Tim Rutherford-Johnson, 2023
New Spaces, New Times: New Music since 1973

The last fifty years have likely been some of the most creatively rich and diverse in musical history. There are many reasons for this: an expansion and increase in institutions and organisations (including the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation) devoted to music’s funding and creation; the rapid growth of the recording industry; the proliferation and cross-pollination of musical genres; the gradual (yet still incomplete) entry of artists of all ethnicities, genders and social classes into the concert hall; and the spread of aesthetics, technology and teaching around the world thanks to study grants, mass and online media, and affordable international travel. Rather than attempt – inadequately – to describe that diversity, this essay will take a partial approach. Its guide will be Manuel Castells’ seminal book The Information Age, and particularly its first volume, The Rise of the Network Society. ¹ Manuel Castells, The Information Age, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).   This is for three reasons. First, Castells’ analysis covers the period from the early 1970s to the turn of the millennium, and so conveniently overlaps with our period of study. Second, Castells’ focus is the intersection between the birth and widespread adoption of information technology and the globalisation of the world economy, two forces that – I have argued elsewhere ² Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Music after the Fall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2017).   – have been significant in shaping the music of recent years. And third, and most important, the structural changes that Castells identifies as characteristic of the Information Age are ones that we can see mirrored in the music of the same period. Using selected examples, this essay will point to some of the ways in which those social changes were reflected in the music that accompanied them.

(„space of places“)Any year in history can appear significant, but 1973 – and a year or two either side of it – seems especially notable for the challenges it presented to social norms and institutions (at least in the West). As an illustration it will do just to list a few of the year’s notable events, chosen from several different realms. This is of course a selective list (much else happened in 1973 that I do not mention here), but taken together these moments point to the emergence, interaction and coherence of new forms of social, political and economic organisation, which in turn would inevitably inspire new imaginative constructions in music. To begin with, it was a year that saw two significant moments in the early history of the information and communication technologies that define our lives today. In April, the Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first public call (to his Bell Labs rival, Joel S. Engel) using a handheld mobile phone; and in summer, computer scientists Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf designed the digital communication protocols TCP/IP, which form the basis of the modern internet.(„space of flows“)The emergence of such technologies – as well as the first commercially affordable computer microprocessors, produced two years earlier – marks for Castells the beginning of the Information Age. Together with desktop computing, which arrived just a few years later, they precipitated two important changes in the structure of society. The first is the gradual replacement of the ‘space of places’ – the realm of fixed and centralised organisations and institutions that make up the real world(„timeless time“) – by a virtual, ‘space of flows’, constructed across and among interlocking digital networks. ³ Both terms are used throughout The Information Age but were introduced by Castells in an earlier work, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).   The second is ‘timeless time’, which Castells identifies in phenomena as diverse as the instantaneous transactions of financial markets and the arrhythmicising impacts of birth control and reproductive medicine on the traditional life-cycle.

Together, the space of flows and timeless time eliminate the reliable, centralised authorities of spatial location and temporal sequence the Walkmanby which we hitherto organised our lives. In their absence, Castells writes, subjective experience becomes ‘the main, and sometimes the only, source of meaning’. ⁴ Castells, I:3. . flow, timelessness and the subjective organisation of both Another invention of the era – the Sony Walkman, introduced in 1979 – exemplifies the effect. As the first portable, personal music player, the Walkman enabled a wholly private, mobile mode of listening. ⁵ Shuhei Hosokawa, ‘The Walkman Effect’, Popular Music 4 (1984): 165–180, and, for a twenty-first century update, Michael Bull, Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience (New York: Routledge, 2007).   For the first time it was possible to mix listening with quotidian, nonmusical acts such as shopping, jogging or riding the bus: one’s private actions could acquire a unique soundtrack, and music could be used as a means of emotional and physical regulation. The three characteristics of the Information Age – flow, timelessness and the subjective organisation of both – were thus brought together in a single object. Notably, music provided the medium in which all three were submerged.

