"Among all aspects of knowledge, the knowledge of sound is supreme." — Hazrat Inayat Khan
Luciano Berio
Pierre Boulez
John Cage
Hans Werner Henze
Mauricio Kagel
Gottfried Michael Koenig
György Ligeti
Luigi Nono
Henri Pousseur
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Source: Ulrich Dibelius, Moderne Musik 1945-1965 (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1966)
May 17, 2013, 2:49pm
From the album Chamber Music
In a compositional milieu where so many artists succumb either to the Scylla of late-romantic necrophilia or the Charybdis of bloodless avant-garde epigonism, it is refreshing to discover music that uses the old classical instrumentarium to novel effect. Such is the work of the Italian composer Franco Donatoni (1927-2000).
Like so many of his European contemporaries, Donatoni cut his teeth in the 1950s at the Darmstadt summer courses, a crucible of avant-garde musical thought. Here he was introduced to many of the major figures of the scene, such as Stockhausen, Berio, Boulez, and Cage. Although Donatoni viewed Cage with suspicion, he shared the American’s radical critique of compositional agency. His response to the crisis of ungrounded subjectivity in contemporary music was not to be found in chance procedures, but in a systematic process of recomposition through rules of substitution and permutation derived from the parametric analytical principles of serialism.
Donatoni’s music is generated by the ruthless cannibalization of earlier works, as fragments of scores are subjected to permutational schemes in order to form new material in a manner inspired by the alchemical process of sublimation. (Musicologist David Osmond-Smith’s description of Donatoni’s techniques includes such graphic anatomical metaphors as “cancerous proliferation” and “dismemberment.”) This method could of course be brought to bear on any music, not just Donatoni’s own. For example, his 1967 composition Etwas ruhiger in Ausdruck (1967) is based on a multidimensional analysis of eight bars from Arnold Schoenberg’s Five Piano Pieces, Op. 23, No. 2.
While the transmutation of pre-existing material follows certain strict rules, its subsequent rearrangement into new configurations is done more or less according to taste. Following the moment-to-moment logic of musical transmutation, without a preconceived vision of how the composition is to unfold, Donatoni sought a musical flow that emerged from the very notational labor of composition, from the “juggling” of notes and proportions to which critics might attempt to reduce this eminently writerly form of music. For Donatoni there is no such thing as creation, only transformation: He declares, “I am not an artist but an artisan.”
After a fallow period in the early 1970s, in which he battled a spell of depression aggravated by the deaths of his mother and his old mentor Bruno Maderna, Donatoni returned to composition. Rejecting the conventional model of composing big orchestral pieces that were performed once and then forgotten, he now focused on producing works for soloists and chamber ensembles with whom he had a direct personal connection. His music from the late 1970s on is marked by deft complexity and cerebral playfulness. Algo IV, one of the last works Donatoni wrote before his death in 2000, is derived from the earlier work Algo, a 1977 piece based in turn upon the recomposition of a guitar lick by Django Reinhardt.
May 08, 2013, 2:19pm
From the album Artificial Intelligence (1985)
Italian-born composer-producer Doris Norton is one of the unheralded champions of early electronica. Norton’s music from the 1980s occupies the stylistic intersection of synth-pop, industrial, and techno music.
Long before launching a solo career, Norton was the voice of the Italian progressive rock band Jacula, led by her husband, Antonio Bartoccetti. The group released two albums in 1969 and 1972. Norton’s own work began to appear in the 1980s. Some of her earliest tracks, such as “Eightoeight” and “Underground” (both 1980), with their syncopated drum machines and clockwork sequencer lines, strikingly anticipate what would later be known as techno. (These tracks bear comparison to Charanjit Singh’s legendary 1983 record Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat).
Norton’s mid-decade releases are classic musical documents of the dawn of the PC era. She embraced the personal computer as a musical instrument uniquely capable of realizing her artistic visions:
In the late sixties I had already conceived computers as “personal.” I have always trusted in the benefits of solitude; [being] alone means freedom… What’s better than a “personal” computer for materializing ideas, by oneself? [source]
Albums such as Personal Computer (1984) were sponsored by Apple (and featured the company’s logo prominently on the cover) while Artificial Intelligence (1985) was purportedly created entirely via computer keyboard, whence the MIDI information was fed to a Roland JX-8P synthesizer. Later albums Automatic Feeling (1986) and The Double Side of Science (1990) were underwritten by IBM.
