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Banco del Mutuo Soccorso: “Cento mani e cento occhi”

From the album Darwin! (1972)

In the dubious estimation of musical common sense, the 1970s are typically represented as years of sorrow, a vast artistic wasteland.  The unfortunately prominent developments of adult contemporary and disco helped stain this decade with the reputation of slick, soulless overproduction. But— aside from the fact that there is a time and place for Giorgio Moroder and yes, even Barry Manilow— beneath the surface, the 1970s is one of the most rich and varied periods in the entire century, spanning everything from the brilliant funk/soul fusion of Curtis Mayfield in the U.S. to the groundbreaking works of “acousmatic music” presented in France by composers such as Francois Bayle and Bernard Parmegiani.

One of the most fascinating phenomena of the decade is the international diffusion of progressive rock, which had been launched by a handful of (mostly) British bands in the late 60s.  Prog rock, with its classical and jazz influences, its sophisticated song structures, and its expansion of the sonic palette beyond the tired, guitar-dominated sound of conventional rock, quickly spread across the European continent, and took on distinctive new forms far removed from its often cloying and affected Anglophone incarnations.

One of the most impressive products of this development was Banco del Mutuo Soccorso (roughly, “Bank of Mutual Aid”), an Italian prog-rock band founded by the brothers Vitorio and Gianni Nocenzi in Rome in 1969.  Their eponymous debut album was released in 1972.  Later that year, Banco recorded what is widely regarded as one of the defining works of the genre, a concept album inspired by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and entitled simply Darwin!

“Cento mani e cento occhi” (“A hundred hands and a hundred eyes”) is to my ears the album’s highlight.  At just over five minutes long, the song is quite compact by prog-rock standards, but its modest length compresses a multi-sectional, developmental structure of compelling dynamism, from the pseudo-classical fanfare of the opening to the stripped-down, two-chord intensity of the outro— all of it held together by the powerful operatic vocals of singer Francesco Di Giacomo.

July 27, 2010, 1:34pm

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Hans Haass: Fugue in C Major (1926)

From the album Piano Music without Limits: Original Compositions of the 1920s

Experimental music for the player piano is usually associated with the work of Conlon Nancarrow, an American composer who beginning in 1948 worked for many years in obscurity in Mexico before being discovered and championed in the late 1970s and 80s. (Nancarrow was featured here in August 2009.)  But in fact the history of original, “unplayable” music for player piano goes back much further, to the first decades of the 20th century. Although the earliest pieces date from the late teens, the majority of compositions in this vein were written in the 1920s, in the experiment-happy environment of Weimar Republic Germany.

The period’s dominant mood of “new objectivity,” as well as the general adulation of the machine in both capitalist and socialist thinking, led to a fascination with so-called “mechanical music.”  This could mean anything from gramophone recordings to new electronic instruments, but it was perhaps best exemplified by the player piano, which was able to reproduce with utter precision and superhuman ability virtually anything that was demanded of it.

At the new music festivals in the towns of Donaueschingen and Baden-Baden in 1926 and 1927, a handful of works for player piano were premiered by Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, and other composers.  These pieces were deliberately composed to take advantage of the mechanical potential of the instrument (specifically, a model of player piano known as the Welte-Mignon), apart from all conventions of piano technique derived from the physical nature of the human hand.  The paper rolls which stored the musical information were created not through live recording, as was customary, but by hand-pricking each tiny perforation in order to exactly determine the pitches, durations, tempo, and dynamics of the music.

One of the pieces premiered in 1927 was this Fugue in C Major (also known as theCapriccio Fugue) by Hans Haass, an accomplished composer and concert pianist who had became a director of recording for Welte-Mignon in 1925.  He recorded over 300 rolls of popular and classical music, and knew as well as anyone the capabilities and limitations of the machine.  According to player piano expert Jürgen Hocker, Haass’ pieces for the Welt-Mignon are the among the most adventurous and depart radically from the conventions of piano composition.  

