Mexican bandleader and musical genius Juan Garcia Esquivel
December 02, 2011, 10:40am
"Among all aspects of knowledge, the knowledge of sound is supreme." — Hazrat Inayat Khan
Joseph Paradiso's Massive Modular Synthesizer
Joseph Paradiso is professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where he is co-director of the “Things That Think” workgroup. Paradiso is trained as a physicist and electrical engineer, but in his spare time he has built one of the world’s largest modular synthesizer configurations, a creation known simply as “Massive Modular Synth.”
In the age of computer music triumphant, the towering banks of modular synthesizer units often seen in histories of electronic music are typically portrayed as relics of a technologically obsolete era. But these physically clunky devices continue to exercise a powerful allure on experimentally minded musicians, as shown by the recent resurgence of interest in custom-built analog components.
Paradiso, who has been building his own synthesizers since 1974, approaches his instrument not as a means of creating static “sounds” to be played by means of a keyboard or other kind of interface, but rather as a sophisticated form of “hands-on” composition:
I don’t play this rig any more as a keyboard instrument. My main use for it now is to make gigantic sound installations with huge patches that I continue building over several hours, until I run out of patch cords. The process is perhaps closer to sculpture than music, where one starts with a small “seed” patch that expresses a simple musical process that is progressively augmented and refined as the patch builds. It is a large, complex feedback system, with signals that control the modules fed back to their inputs through a massive network of digital and analog processing . The resulting sounds are mainly autonomous, babbling and droning on for hours and days, as each patch achieves a distinctive groove or atmosphere without really repeating.
This approach strongly resembles the so-called “cybernetic music” of the German composer (and Acousmata favorite) Roland Kayn (1933-2011). The act of wiring the components together becomes itself a form of composition, expressed not in musical acts or notation, but rather in the distinctly technological language of oscillators, filters, sequencers and logic gates. Although some of the components of Paradiso’s synthesizer are digital, there is no computer involved, and Paradiso sees his instrument as a testament to the aesthetic values of tangibility, ephemerality, and unpredictability possessed by analog electronics.
November 26, 2011, 1:51pm
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Richard Lerman: Travelon Gamelon, promenade version (1978)
From the album Travelon Gamelon: Music for Bicycles
Richard Lerman (1944-) is an American composer and sound artist best known for his use of piezoelectric microphones to record minute natural sounds such as the falling of raindrops on blades of grass or the march of ants across the desert floor. Beyond his artistic production in this domain, Lerman has worked for decades to popularize field recording by educating people about the technical and aesthetic principles of the practice.
Lerman’s most iconic composition is something quite different: Travelon Gamelon, conceived in the late 1970s, is a clever musicalization of the common bicycle. The work exists in two versions: concert and “promenade.” The concert version calls for three bicycles turned upside down and each “played” by a performer. The piece is carefully written out using a combination of conventional and graphic notation, directing the performer to create sound by plucking and bowing the spokes of the wheel, applying the brakes, and striking the frame. All these sounds are miked and subjected to live electronic modification.
The promenade version, by contrast, is relatively free in structure, the sounds being generated by the impact of the spokes against various inserted materials (similar to the classic playing-card noisemaker familiar from childhood). The rhythmic whirring is captured by tiny homemade pickups, which send it via battery-powered amplifiers to loudspeakers attached to the bicycles’ handlebars.
This recording is an excerpt from a 45-minute performance of the promenade version of Travelon Gamelon, recorded on July 2, 1979, on the occasion of the opening of the Boston Museum of Transportation. The recording, of course, cannot do justice to this perambulatory piece of public art; it provides, at most, what John Cage called a “postcard” rendition of the event itself. Nonetheless, one can get a sense of the spirit of the piece, which has been performed many times all over the world since its premiere.
Travelon Gamelon was first released by the always-adventurous Folkways Records in 1982, and you can download the album and view the liner notes on the label’s website. It was re-released along with other Lerman compositions by Japanese label EM Records in 2006.
Played 122 time(s).