While the beat-oriented style of Norton’s music aligns her with such global fellow-travelers as Yellow Magic Orchestra and Kraftwerk, her championing of the PC as a tool for self-sufficient musical creativity also connects her to more artsy musicians such as Pietro Grossi, Laurie Spiegel, and the League of Automatic Music Composers. Norton’s predilection for the bright, glossy timbres of early digital instruments also recalls Hubert Bognermayr and Harald Zuschrader’s bizarre 1982 one-off Erdenklang.
While her music remains largely out of print and inaccessible, Norton’s early records have recently begun to receive the inevitable rediscovery treatment. Her 1981 album Raptus was re-released in 2011 by Italian label Black Widow Records, and her other albums from the early 80s are likely soon to follow.
May 01, 2013, 7:00am
Dear akousmatikoi,
I have successfully slain the PhD dragon and will be reanimating Acousmata in the coming weeks. Many other exciting projects are brewing as well. Thank you for your patience and happy listening!
Thomas
April 26, 2013, 10:48am
American composer and installation artist Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) speaking at Ars Electronica 1989 in Linz, Austria
February 24, 2013, 3:34am
I just bought this book, and it’s at the top of my post-dissertation reading list!
From continuo-docs:
The cover of the first English translation of A la Recherche d’une Musique Concrète (1952), published by University of California Press, Berkeley, November 2012. The book is in the form of a sound diary written between 1948 and 1952. Excerpt:
March 1948: Back in Paris I have started to collect objects. I have a “Symphony of noises” in mind; after all, there has been a symphony of psalms. I go to the sound effects department of the French radio service. I find clappers, coconut shells, klaxons, bicycle horns. I imagine a scale of bicycle horns. There are gongs and birdcalls. It is charming that an administrative system should be concerned with birdcalls and should regularize their acquisition on an official form, duly recorded.
I take away doorbells, a set of bells, an alarm clock, two rattles, two childishly painted whirligigs. The clerk causes some difficulties. Usually, he is asked for a particular item. There are no sound effects without a text in parallel, are there? But what about the person who wants noise without text or context?
February 17, 2013, 2:24pm
Acousmata will be on near-total hiatus for the next two months or so as I focus my attention on finishing my dissertation.
Stay tuned for exciting news about my upcoming projects, including a new vision for this blog.
Thanks for your support!
February 05, 2013, 2:48pm
From the album Benzaiten (1974)
This highly grooveable hybrid of progressive rock and traditional Japanese music was the first release by multi-instrumentalist Osamu Kitajima (disregarding his 1971 “homage to British pop-psychedelia” under the pseudonym Justin Heathcliff). After followup albums Masterless Samurai (1980) and Dragon King (1981), Kitajima moved decidedly in the direction of new age music.
The album takes its name from Benzaiten, the Japanese name for the Hindu goddess Saraswati, patroness of knowledge, music, arts, and science. It features a cameo by Haruomi Hosono, who would carry on the torch of Japanese avant-pop in projects such as his exquisitely weird 1978 solo album Cochin Moon and the synthesizer-driven juggernaut Yellow Magic Orchestra, of which he was a founding member.
February 01, 2013, 2:58pm
From the album Voyager (1993)
The impact of the digital computer on music-making in the late 20th century goes far beyond the function of a perfectly docile performing robot to which it is typically reduced in the textbook history of electronic music. Some of the most creative composers of the past few decades have used the computer as a means of facilitating, complicating, or even participating in musical improvisation. (I’ve touched on some of the earliest efforts in this vein in earlier posts on the League of Automatic Music Composers and The Hub.) This is the approach taken by American musician and polymath George Lewis in his pioneering computer music program Voyager, developed in the mid 1980s.
The music is produced by the interplay between a 64-voice computer-controlled “virtual improvising orchestras” and two human musicians whose playing is converted into MIDI data by devices known as “pitch followers.” Every 5 to 7 seconds, a program subroutine shuffles the 64 synthetic voices, determining how many will be activated and whether they will carry over from the previous grouping or be brought in “off the bench,” so to speak. Further subroutines determine a bevy of musical details such as timbre of the active voices, the scales from which they draw pitches, their melodic behavior, dynamics, tempo, and many other parameters. Finally, with each run of the subroutine, a new kind of response to the players is decided: whether to “listen” to one, both, or neither, and how exactly to react to the musical input they provide. The result is what Lewis describes as ”multiple parallel streams of music generation, emanating from both the computers and the humans—a nonhierarchical, improvisational, subject-subject model of discourse, rather than a stimulus-response setup.”