Such transformations were not confined to the realms of information and communication. Castells describes the Information Age as ‘characterised by a widespread destructuring of organisations, delegitimation of institutions, fading away of major social movements, and ephemeral cultural expressions’, and these features can be traced across numerous other events of 1973. ⁶ Castells, I:3.   On 1 January, for example, a major act of political decentralisation took place as Denmark, Ireland and the UK joined the European Economic Community. In the same month, American hegemony was seriously challenged for the first time since the end of the Second World War as the Paris Peace Accords effectively ended its military involvement in Vietnam. At home, President Richard Nixon was becoming increasingly embroiled in the Watergate scandal that would lead to his resignation in August 1974 and a major discrediting of the President’s authority. And in another story with resonances today, Egypt and Syria launched the Yom Kippur War against Israel, permanently altering relations in the Middle East. The oil embargo subsequently imposed on Israel’s supporters by OAPEC ended the West’s long period of postwar prosperity and ushered in the present era of globalisation as national economies and corporations restructured themselves against future shocks.

The early 1970s also saw the first fruits of the modern environmental movement. Following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, the Nixon administration formed the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, which in 1972 banned the use of the controversial pesticide DDT (a major topic of Carson’s book). As a global campaign movement gathered pace in the wake of these achievements, environmental, or ‘green’ political parties began to be formed. The first such national party in Europe, the UK’s People Party, was founded in – again – 1973. A precursor to the present-day Green Party, the People Party took as its inspiration A Blueprint for Survival, written by Edward Goldsmith and Robert Allen, which advocated for a future society based upon small, deindustrialised communities: decentralisation here advanced as a requirement for mankind’s survival.

Two major architectural achievements of 1973 – both opened in October that year – also reflected shifts away from Euro-centric to more globalised perspectives. The Sydney Opera House, designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon, helped transform the image of Australia as an international destination and helped rebalance of international cultural flows away from the traditional centres of Europe. Differently, the opening of the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul created a new transport link between Europe and Asia, accelerating the intercontinental flow of people, goods, and trade. But perhaps the ultimate act of decentralisation took place on 14 May when NASA launched Skylab, the USA’s first space station: the beginning of a journey to live independently of the Earth itself.

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That the Ernst von Siemens Musikpreis was founded in the midst of this period of change and turmoil only makes the name of its first winner all the more striking. In 1973, Benjamin Britten was ripe for the sort of ‘lifetime achievement’ recognition that the Musikpreis bestows: a unique international voice, a man who had transformed his nation’s musical culture (seemingly forever), and a composer with numerous significant works for the stage and concert hall to his name. Yet viewed from today’s vantage point, Britten appears one of the last major figures of the Classical- Romantic tradition. As Martin Hürlimann’s laudatio for the composer put it, ‘He knows about the currents of the time, but does not subscribe to any theory.’ Hence one’s surprise at seeing him at the head of a list that also includes Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Helmut Lachenmann, Brian Ferneyhough and Rebecca Saunders. Among those prizewinning composers who came after Britten, maybe only Leonard Bernstein can be said to have breathed the same air. As much as Britten’s award marked a beginning, then – the inauguration of a prestigious new honour for the world’s leading composers – it also marked the end of certain kind of postwar spirit. Britten himself died just two years later. As the space of flows replaced the space of places, so the era of Britten – and of Peter Grimes, the War Requiem, Gloriana and A Ceremony of Carols – faded into history. Likewise, the linear constructions of Britten’s music, with their clear landmarks and points of climax and resolution, were superseded by non-teleological musical logics.

In fact, a musical space of flows had already been devised in the parametrical thinking of the serial, electronic and aleatory practices of the 1950s and 60s. One of the key musical innovations of the mid-twentieth century, The notes themselves are thus reimagined as emergent properties of the network, rather than ‘places’ within the hierarchical structures of harmony and meter.parametrical thinking considers individual notes no longer as ‘places’ within the wider landscape of common practice tonality, but as unique combinations of different musical parameters, such as pitch, duration, volume and timbre. With each parameter establishing an axis of some sort (a range of durations, for example, or the notes of a chromatic scale), lines of relative contrast or similarity can be created between notes across several dimensions. The notes themselves are thus reimagined as emergent properties of the network, rather than ‘places’ within the hierarchical structures of harmony and meter. The different parameters become lines of flow: loud to soft, high to low, left to right, a flute to a marimba, and so on.