Though recognizable as a fugue thanks to its omnipresent theme and consistent imitative polyphony, this composition is really a showpiece for the unique effects of the medium: breakneck tempo, simultaneous use of the entire keyboard, and ultra-fast runs and trills which overload the ear’s ability to distinguish individual notes, creating what Hocker calls “clouds” and “hurricanes” of sound.

(Note: This post is based on my dissertation research on music technology in early 20th-century Germany.  More music and information on this fascinating period will be forthcoming over the next two years.)

July 22, 2010, 2:35pm

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P-Model: “Art Mania”

From the album In a Model Room (1979)

P-Model was a self-described “techno-punk” band from Japan founded in 1979 by Susumu Hirasawa.  Their first two albums— In a Model Room (1979) and Landsale (1980)— exhibit a twitchy, electronically-infused punk/pop style that powerfully demonstrates the global dimensions of the New Wave phenomena circa 1980.

The band’s next two releases, Potpourri (1981) and Perspective (1982) took a turn into more diffuse stylistic territory, less punkish and in many ways more experimental, with the earlier albums’ hard-edged production values traded in for a high-reverb sound-wash. These albums are not as immediately engaging as P-Model’s first works, but they represent some of the strangest and most fascinating musical endeavors of the early 1980s.

In addition to his work as the frontman for P-Model, Hirasawa has also had a prolific career as a solo artist, releasing 13 albums since 1989.

July 18, 2010, 10:31am

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Roland Kayn: “Isotrope,” Part II

From the album Infra (1978-79)

Roland Kayn is surely one of the most fascinating and obscure composers in the history of electronic music.  Kayn was a journeyman in the avant-garde European music scene in the 1950s and 60s: he made appearances at several of the newly-founded electronic music studios, undertook advanced composition studies with Boris Blacher in Berlin, and had works premiered at the famous summer courses in Darmstadt.  

In 1964 Kayn joined the Gruppo d’Improvvisatione Nuova Consonanza, a collective of composer-performers founded by Franco Evangelisti in Rome.  He was a member of the group until 1968, when he left in order to pursue his vision of “cybernetic music,” which had haunted him since his first contact with electronic sound production at the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne in 1953.  In 1970, Kayn was invited to work at the Instituut voor Sonologie (Institute of Sonology) at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.  The composer Gottfried Michael Koenig, director of the studio since 1964, had recently overseen the installation of a state-of-the-art analogue system of independent modular units, such as oscillators, filters, envelope generators, and logic circuits. At the center of this configuration was a “variable function generator,” essentially a primitive sequencer that could be programmed to store a series of voltages which were then used to control the various components of the studio.  With this system, Kayn was able for the first time to realize his ideas of cybernetic music, which involved elaborate configurations of connections and feedback loops that create complex and unpredictable sonic interactions.  Kayn “composes” the initial setup of the studio components, but once the sound is set in motion, it is allowed to take its own course.  In this way, Kayn believes thatthe electronic system develops a sort of capacity to think for itself, a capacity which in a sense can be described as artificial intelligence…. Existential Being, as it were, takes the place of a logically functioning consciousness.”

For more Roland Kayn, check out my earlier post and his official website.  MP3 rips of several out-of-print LPs of Kayn’s music from the 1970s have been made available on the blog No Longer Forgotten Music:

Elektroakustische Projekte

Infra 

Makro 

Simultan

Here are some lovely images from the liner notes to Kayn’s albums (with the exception of the picture of Kayn himself, which is from the 1967 documentary film Nuova Consonanza: Komponisten improvisieren im Kollektiv):

Excerpt from the score for Allotropie (1962-64)

Excerpt from the score for Galaxis (1962)

Excerpt from the score for Cybernetics

A glimpse into Kayn’s studio

Roland Kayn in 1967

July 12, 2010, 3:41pm

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Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker: “Fünf Mann Menschen” (1968)

From the album Musik für Radio, 1950-2000

This is part of a feature on the Austrian poet and experimentalist Ernst Jandl (1925-2000), in collaboration with Continuo’s Weblog.  At Continuo’s you can find a wonderful album of Jandl’s sound poetry recorded at the BBC in 1966.