Lewis emphasizes that his code is capable of generating music on its own; human input is entirely optional. By making the machine musically self-sufficient, he attempts to ”de-instrumentalize the computer”—to treat it not as a passive means of producing sound, but as a sentient musician in its own right. Guided by a “technologically mediated animism,” Lewis seeks to endow the computer with its own distinctive musical behavior, comparable to the sense of personality projected by human performers in the act of improvisation.
The dizzying variety of timbres, rhythms, and tones heard in a typical performance of Voyager was inspired by the concept of “multi-instrumentalism” developed by the members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, whose usage of many different instruments in a single performance allowed for a prismatically shifting ensemble sound “exceeding the sum of its instrumental parts.” (Lewis, who joined the AACM in 1971, tells the group’s story in his critically acclaimed 2008 book A Power Stronger Than Itself.)
What the work is about is what improvisation is about: interaction and behavior as carriers for meaning. On this view, notes, timbres, melodies, durations, and the like are not ends in themselves. Embedded in them is a more complex, indirect, powerful signal that we must train ourselves to detect.
Lewis sees Voyager as an expression of African-American cultural practices that challenge the Eurocentric biases of much avant-garde music. Favoring a maximalist aesthetics of surplus over the austere classical ideals of balance and equilibrium, Lewis quotes the scholar Robert L. Douglas, who writes that African artists want “to add as much as possible to the act of creation…to add to life is to ensure that there is more to share.”
The code for Voyager was begun in 1985 at the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM) in Amsterdam and finished two years later in New York. It was written in a programming language called Forth, which Lewis described as “appealing to a community of composers who wanted an environment in which a momentary inspiration could quickly lead to its sonic realization—a dialogic creative process, emblematic of an improvisor’s way of working.” This performance, featuring Lewis on trombone and Roscoe Mitchell on alto and soprano saxophone, was recorded in 1993 in Berkeley, California.
January 17, 2013, 4:26pm
From the album Palace of Marvels (2010)
One of the most talented and creative figures on the computer music scene today is the German composer Marcus Schmickler. His early solo albums, recorded under noms de plume Wabi Sabi (1996) and Sator Rotas (1999), feature delicately spun harmonic drones and textural morphings at times reminiscent of the music of François Bayle. Schmickler’s more recent works, such as Altars of Science (2007) and Palace of Marvels (2010), both released on the esteemed label Editions Mego, move in a different direction, probing extreme states of auditory perception and pushing the envelope of contemporary electronic production.
Apart from his computer music, Schmickler has composed pieces for classical ensembles, such as Demos (2006), for choir, chamber quintet, and electronics, and Rule of Inference (2011), for percussion quartet. He also heads the spacey post-rock outfit Pluramon. Much of Schmickler’s work explores the interface between art and science, or aesthetics and epistemology, as for example his 2009 project The Bonn Patternization, a 10-channel composition based on the sonification of astronomical data.
Palace of Marvels is an ear-bending trip into the phenomenon of the Shepard tone, an auditory illusion which creates the sensation of a never-ending ascent or descent in pitch. (Roger Shepard, the discoverer of this phenomenon, is name-checked in the track “Shep’s Infinity,” as is French composer and acoustician Jean-Claude Risset in “Risset Brain Hammer.”) On this relatively simple foundation, Schmickler constructs a dizzying array of sonic variations—different perspectives on a common perceptual object—each one leading the listener farther down the rabbit hole. This is devilishly difficult music, but there is a sirenic allure in Schmickler’s work that compels you to keep listening even as your scrambled brain begs for silence.
If you dig Schmickler’s music, you should also check out the excellent annotated playlist he recently curated for RadioWeb MACBA entitled “Ontology of Vibration: Economics, Music, and Number.”
January 10, 2013, 8:31pm
From the album Tragoedia (1969)
The late 1960s witnessed the true coming of age of electronic music. While new instruments had been developed since the beginning of the century, and widespread production began to percolate in the wake of the Second World War, it wasn’t until albums such as Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon (1967) and Wendy (née Walter) Carlos’ Switched-On Bach (1968) that electronic music reached the public ear on a massive scale.