Evidence of the musical landscapes that parametrical thinking made possible can be seen in the composer who won the Musikpreis the year after Britten: Olivier Messiaen. Often credited with originating the parametrical idea (through his Quatre études de rhythme of 1949–1950), Messiaen constructed an entire musical language around a non-linear, non-teleological view of time. ‘Elimination of sequencing creates undifferentiated time’, Castells writes, ‘which is tantamount to eternity’; ⁷ Castells, I:494. and as Paul Griffiths has shown in a book-length study, Messiaen’s conceptions of harmony, rhythm and melody were turned towards much the same end: ‘sublimely indifferent to [the Western tradition’s] principal axioms of diatonic harmony, meter, forward motion expressed as development, and an interdependence of rhythm and pitch structure’. For this reason, Griffiths adds, Messiaen is ‘the first great composer whose works exist entirely after, and to a large degree apart from, the Western tradition’ ⁸ Paul Griffiths, Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), p. 15. . With its decoupled parameters and dismantled hierarchies, Messiaen’s is the quintessential music of a timeless time.

Messiaen’s search for musical eternity was inspired not by social, economic or technological currents, however, but the mysteries of his profound Catholic faith. Yet by the early 1970s the transformations of time and space that Castells diagnoses were clearly being reflected in the music of the time. A cross-section of major works composed either side of 1973 illustrates the point: the multi-temporal portrait of the poet Hart Crane of Elliott Carter’s A Symphony of Three Orchestras (1976); the strange mobile of Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel (1971), whose circular logic Feldman resolves only by the intervention of himself: a ‘quasi-Hebraic’ melody he composed as a teenager; ⁹ Morton Feldman, ‘Rothko Chapel’, in Give my Regards to Eighth Street, ed. B.H. Friedman (Cambridge: Exact Change, 2000), p. 126.   the intensely personal echoes upon echoes of Luigi Nono’s … sofferte onde serene … (1976); the individualistic rituals of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Trans (1971) and Inori (1974); and the looping, non-linear tableau of Harrison Birtwistle’s The Triumph of Time (1971), described by one writer as ‘concerned with [a] timeless time’ in which ‘Time passes and yet time appears to stand still’ – ideas that Birtwistle would return to throughout his career. ¹⁰ Jonathan Cross, Harrison Birtwistle: Man, Mind, Music (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p. 175.   All of these place notions of subjective identity and experience within the parametrical space of flows enabled by serialism. Yet it is in four other works that we can see the main musical trends that would dominate the new music of the Information Age in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century.

Cassandra’s Dream Song for solo flute (1971) is Brian Ferneyhough’s first major experiment in the soloistic, ‘complexist’ manner for which he is renowned: a space of mutually contradictory parametrical flows – a polyphony of polyphonies of pitch, rhythm, timbre and dynamic all pulling in different directions at once. Like our Walkman owner above, Ferneyhough’s performer (and listener) must create their own meaning from the midst of these, by way of their own journey through that space. In Partiels (1975, the best known and most iconic piece from the cycle Les Espaces acoustiques), Gérard Grisey views the same concerns from the opposite direction. Rather than pursuing lines of flow from within a complex web, Grisey generates complexity out of a single timbre – in this case, a low trombone E – whose lines of flow he follows to their furthest extent, gradually deconstructing the sound of the ensemble into harmonic and rhythmic patterning, noise and finally absurdist theatre. Helmut Lachenmann’s Pression (1969–1970), meanwhile, realises the parametrical space in physical terms, abstracting the ‘pressure’ of its title as a line of force moving into or against something, which the composer then develops into a range of different lines of force across the cello: not only the pressure of the cellist’s bow or fingers on the strings, but also the movement of her fingers or bow up and down the strings, the movement of the bow across the strings, and even the movement of the fingers along the bow. Finally, Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (1974–1976) radically limits the parametrical space to harmonically static, repeating pulse patterns that express a flat, self-similar landscape of pure flow.