Fünf Mann Menschen (Five Man Mankind) was first broadcast on Stuttgart’s Southwestern Radio on November 14, 1968.  Created by Jandl and his companion, the poet Friederike Mayröcker, Fünf Mann Menschen was credited with turning the genre of the Hörspiel (radio play) away from its literary postwar form back toward its experimental roots in the Weimar Republic (1918-1933).  While the so-called “classical” Hörspiel that took shape after World War II was usually a straightforward spoken text (a kind of “audiobook” avant la lettre), the new Hörspiel of the 1960s sought to exploit the unique potential of the radio medium, which included the entire spectrum of sound recently unleashed in electronic music studios around the world.  (An excellent source on all this is Mark E. Cory’s essay “Soundplay: The Polyphonous Tradition of German Radio Art,” in the wonderful anthology Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde.)

Only 14 minutes in length (the typical Hörspiel was at least twice as long), Fünf Mann Menschen consists of a number of vignettes that evoke the successive stages of modern life and ironically undermine the conformist tendencies of contemporary society.  Although much of the effect of the piece is language-specific, and thus meaningless to those who don’t speak German, it can also be appreciated as a kind of voice-based musique concrète.  The creative use of stereophony in this work was also largely without precedent in the Hörspiel.  It is presented here in an excerpted version.

July 06, 2010, 11:00pm

Musica mundana update, June 2010 

Two excellent stories to which I was alerted this morning by NPR, which unfortunately used them as a cutesy segue into a feature on the “real music” of some boring singer/songwriter.

First, physicists at CERN in Geneva are “sonifying” the data from their experiments with the Large Hadron Collider in order to render perceptible these microcosmic interactions— and perhaps, to better understand them.  The project, entited “LHC Sound,” is a collaboration between CERN and a group of physicists, musicians, and artists in London.  Unfortunately, this “particle music” sounds a lot like second-rate computer music circa 1998.  Nonetheless, intriguing work.

The Large Hadron Collider. Is it a coincidence it looks like the Pompidou Center?

Second, scientists at the University of Sheffield in England have recently used satellite images of the vast “coronal loops” shot off by the sun to measure the frequency of their vibrations and transpose the result into the range of human hearing.  The scientists studying these phenomena say that the magnetic disturbances sometimes behave like a plucked guitar string (transverse waves), in other cases like air through a wind instrument (longitudinal waves).  Analysis of the sounds is being used to prepare for an anticipated “space storm” in 2013.

I find it fascinating that virtually all of the “nature music” discovered in recent years— whether microcosmic or macrocosmic— sounds like post-1950 experimental electronica.  Is nature imitating art here, or vice versa?

June 25, 2010, 11:06am

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Newman Guttman: “Pitch Variations” (1957)

From the album Music from Mathematics

It seems appropriate that some of the first pieces of computer music were composed by a man with the fantastically dorky name of “Newman Guttman.” Realized on the state-of-the-art IBM 7090 computer at the legendary Bell Labs in New Jersey, the work of Guttman, Max Mathews, and others helped inaugurate a new age of synthetic sound.

The theoretical foundation of computer music was nothing less than a recapitulation of the 2500-year-old wisdom of Pythagoras:  ”Any sound can he described mathematically by a sequence of numbers.”  From this basic principle, the pioneers of computer music laid out an ambitious program of unhindered musical creativity:

“Man’s music has always been acoustically limited by the instruments on which he plays. These are mechanisms which have physical restrictions. We have made sound and music directly from numbers, surmounting conventional limitations of instruments. Thus, the musical universe is now circumscribed only by man’s perceptions and creativity.” (From the liner notes to Music from Mathematics)

But, as Pierre Schaeffer and others were discovering, there was a chasm between the neat equations of pure mathematics and the pyscho-acoustic realities of human hearing.  ”Pitch Variations” explores the nonlinear relationship between frequency and perceived pitch that arises in periodic vibrations too quick to be perceived as rhythm, yet too slow to be heard as tone— the realm of what would later be called pulsar synthesis.  This noisy little piece of electronic music history thus anticipates many later developments, from granular synthesis to glitch.

