasons, the nicest way to do that was to kind of have an open dinner party. It's like when someone moves to your neighborhood and you invite them over to dinner and make them feel a little more at home, and the next day they feel like they actually live there. I noticed that there was a real sense, and I think there still is, in American artists, especially composers, that they don't live anywhere. You know, you've got some guy in Oklahoma and he could be great, he could be awful, we don't know, but he doesn't feel like he belongs anywhere. There's no state funding, there's no national interest in new music, there's no Tulsa new music festival he can hang out at. I thought it might be kind of nice to construct a home, if only a virtual one -- a home where many of our artists could just say, "I know I'm a composer because I'm part of this group of composers." And that's not much, but it could be very, very important to a lot of people, and it has been. That seemed like a commodious and manageable thing to offer people. I couldn't support them, I couldn't give them money, I couldn't do festivals of their work, but I could say, "For the rest of your life, your work will have these five lines in a catalog that lots of people will see and you will be a composer and your work will be gettable."

Jody Diamond: What Larry was just saying reminds me of a term that's in use in Australia. We spent six months in Melbourne in '96, which was really fantastic, and when people talk about being a composer, they have another term -- they call it being a music maker. By which they don't mean making sounds, but they mean creating the context in which your work will exist. So to them a music maker is someone who is not only a composer, who makes music, but who also puts on concerts or convinces a gallery to host something or writes about music. Because our work is, hopefully, new, and doesn't have a place in the world yet, part of our job is to also make it a place in this world and kind of define it. So I like to think of Frog Peak as a music maker in that sense.