Although the social, political and cultural changes of the Information Age could already be identified in the 1970s, it would be more than a decade before their implications were widely adopted. Before the 1990s, the internet was still a niche technology, with only limited academic and military applications. Desktop computing and mobile communication remained the preserves of the wealthy and had not reached widespread adoption. As such, the cultural impact of information technology was relatively minor: new technologies always take time to diffuse throughout an economy, notes Castells, because they also require the culture, institutions and processes of that economy to change in order … originally called the ‘Mesh’ and later christened the ‘World Wide Web’.to maximise their potential. ¹¹ Castells, I:85.   Those changes accelerated after 1989, however, thanks to the publication of Tim Berners- Lee’s proposal for a universal system of hyperlinked documents – originally called the ‘Mesh’ and later christened the ‘World Wide Web’. ¹² Tim Berners-Lee, ‘Information Management: A Proposal’, March 1989, available at https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html.   When the Web was officially launched in 1991 it became the primary tool by which the internet was popularised, and the transformations implicit in it could be fully realised.

The list of works described above indicates the extent to which aspects of the network society that was beginning to emerge in the 1970s were finding their way into different areas of the musical avant garde. Yet – like the internet itself – it was not until the 1990s that their innovations were widely adopted and imitated. This is particularly true of Reich and Grisey, whose minimalism and spectralism have become two of the most popular idioms of contemporary concert music of the last twenty years. Witness the prevalence on concert programmes of music by, for example, John Adams, Philip Glass or Reich himself; or by Georg Friedrich Haas, Magnus Lindberg and Kaija Saariaho. The sonic and performative challenges of Lachenmann’s and Ferneyhough’s music have received less widespread popular acceptance among audiences, but among composers their legacies are perhaps even more influential, as evidenced by the music of composers from Chaya Czernowin, Beat Furrer and Rebecca Saunders to Richard Barrett, Liza Lim and Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, as well as of the younger generations who have come after them. Such impact and popularity depends not only on the quality and innovation of the music but also a surrounding infrastructure. This includes a corpus of performers specialised within certain musical practices (this had already begun with the founding of ensembles such as the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble intercontemporain and Ensemble Modern but reached greater heights of specialism in the 1980s through groups such as Australia’s ELISION, founded in 1986; the USA’s Bang on a Can, founded in 1987; and Germany’s Ensemble Musikfabrik, founded in 1990); teaching spaces (such as IRCAM’s International Cursus Program for Composition and Computer Music, inaugurated in 1990); and record labels (such as ECM’s New Series, launched in 1984; the UK’s NMC Recordings, launched in 1989; and KAIROS, launched in 1999).

The impact of the internet itself on music has been vast – not least on the ways in which music is distributed and consumed, and how its creators are remunerated (or not). But its effects on the aesthetics of music can also be clearly seen. As the innovations of the 1970s entered the mainstream, so new avant-gardes rose to engage with the newer manifestations of the digital age. Most obviously related to the net is the genre of networked music that originated in the radio and telephone experiments of Maryanne Amacher, Alvin Curran and Max Neuman of the 1960s and 70s but found its natural home online: representative works include William Duckworth’s Cathedral (1997), Randall Packer’s Telemusic #1 (2000), and Pauline Oliveros and Alan Courtis’s Telematic Concert (2009). Yet the impact of the internet on music-making extends beyond the use of the technology itself. As the curator Nicholas Bourriaud, who has written extensively on the impact of digital technology within the visual arts, observes, ‘The computer as object is of very little importance compared to the new forms it generates’. ¹³ Nicholas Bourriaud, The Radicant (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2009), p. 133–134.

The point can be illustrated by a closer look at another cross-section of composers: Peter Ablinger, Anthony Braxton and Jennifer Walshe. Again, this list is necessarily selective, but together these three offer an overview of contrasting ways in which the forms that emerged in the 1970s and 80s were developed under the conditions of the digital era of the 1990s and early twenty-first century.