November 16, 2011, 1:27pm
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Raymond Scott: “Nursery Rhyme”
From the album Soothing Sounds for Baby, Volume 1 (1964)
In honor of my newborn son, Felix Troutt Patteson (born November 3, 2011), I present this wonderful bit of 1960s sound design by the intrepid American bandleader, composer, and inventor Raymond Scott. Conceived as a musical soporific for small children—“an infant’s friend in sound,” as the marketing proclaimed—Soothing Sounds for Baby was a set of three records corresponding to the graded age-groups 1-6, 6-12, and 12-18 months. Using his own electronic instruments, which included some of the world’s first musical sequencers, Scott created bright, shimmering sonic textures comprised of short motivic patterns overlaid with playful melodic improvisations.
In its intended purpose, the record was a failure, but it is now seen as a striking anticipation of the repetitive electronica to emerge in the 1970s. Originally produced in collaboration with the Gesell Institute of Child Development in 1964, Soothing Sounds for Baby was re-released on CD in 1997 by the Dutch label Basta Records, which has specialized in reanimating Scott’s discography. More recently, Soothing Sounds received the full-blown remix treatment.
On a related note, fans of Raymond Scott should check out the recently released documentary film Deconstructing Dad, produced by Scott’s son Stan Warnow and Jeff Winner.
Played 81 time(s).
November 10, 2011, 10:45pm
Paul Hindemith: “Trio”
Undated drawing by Paul Hindemith (from the book Der Komponist als Zeichner)
November 07, 2011, 10:57am
Cory Arcangel: A Couple Thousand Short Films about Glenn Gould (2008)
For this remarkable piece of A/V wizardry, media artist Cory Arcangel created custom software to automatically map each note of the first of J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations to a corresponding YouTube clip of an amateur musician performing the required pitch. Using over 1100 different snippets of video, Arcangel constructs a beautiful collision of classical music and internet culture.
October 28, 2011, 3:40pm
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Music, technology, utopia: The legacy of Pietro Grossi
Pietro Grossi: Excerpt from Create C (1972)
From the album Bit Art (2010)
On the basis of both his musical creations and his visionary perspectives on the fate of art in the digital age, the Italian composer Pietro Grossi (1917-2002) is one of the most important figures in late 20th-century music. Grossi’s career was dedicated to a radical new conception of creativity and artistic production, as both aesthetic and a social phenomena.
Like most electronic and computer music composers of his generation, Grossi began as a classically trained musician. He studied cello and composition, played in the orchestra for many years, and his early compositions from the late 1950s are for conventional ensembles such as the string quartet, albeit in a probing, post-Webernian idiom, as was the style of the time. Some of these pieces employed a pre-compositional approach known as combinatory analysis, which was inspired by Grossi’s reading of Joseph Schillinger’s influential text The Mathematical Basis of the Arts.
His first contact with electronic music came in 1961, when he visited the Studio di Fonologia Musicale (Studio of Musical Phonology) in Milan, which was led by Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. Here he realized Progretto 2-3, one of his earliest tape pieces, based on slowly changing sonorities formed by superimposed sine waves. Grossi would revisit this concept in an even more fundamental way in his later compositions Battimenti (1965). Another piece from this period, entited PG 4, was an ambient drone work created for a sound installation for an architectural exhibition in Florence.
Grossi founded the Studio di Fonologia Musicale di Firenze in Florence in 1963. It began in his home with a white noise generator and a few oscillators, filters, and tape machines. In 1965 the studio was absorbed by the Florence conservatory, where Grossi began teaching a course in electronic music, the first of its kind in Italy. In 1967, Grossi was given the opportunity to develop a music program for a GE-115 computer, provided by the Italian computer company Olivetti. Grossi programmed a number of pieces, including a fugue from Bach’s Musical Offering and Paganini’s Fifth Caprice. He also created his first original computer compositions, which demonstrated the experimental potential of the computer. All this music was included on a 45-RPM record that was sent as a Christmas present to 20,000 Olivetti customers.
