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Anthony Braxton: “Open Aspect #4”

From the album Open Aspects (Duo) (1982)

In a prolific career in which he has collaborated with innumerable musicians and released over 100 recordings, Anthony Braxton has staked out a unique stylistic position between the post-bebop/free jazz tradition and the experimental and improvisatory approaches to music associated with the Euro-American avant-garde. His work is representative of the collapse of conventional boundaries of musical genre in the second half of the twentieth century, but it also testifies to the enduring power of these boundaries: avant-garde listeners are unlikely to encounter Braxton in standard texts or class syllabi, while many jazz musicians and aficionados disown his work as beyond the pale.

In addition to being a composer and multi-instrumentalist, Braxton is also an intrepid writer and theorist.  His understanding of his role in the musical macrosystem is expressed in the three categories of “tri-vibrational dynamics”: traditionalism, stylism, and restructuralism.  Traditionalism is based on the maintenance of old cultural forms, as exemplified by most museums and symphony orchestras.  Stylism is the attempt to “perfect” past experimental tendencies, making them palatable for mainstream cultural consumption.  (Braxton compares “stylists” to technocrats.)  Finally, restructuralism is the effort to fundamentally reshape and evolve the artistic medium.  Although Braxton aligns his own music with the last of these categories— “My music, my life’s work, will ultimately challenge the very foundations of Western value systems, that’s what’s dangerous about it”— he believes that a balance of all three is necessary for a well-ordered cultural ecosystem.

Open Aspects is a set of pieces in collaboration with composer Richard Teitelbaum, formerly of the free improvisation collective Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV), with whom Braxton played briefly in 1970.  On this album, Braxton plays alto and sopranino saxophone, accompanied by Teitelbaum on Moog synthesizer and microcomputer.  All the pieces are completely improvised. In this example, the relationship between these two sound elements is ambivalent: while Braxton’s playing is undeniably in the foreground, Teitelbaum’s electronics provide a textural dimension that is at once supportive of the solo part and strangely indifferent to it.

September 03, 2010, 10:17am

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Herbert Eimert: “Tone mixture”

From the album Einführung in die elektronische Musik (1963)

[This is a collaborative post with Continuo’s Weblog.  After listening to this example, head over to Continuo’s, where you can download the full album (320 kbps MP3 vinyl rip with scanned liner notes) and read some historical background on Herbert Eimert.]

Einführung in die elektronische Musik (Introduction to Electronic Music) belongs to a fascinating category of musical-didactic hybrid that emerged in the wake of the first electronic music studios around 1950.  In presenting what could be called a taxonomy of electronic sound, these albums were intended to sensitize listeners to the new musical material of recorded and synthetic sounds, as opposed to the familiar gestural language (whether tonal or post-tonal) of vocal and instrumental music. Albums such as this can be seen as the modern analogs to the 19th-century orchestration treatise, which, which sought to systematically represent all the sound-production possibilities of the symphony orchestra.

Perhaps the best-known representative of this genre is the wonderful Solfege de l’objet sonore of Pierre Schaeffer, which was released in 1967 to accompany Schaeffer’s psychoacoustic magnum opus Traite de les objets sonores.  Some other examples include Herbert Brün’s Über Musik und zum Computer (1971), John R. Pierce’s The Science of Musical Sound (1979), and IRCAM - Un portrait (1983).

In this track, Eimert explains the Tongemisch or tone mixture, which is a complex sound composed of an inharmonic spectrum in which the partials are not in whole-number ratios to the fundamental.  This kind of sound occurs only rarely outside of electronic music, for example in bells, rods, plates, and other metallic objects.

The tone-mixture was a crucially important concept for the theoretical development of electronic music as envisioned by Eimert, for it allowed the atonal organization of sound to penetrate down to the level of timbre itself.  Conventional instruments, so Eimert and others argued, are in a certain sense hardwired for tonality, because the harmonic spectrum emphasizes tonal relationships such as the octave, fifth, and major third.   This explains why, for these composers, electronic music was by definition serial music, and vice versa. As Eimert states in his commentary to the these sound examples: “The tone-mixture is an entirely new dimension of composition; in it, the many insurmountable contradictions of so-called atonality are finally resolved. […]  Such tone-mixtures can be compositionally ordered such that the structure of the sounds becomes integrated into the structure of the work.”