The total output of Ablinger, for example, can be regarded as a network itself, and this impression is strengthened when one spends time on his sprawling website, with its intermittently hyperlinked pages, random pathways and frequent dead ends. The principal interests of Ablinger’s music are noise, silence, environmental sound, transcription and perception: these are the flows (or parameters) of his work, with individual pieces existing as nodes where groups of these intersect. So, for example, Listening Piece in Four Parts (2001) comprises a four-by-five arrangement of chairs set out in sonically interesting and contrasting environments noise, silence,
environmental sound,
transcription and
perception– a beach, a suburban baseball field, a city carpark and a beside a wind farm. For the Quadraturen series (1995–2000), environmental sounds are recorded first, then transcribed onto a grid of pitches and durations to produce a sort of pixelated approximation for realisation on acoustic instruments. The same technique is used in Piano and Record (2012), but this time the source sound is a blank (i. e. silent) LP: the piano transcription makes music out of the incidental sounds of static pop and crackle, and the AC hum of the record player. And in the Studien nach der Natur (1995–2002), the environmental sounds (a motorway, the sea, a mosquito, etc.) are not present at all, but are imitated by a vocal sextet from a written score.

The output of saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton is similarly interconnected, but this time the lines of flow are between other works within his catalogue. With his quartet of the 1980s (with pianist Marilyn Crispell, drummer Gerry Hemingway and bassist Mark Dresser), Braxton developed a method of creating whole concerts out of collages of overlapping compositional frameworks (something like the way a club DJ will mix records, but with considerably greater flexibility). Some works were played by the whole group, in sequence, while others would be played simultaneously by different members, either whole or more often in fragments. With the Ghost Trance Music series, developed between 1995 and 2006, this idea is taken still further. These pieces are based on a form of endless melody (often notated over many pages) that serves as a kind of musical highway (or ‘metaroad’ ¹⁴ See Graham Lock, Forces in Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-reality of Creative Music (London: Quartet Books, 1988).   along which different symbols indicate the various diversions, off-ramps or intersections that might be taken: into other pages of score, for example; into a different compositional system; or into a new work entirely from elsewhere in Braxton’s oeuvre, including other Ghost Trance pieces. It is a system that is designed ‘to put the player in the driver’s seat’, according to the violinist and concertmaster of Braxton’s Tri- Centric Foundation Orchestra Erica Dricker, ‘drawing his or her intentions into the navigation of the performance, determining the structure of the performance itself’ ¹⁵ Erica Dicker, ‘Ghost Trance Music’, Sound American 16 (n.d.), http://archive.soundamerican.org/ sa_archive/sa16/sa16-ghost-trance-music.html. . Ghost Trance Music is ‘Learn to skateboard, however primitively’ quintessentially music as a space of flows: in which any point on the landscape can be transformed instantaneously into any other.

Although THIS IS WHY PEOPLE O.D. ON PILLS/AND JUMP FROM THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE (2004) by Jennifer Walshe is a relatively early work of hers (Walshe’s musical aesthetic may be better grasped through larger pieces such as EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT, (2016), for voice, string quartet and film, or the multimedia opera for nine performers TIME TIME TIME (2019)), it offers one of the purest studies of flow in twenty-first-century music. Its score begins with the instruction, ‘Learn to skateboard, however primitively’. The text that follows concerns studying real and imaginary skating environments, and constructing a mental impression of how it would feel to skateboard through them. This journey – with its conflicting lines flow and friction, balance and gravity – is then translated through the player’s instrument, using just a single pitch so as to maximize attention on the physical forces being conveyed.

All three composers offer examples of the parametricallyThe only ‘place’ was a screen. Everything was everywhere, all at once, forever. organised space of flows, but extended and elaborated in ways that were enabled (if not yet anticipated) by the composers of the 1970s. All three elaborations reflect the greater extent to which the structures of the information age had penetrated everyday consciousness by the start of the twenty-first century. We can also see in them a fuller presence of the subjective self as an aesthetic and structuring principle. The musical qualities of Ablinger’s listening pieces are constructed entirely in the minds of their listeners, while the transcriptional processes of Quadraturen or Piano and Record critique the fundamental notion of objective listening. Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music encourages liquid reorganisations of form around the in-the-moment decisions of its players (to say nothing of its dependence on a musical landscape that originates exclusively in the career of Braxton himself). And Walshe’s soloist constructs music from out of the ultimate subjective experience of physical flow: the carves and curves of an imagined skateboard journey.