In 1969, Grossi began working with computers on a regular basis at the National University Computation Center (CNUCE) in Pisa. At first the computer was able to output only a monophonic square wave of constant amplitude. Later systems allowed for variation in volume and timbre. The computer stored music as manipulable data which could be affected through a set of commands at the console, such as INVERT (in invert melodic intervals), SCALE (to change tuning), and MODIFY (to make global parametric alterations).
While many composers were drawn to the computer for its ability to perform complex musical instructions with absolute fidelity, Grossi had a fundamentally different conception of the potential of “computer music.” He saw the computer not as a means of precisely realizing the pre-formed music in his mind, but rather of liberating composition from the constraints imposed by human intelligence. Provided by humans with certain basic parameters, the computer can create music of a complexity and richness literally beyond imagination.
Grossi’s music from the early 1970s is to my ears the most exhilarating and original of his work. Pieces such as Monodia (1970) are stunning etudes in synthetic sound, using a single, monophonic sound chip to create skittering blasts of notes, twisted digital distortion, and trompe-l’oreille illusions of polyphony. Create C (1972), presented here, could be humorously described as “Ferneyhough in Super Mario World”: the primal timbres of early computer sound chips are pushed to their limits, creating a music of bewildering complexity and abrasive beauty. For all its intensity, this is still music of breathtaking, childlike directness, far from all pretense or ironic posturing. Grossi’s music not only anticipates but surpasses much of the computer music that would follow it in the 40 years between then and now.
Grossi’s later projects carried his radical aesthetic principles from music into graphic arts. In 1986 he developed “Homeart,” a computer program written in QBasic which created random visual patterns according to basic instructions— a kind of digital interior decoration. He later published a number of unicum books based on the Homeart program. Finally, in 1997, he and Sergio Maltagliata designed an interactive audio-visual composition called NetOper@. (This was a late manifestation of Grossi’s interest in long-distance music-making: in 1970 he had established a telephone link between computers in Rimini and Pisa in 1970, and in 1974 organized a “telematic concert” between himself in Pisa and Iannis Xenakis in Paris. This idea would later be taken up by the American computer music group The Hub in 1985.)
The composer at the console
The emergence of the computer as an instrument of what could be called “computer-aided composition” spelled the end of the division of labor separating the functions of performer, composer, and listener. Accordingly, Grossi envisioned a fundamental shift in the meaning of composition. His class at the Florence Conservatory was open to non-musicians: the computer was to de-specialize musical production, eliminating the long, lonely hours of study required under the old regime. The liberation from the drudgery of instrumental training would free students to become more well-rounded and enlightened members of society.
Grossi encouraged his students to do away with the concept of intellectual property, instead thinking of music as a constantly changing work-in-progress of which individuals are merely the temporary custodians. Existing music was not a sacred and inviolable cultural heritage, but rather a reservoir of material for future productions. This was a kind of “remix” aesthetic avant la lettre, but with an important difference: Grossi’s notion of musical re-invention was based not on recordings, but rather on the greater malleability afforded by musical storage in terms of digital instructions. This allows for more abstract transformations. For example, a given composition, when stored as data in the computer, could be analyzed with regard to pitch content, producing a statistical table of pitch-class frequency that forms the basis for a new composition with a similar tonal “color” to the original. Analogous process could be undertaken with regard to rhythm, dynamics, and theoretically even timbre. Grossi writes:
“Already twenty-five years ago, I was in close contact with all the researchers involved in electronic music, and we exchanged taped recordings each with a title and an author. And each time I got something, I was very happy to listen to what the other person had done. But I could also get hundreds of other pieces out of that tape by making use of the technology available at the time: variable speed tape recorders, filters, even scissors. Already we saw the prospect of freeing ourselves from the message, which earlier had been rigorously fixed on music paper and performed according to precise rules. Each tape-recorded phonic message became the point of departure for creating many others… From a set of information making up a classical, contemporary, or even extemporary piece created by the computer itself, it is possible to make an infinite series of transformations.”