Eimert (left) and Karlheinz Stockhausen at work in the studio (1953)

September 01, 2010, 2:23pm

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Chris Watson: “Winter Flags” (Massed knot roost on shingle bank, Snettisham, Norfolk)

From the album Outside the Circle of Fire (1998)

Sheffield-born Chris Watson was a founding member of the seminal experimental outfits Cabaret Voltaire and the Hafler Trio.  He gave up music (in this limited sense) around 1990 to begin working in sound recording for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.  Since 1996, he has released four full-length albums of his field recordings made in locations all over the world.  

These recordings can be heard as an auditory counterpart to the footage featured in outstanding nature documentaries such as Planet Earth or The Private Lives of Plants, which has profoundly sensitized us to the fascinating lives of plants and animals. Whether listened to as a non-representative “sound object” in the sense of Pierre Schaeffer or used to imaginatively evoke distant environs, these remarkable recordings enable us to experience otherwise inaccessible dimensions of the sounding universe.

August 23, 2010, 5:19pm

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Syzygys: “Rimsky Train”

From the album The Complete Studio Recordings (2003)

“A female duo who plays microtonal pop music,” the Japanese band Syzygys is the project of Hitomi Shimizu (keyboards) and Hiromi Nishida (violin).  (The band’s name, presumably an alternative plural of the polysemic word “syzygy,” comes from a Greek root meaning “conjunction.”)

Like all good music, that of Syzygys defies description: it is at once familiar and strange. Many of the gestures are redolent of that ubiquitous but unnameable modern idiom of composition heard in incidental music for popular media, but a subversive and experimental element is also always present— and in this way the music of Syzygys is comparable to the otherwise very different work of, say, Raymond Scott.

The delightful weirdness of this music derives in part from the completely ingenuous fusion of catchy pop song elements with the hauntingly unfamiliar sonorities of a 43-note just intonation scale invented by Harry Partch.  Shizimu plays a modified electric reed organ tuned this scale.  (Across the top of the band’s homepage there is a “playable” 43-note keyboard.  A classy touch.)

If this music sounds like the somewhat deranged soundtrack of a forgotten Nintendo game, it’s not coincidental: Shimizu has done the music for several titles for the Sony PlayStation.  She’s also a prolific composer for film and TV.

August 19, 2010, 12:01am

Naum Gabo: Project for a Radio Station (c. 1921)

August 17, 2010, 12:40pm

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James Tenney: Spectrum 6 (2001), for flute, clarinet, percussion, violin, and cello (excerpt)

From the album Spectrum Pieces

In his series of eight compositions bearing the title Spectrum (1995-2001), the brilliant American composer and theorist James Tenney embarked on a new exploration of the musical potential of the harmonic series, a phenomenon that had inspired him throughout his career.

While in many of his earlier works based on the harmonic series, such as his Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow (1974) or Septet for six electric guitars and electric bass (1981), Tenney had methodically introduced the partials in an upward sweep from the fundamental, in the Spectrum pieces the pitches of the series are used all at once.  If the effect of his earlier music had been strongly tonal, thanks to the emphasis on the lower partials of the spectrum, these later works betray their harmonic foundations only in fleeting glimmers; the dominant mood is ungrounded and suggestive.

All the spectrum pieces are written in “time-space” notation, meaning that the duration of each note is determined not by its shape (half note, quarter note, etc.) but by its visually-measured length on the staff, each line of which in this case lasts exactly 30 seconds.  Tenney used a computer program which allowed him to steer the general parameters (density, register, etc.) while the computer automatically generated the actual notes.  This is the principle of stochastic processes, or constrained randomness, which was introduced into music in the 1950s by Iannis Xenakis.

Tenney’s Spectrum pieces sound to me like a distant echo of the most disembodied textures of the early 20th-century Austrian composer Anton Webern: the tones seem to float serenely in a rarefied space, expressive of something profound yet wordless.  

August 15, 2010, 1:00pm

The Tone Generation

Covering the “analogue age,” from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1970s, with a focus on the third quarter of the century, “The Tone Generation” is a 20-part radio series on the history of electronic music written by the British audio-visual artist Ian Helliwell.  Each episode is a 30-minute exploration of a particular scene: the first ten investigate different geographical areas, while episodes 11-20 take up various themes such as “Electronics and Jazz,” “Computer Music,” and “Electronics for Expos.”  This format conveys a sense of the global dynamics of the art form which are too often occluded by the dominance of the France-Germany-USA axis, while also delving into important topics that transcend geographical boundaries.