And where now for the space of flows? In many ways, the network society Castells envisaged only arrived fully with the Covid-19 pandemic. No longer confined to the elite and esoteric worlds of finance and industry, the space of flows entered our homes. Boundaries were dissolved between public and domestic, work and home, self and screen. Corona-time was a truly timeless time: an era without future or past, only an endless now. This was true not only in emotional terms (without the organizing influence of appointments, social engagements and celebrations we all felt the sense of every day becoming the same) but in practical ones too: concerts, films, theatre could all be streamed at whim, with no need for scheduling; ‘meetings’ arranged online could take place instantaneously, without the need for travel between locations. The only ‘place’ was a screen. Everything was everywhere, all at once, forever.

Inevitably, music reflected these intensifications. To highlight a few examples among hundreds, consider the timeless, spaceless collaborations of Richard Barrett’s Binary Systems (2020) ¹⁶ Richard Barrett, with Daryl Buckley, Ivana Grahovac, Lori Freedman, Anne La Bergh and Lê Quan Ninh, binary systems (self-released, 2021), https://richardbarrett.bandcamp.com/album/binary-systems.   and Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa)’s Jazz Codes (2022) ¹⁷ Moor Mother, Jazz Codes (ANTI-, 2022), https://moormother.bandcamp.com/album/jazz-codes.   two albums created from short solo recordings by other performers, which then became source material for entirely new compositions. Or the close-to-home sound spaces of Sylvia Hallett’s Tree Time (string instruments made of the overgrown forest next door) ¹⁸ Sylvia Hallett, Tree Time (self-released, 2020), https://sylviahallett.bandcamp.com/album/tree-time.  and Laura Cannell’s Antiphony of the Trees (dialogues with back garden birdsong), ¹⁹ Laura Cannell, Antiphony of the Trees (Brawl, 2020), https://brawlrecords.bandcamp.com/album/antiphonyof-the-trees.   and the aimless internet screenscapes of Alexander Schubert’s Browsing, Idling, Investigating, Dreaming. ²⁰ ‘Alexander Schubert: Browsing, Idling, Investigating, Dreaming’, Bastard Assignments, YouTube, 16 June 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAhaYcA9zuQ.   Or the blending of composer and performer, to a degree perhaps not seen since the eighteenth century, necessitated by lockdown and quarantine regulations: in her apartment/recording studio, with the redundant props of her stage performances in the background; ²¹ ‘The Quarantine Concerts – Pamela Z – June 27, 2020’, Experimental Sound Studio, YouTube, 11 July 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM9_mACgsuY.   Nomi Epstein’s Object Relations, in which the space and objects of her home are explored alongside non-diegetic and then diegetic performances of recording of her Solo for Piano, part 2: Dyads; ²² ‘Gray Sound Sessions, Vol. 7, Act 1: Nomi Epstein’, Gray Center, YouTube, 24 June 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM2_wbDgXCY.   and Tim Parkinson’s restaging of the first scene of his opera Time with People for a pair of Playmobil toy figures. ²³ ‘The Quarantine Concerts – Angharad Davies/Tim Parkinson – April 19, 2020’, Experimental Sound Studio, YouTube, 23 April 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pisiDTT0gk.

What consequences this latest reconfiguration of our times and spaces will have for music made in the next 50 years, we cannot say. ‘All major social changes are ultimately characterized by a transformation of space and time in human experience’, writes Castells in his Preface to The Information Age. ²⁴ Castells, I:xxxi.   No doubt music, as the quintessential art of both space and time, will be transformed too, as it always has been.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson

is a new music critic and journalist whose books include Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Contemporary Culture since 1989 and The Music of Liza Lim. He lives in West Sussex with his family and other critters.