Andrew Rudin’s composition Tragoedia appeared hot on the heels of Subotnick’s record, which it followed in Nonesuch Records’ groundbreaking series of commissions for original, album-length works of electronic music. Subtitled “A composition in four movements for electronic music synthesizer,” the large-scale structure of Tragoedia is based on the four fundamental emotional processes of Greek tragedy. While describing the work as an example of program music, however, Rudin cautions that the music “does not relate to any specific drama or event but attempts to explore those actions and devices through which tragedy is evoked.”
Rudin’s career up to the creation of Tragoedia transected a rich and fascinating period in the history of avant-garde music in Philadelphia. After undergraduate studies in which he was heavily influenced by the music of the Second Viennese School and Igor Stravinsky, Rudin went to the University of Pennsylvania in order to work with George Rochberg, who had recently become chair of the music department there. (The idea of Rochberg as a modernist beacon is somewhat ironic in light of his later notoriety as a poster boy for the neo-Romantic revival of the 1970s.) Rudin also studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen, who taught as a visiting professor for one semester, and George Crumb, who joined the department in Rudin’s final year there. He may also have crossed paths with future pioneering sound artist Maryanne Amacher, who was an undergraduate at Penn in the early 60s.
Around this time, Rudin became familiar with the experimental stage art of the American choreographer Alwin Nikolais. Nikolais had recently purchased one of the first commercially available Moog synthesizers for use in his synaesthetic theater productions, and he demonstrated the machine for Rudin. Soon thereafter, at Rudin’s invitation, Robert Moog came to Penn and oversaw the construction of an electronic music studio in the basement of the Annenberg School for Communication. Tragoedia was produced not at Penn, however, but at the electronic music studio at the Philadelphia Musical Academy (later absorbed into the University of the Arts), where Rudin had taken a position as director of the Electronic Music Center.
The third movement, “Peitho,” which means temptation or persuasion, is a study in perpetual motion built around skittering chromatic figures. Its formal structure was inspired by the third movement (“Purgatorio”) of Gustav Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony. The eerie and evocative textures of Rudin’s music quickly found their way into the cultural bloodstream: snippets from Tragoedia were used by famed Italian director Federico Fellini in his 1969 film Satyricon.
December 28, 2012, 6:52pm
From the album A Very Merry Electric Chrismas to You! (1971)
Coming at the tail end of the post-Switched-On Bach ”Moogsploitation” craze of the late 1960s, Douglas Leedy’s A Very Merry Electric Christmas to You! is a lovely and musically sensitive synthesis (pun intended) of timeless holiday melodies and the cutting-edge electronic music technology of its time.
Leedy is an American composer, conductor, and musicologist whose slim discography belies his many years of activity in a variety of genres. In the late 1960s he taught at UCLA, where he also established an electronic music studio. Later he abandoned 12-tone equal temperament and pursued a musical style inspired by modal scales, minimalist repetitive patterns, and Carnatic Indian musical traditions. Since 2003, he has published music under the name Bhisma Xenotechnites.
A Very Merry Electric Christmas to You! features mostly “straight” arrangements of Christmas tunes, with some tracks (such as “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” and “The First Noel”) showing off Leedy’s not inconsiderable classical chops in florid variations on melodic themes. In his version of “Silent Night,” a gently modulated electronic drone provides a perfectly soporific accompaniment to the lilting melody.
The album was produced at the UCLA electronic music studio and features both Moog and Buchla synthesizers, as well as a mysterious touch-controlled instrument called the “Ognob Generator,” a tiny custom-build device created by Leedy with the assistance of W. R. Biglow, Jr.
Leedy’s two other electronic albums, The Electric Zodiac (1969) and Entropical Paradise (1971) show his more experimental side. Entropical Paradise, for example, is a two-hour work comprising six “sonic environments” created by free-running generative synthesizer patches.
Not surprisingly, A Very Merry Electric Christmas to You! was not the only Moog Christmas venture of the period. The Moog Machine’s Christmas Becomes Electric, a decidedly tame introduction to the synthesizer, actually predated Leedy’s record by two years.
December 20, 2012, 5:10pm
Mechanical singing bird, created circa 1890 and by Blaise Bontemps in Paris.
Recently restored by the House of Automata in Scotland.
December 11, 2012, 3:48pm
La Tonotechnie ou l’Art de noter les cylindres (Marie Dominique-Joseph Engramelle, 1775)
December 10, 2012, 6:00am