The music featured is well-chosen and often quite rare (there are several pieces I have not been able to locate elsewhere).  The balance between music and narration is not always ideal; sometimes I wanted more historical context for the sounds I was hearing.  Still, in its ambitious scope and its creative use of the medium, “The Tone Generation” is an impressive accomplishment, and a worthwhile listening experience for those fascinated by the early history of electronic music.

August 12, 2010, 10:07am

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François Bayle: “Grande Polyphonie 2” (1974)

From the album Vibrations Composées / Grande Polyphonie

Along with Bernard Parmegiani, Luc Ferrari, and others, François Bayle was one of the foremost composers of the Groupe de Recherche Musicales (Musical Research Group) in the years following the departure of founder Pierre Schaeffer.  Bayle was director of the of the GRM from 1966 to 1997, during which time he created a large body of works under the rubric of musique acousmatique or “acousmatic music.” Among his many contributions to the art form is the Acousmonium, an orchestra of loudspeakers designed to give the composer control of the spatial distribution of sound in playback (known as diffusion).  Bayle is still composing as of this writing.

Bayle’s music is typically more harmonically conscious than most electronic art music.  While many of his colleagues throw out harmonic considerations in order to develop an “art of noises” entirely freed from the pitch dimension, Bayle uses harmonic tension in a manner wholly distinct from traditional notions of tonal centers.  (In this respect he could be compared to Gyorgi Ligeti, who frequently pursued similar ends in the domain of instrumental and vocal music.)  Consonance and dissonance fluctuate in cloud-like agglomerations, coexisting in a true dynamic equilibrium, unlike the fixed match of preordained harmony that is Western tonality.

Characterized by a strangely compelling fusion of lush, almost psychedelic timbral excess with an acute sense of form and proportion exemplifying the proverbially French aesthetic of clarté, Bayle creates a sound-world teeming with birdsong-like electronic twitters, bells, gongs, and all manner of resonant bodies joined together in a joyous, childlike clangor. 

August 06, 2010, 10:00am

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The League of Automatic Music Composers: “Martian Folk Music” (1980)

From the album The League of Automatic Music Composers 1978-1983

Take the anarchic, self-organizing ethos of free improvisation, add the raw, low-bit waveforms of early computer sound chips, and tie it all together with cybernetic concepts of interactivity and information exchange, and you get the League of Automatic Music Composers.  A product of the uniquely Northern Californian fusion of counterculture and high technology (brilliantly chronicled in Erik Davis’ book Techgnosis), the League pioneered the use of computers in live performance and created music of rare and distinctive beauty.

The KIM-1, released in 1976 and packing 1152 bytes of RAM, was one of the first mass-market microcomputers (so-called to distinguish them from the massive mainframes that were the most common form of computer at the time).  Jim Horton, an electronic musician who had been active for years in the Bay Area scene, quickly bought a KIM-1 and started exploring the unit’s potential as a musical instrument.  Horton had earlier specialized in building massive, self-generating analog synthesizer patches which he would let run for hours on end— a remarkable parallel with the simultaneous efforts undertaken in Europe by Roland Kayn.  (A late solo work by Horton was previously featured on this blog.)  

It was Horton who conceived the notion of a “silicon orchestra” of human-controlled interconnected computers which reacted to each other’s output in deliberately complicated configurations.  He was soon joined by John Bischoff, Rich Gold, and David Behrman, and this quartet performed for the first time as the League of Automatic Music Composers in November 1978.  

In 1980 Gold and Behrman left the group and Tim Perkis became a member. “Martian Folk Music” is performed by this later lineup of Perkis, Bischoff, and Horton. This track is typical of the League’s trademark sound: pure digital waves, spasmodically careening across the sound-field, interacting according to the laws some occult dynamics that lies just beyond the listener’s comprehension.  

The sonic affinity with early video game soundtracks is not coincidental, as the sounds of the KIM-1 are essentially the same as those of famous SID chip of the Commodore 64.  Chip music meets the avant-garde: a match made in heaven.

A flyer made by Rich Gold showing one of the League’s configurations

The League at work: Tim Perkis, Jim Horton, and John Bischoff (source)

August 02, 2010, 1:00pm

Stockhausen: “This is silly.  I want to get out.”

Cage: “Now now, Karlheinz.  Don’t be pissy just because you didn’t get to sit up front.”

July 29, 2010, 2:28pm