Grossi’s vision of the dissolution of the barriers between listeners, performers and composers was an outgrowth of the utopian thinking of the 1960s, which foresaw technological progress leading to the minimization of labor, freeing individuals for lives devoted to creative pursuits. As he put it, “[The present gives us] the image of a society characterized both by permanent education and research and by a frequent transfer from one activity to another. And in the fullness of time the leisure deriving from increased automation will give man the possibility of cultural enrichment and refinement. Today, practically speaking we have the possibility of solving our problems; the means are there—only the appropriate structures are still missing.”
Such a vision accorded with the idea of “composing” outlined in Jacques Attali’s 1977 book Noise. Attali announced the arrival of a new paradigm in the history of music, characterized by the decentralized production of music outside the orbit of economic exchange. For Attali, as for Grossi, the emancipatory and democratic potential of music, aided by the development of technology, presaged a social order of equality and plenitude: Grossi invoked the words of sociologist Renato Famea, who foresaw a utopian anti-economy of “everything for everybody, effortless and valueless.”
As Grossi foresaw, the development of technology has decentralized and democratized musical creativity. But the old ways die hard. Collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to composition are still the exception, rather than the rule. Popular conceptions—and following them, money and power—are still in the thrall of a conservative mentality that favors marketable products above experimental processes, individual geniuses above creative collectives, and technology as a means of repeating what we know, rather than discovering what we don’t. At a historical moment in which the idea of progress threatens to wither into the private accumulation of consumer gadgets amidst the general destruction of the commons, Grossi’s vision of musical politics is as distant as it is pressingly relevant.
Still image from Grossi’s Homeart program
Played 186 time(s).
October 23, 2011, 3:49pm
Ecstatic, hour-long mix of ritual music made by human beings the world over, lovingly curated by percussionist Mike Weis. Includes South Korean shamanistic rituals, Sufi music to accompany the kinetic meditation of the “whirling dervishes,” the polyphonic yelli singing of the Baka forest people of central Africa, trance music of Brazilian Candomblé worshippers, Afro-American Baptist church music, and much more.
October 19, 2011, 10:00am
“Switched-On Garden”: Public art goes green
The new “trans-digital conservatory” Data Garden celebrated its launch yesterday with an ambitious public art extravaganza at Bartram’s Garden, the stately botanical garden founded in 1728 on the banks of the Schuykill river in southwest Philadelphia. Entitled “Switched-On Garden,” the event was a lovely mix of technology and nature, old and new, experimental art and unpretentious fun. Unfortunately, I had to leave before the live performances began, but I took time to check out each of the four sound installations.
Right on the banks of the Schuykill, near an outcropping over the river known as Notched Rock, New York-based artists Dan Scofield and Miriam Simun set up a small forest space in which several ambiently placed speakers emitted haunting, disconnected electronic tones. Responding to the information gathered by infrared sensors mounted on trees, the sounds reacted subtly to the presence of listeners.
A participatory work by Brazilian sound artist Vivian Cacurri was set up on a wooden platform called the octagon. Eight tree stumps, each with its own contact microphone, provided seating for visitors to step up and perform as they please. The microphones were run though a mixing unit whose amplification and delay effects served to blur the relationship between the sounds and their sources, creating a sonic anonymity that encouraged even the shy to take part.
In the lily pond near the middle of the grounds, Philadelphia musician Jesse Kudler created a floating sound installation consisting of small speakers connected to mp3 players mounted on four rectangles of styrofoam, which strangely resembled icebergs. The quiet, continuous tones melded gently into the ambient soundscape.
In the upper garden was an array of twittering and screeching electronic gadgets presented by Sam Cusumano of Electricity for Progress, an educational initiative that teaches people about electronics through circuit bending and other experimental endeavors. Nine stations placed about the garden presented various unassuming objects—from a Barbie karaoke machine to a trio of apples— that Cusumano had turned into glorious digital noisemakers. I tried out a number of the “instruments” myself but ultimately enjoyed just taking in the delightful phantasmagoria of uncoordinated sound.
The entire event called to mind an electrified version of R. Murray Schafer’s vision of the “soniferous garden,” a space devoted to communal music-making in a natural setting: ”In one corner of the garden…there might also be a place for a public instrumentarium, consisting of a number of simple instruments…so that the citizens of a community might come together and play together.”
October 17, 2011, 9:11pm