This wonderful album, first released in 1962 and long out of print, has been graciously immortalized and is available for download from Orpheus Music.

June 23, 2010, 3:40pm

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Brian Ferneyhough: La chute d’Icare (1988)

From the album La chute d’Icare, Superscription, Intermedio alla Ciaccona, etc.

One of the most successful and notorious composers working in an unapologetically modernist idiom in the second half of the 20th century, Brian Ferneyhough is a British composer who has lived in California since 1987.  

Ferneyhough’s intention is to write scores of such extreme complexity that they are, in many cases, literally unperformable.  The perfect realization of the notes as written becomes an impossible ideal which the musician can at best asymptotically approach.  Playing this music thus becomes a sort of self-abnegating spiritual exercise, in the course of which the performer is likely to become, in the composer’s words, “lost in the forest of his own imperfections.” (Ferneyhough’s scores, which resemble musical labyrinths, remind one of the German word for a maze: Irrgarten, literally ”garden of error.”)  This all sounds rather sadistic, but musicians who have dedicated themselves to the interpretation of Ferneyhough’s work have attested to the exhilaration that comes with each new attempt: these pieces can never be “mastered,” which means they always present new challenges to the intrepid performer.

The title of this work, meaning “The Fall of Icarus,” was taken from a rather strange 16th-century painting by Pieter Brueghel.  La chute d’Icare can be heard as a relatively rare example of modernist program music, with the clarinet part representing the erratic and ultimately doomed flight of Icarus.  To my ears, in spite of its fearful complexity this music has a verve and playfulness far more sincere than that of much other, simpler music which also aspires to these ideals.

June 16, 2010, 8:46am

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Jim Horton: “Rebirth” (1990)

From the album Numbers Racket

Beginning in the late 1960s, Jim Horton (1944-1998) was an active member of the San Francisco Bay Area experimental music scene.  In the early 70s he studied at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College under the leadership of Robert Ashley.  With Tim Perkins and John Bischoff, Horton founded the “world’s first computer network band,” the League of Automatic Music Composers, in 1978.  The League pioneered the collaborative use of microcomputers in live improvisation. Many of their “compositions” were driven by game-like interactions between the players.  Around this time, Horton also began using computers to implement alternate systems of tuning, and in particular various forms of just intonation.

These influences are at work in this piece composed by Jim Horton in 1990 and released on a 1992 cassette by the Just Intonation Network entitled Numbers Racket.  The sounds in this piece are vintage 80s digitalia.  Although I’m generally fond of these bright, metallic sounds, the timbre of the piece wears a bit thin by the end of it.  The real interest here is on the level of tuning and form.  

The composer provided the following cryptic notes to “Rebirth”:

The computer, empty of suffering, simulates high-speed attainment of nirvana by playing the medieval Tibetan Buddhist game “Determination of the Ascension of Stages,” invented by Sakya pandita Kunga Gyaltsen (“Whose Banner is Total Joy”). The board shows 104 places of a fantastic cosmic geography.

The game mentioned by Horton is a variation on an ancient Indian board game in which “the player progresses according to the throw of dice from hell states and other inauspicious conditions by way of the Tantric path to Buddhahood and nirvana.” (Amazingly, it belongs to the same lineage as the modern children’s game Snakes and Ladders.)  This strange “program” behind the piece resonates with the cyclical quality of the music, which climbs ever upward only to tumble back down again and start anew.  Each iteration is slightly different, and the various levels seem always to be slightly out of phase, thus creating the overall sense of motion and vitality suggested by the title.

June 10, 2010, 2:32pm

Behold “La joueuse de tympanon” (“The Dulcimer Player”), one of many musical automata from the late 18th century.  Then, as now, such creations provoked powerful responses:

“The attempts of mechanicians to imitate, with more or less approximation to accuracy, the human organs in the production of musical sounds, or to substitute mechanical appliances for those organs, I consider tantamount to a declaration of war against the spiritual element in music.  The more perfect this sort of machinery is, the more I disapprove of it…” — E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Automata (1814)

June 04, 2010, 9:41am