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Percy Grainger: “Experiments to Provide Instruments for Free Music” (c. 1952)

From the album The Lyre’s Island: Some Australian Music, Sound Art, and Design (1996)

Best known for his copious folk-song arrangements and rather conventional works for wind band, Australian composer Percy Grainger (1882-1961) also moonlighted as one of the 20th century’s most fearlessly harebrained musical experimenters.  

In 1912, he created “Random Round,” a remarkable composition that anticipated musical indeterminacy a half-century before Umberto Eco’s The Open Work. In the early 1920s Grainger produced highly elaborate and sometimes unplayable arrangements of folksongs for the Aeolian player piano company in London. Later in the decade he developed a practice of “elastic scoring,” a flexible way of notating orchestral music to make it more easily adaptable to ensembles of various size and instrumental makeup. 

Inspired by his childhood experience of the sound of the ocean and by the prophetic ideas espoused in Ferruccio Busoni’s 1907 Sketch of a New Aesthetics of Music,Grainger had long imagined a “gliding music” free of the discrete pitch levels that characterized Western melody. (Grainger had studied with Busoni for a brief time in 1903.) This he realized for the first time in a 1935 sketch called “Free Music,” first for string quartet and later arranged for four Theremins. Of the idea of free music, Grainger wrote,  ”My impression is that this world of tonal freedom was suggested to me by wave-movements in the sea…It seems to me the only music logically suitable to a scientific age.”

Grainger’s 1951 sketch showing a sewing machine driving a hand drill controlling a Morse code oscillator.

From 1945 until his death in 1961, while living in White Plains, New York, Grainger developed a series of elaborate experimental instruments designed for the realization of free music. He was assisted by his wife Ella and the American physics teacher Burnett Cross. These became known as the “Cross-Grainger free music machines.” They included the Reed-Box Tone-Tool (1950-51), an automated instrument using harmonium reeds tuned in eighth-tones, the “Electric-Eye Tone Tool,” begun in 1953 and unfinished, which used transistors to create tones from graphical inscriptions via photoelectric cells, and the “Kangaroo Pouch” machine, a massive Rube Goldberg contraption which I will not attempt to explain here. (The reader is referred to Rainer Linz’s survey of Grainger’s free music instruments.)

The remarkable audio you are hearing is taken from the CD companion to volume 6 of Leonardo Music Journal, curated by Douglas Kahn. The track titles are “Butterfly Piano,” “Reed-Box Tone-Tool,” “AM Oscillator Test,” “Hiles-and-Dales Oscillator,” and “Oscillator Test Pattern.”

October 14, 2011, 10:13pm

“The MS belongs to the ‘Yang’ tradition, the most highly involved and regarded chant tradition in Tibetan music, and the only one to rely on a system of notation (Yang-Yig). The chant consists of smoothly effected rises and falls in intonation, which are represented by complex curved lines. The notation also frequently contains detailed instructions concerning in what spirit the music should be sung (e.g. flowing like a river, light like bird song) and the smallest modifications to be made to the voice in the utterance of a vowel. On the whole, Yang chants are sung at an extremely low pitch and at a lingering and subtly changing pace, allowing full expression of the chanted text. Such texts as these would have been used as a mnemonic device by the Master of Chant in a monastery in leading the monastery in the performance of a chant. This type of graphic notation of the melody line goes back to the 6th century. It records neither the rhythmic pattern nor duration of the notes.”

Source: The Schøyen Collection

October 09, 2011, 8:10pm

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Felix Kubin: “Psyko Billy”

From the album Matki Wandalki (2004)

The musical production of Felix Kubin (born 1969 in Hamburg) ricochets between the two poles of experimental, post-futurist sound art and “psycho sci-fi pop,” often within the same track. Veteran of numerous musical projects, from the early 80s punk group “Die Egozentrische Zwei” (whose recordings were later released as “The Tetchy Teenage Tapes of Felix Kubin”) to Klangkrieg, a noise-collage duo with Tim Buhre started in 1987, Kubin cites among his formative influences the music of Sun Ra, Stockhausen, and Throbbing Gristle.

As befits a self-described dadaist, Kubin has maintained an aura of absurd mystery around his life and musical activities. His personal website has not been updated for six years, and in any event contains mostly breathless mock-publicity boilerplate about the remarkable musical career of the “whirlwind wizard of the ivories.” A substantial—and apparently sincere—feature on Kubin appeared in the now-defunct Acetone Magazine in 2005. Here he states: “Of course I know that my existence is ridiculous like everyone else’s. But I cannot lead a life with this knowledge on my forehead, so I pretend that it is different and make myself believe it.”

In addition to his prolific recordings, Kubin has created a number of radio plays, sound installations, and other artistic undertakings of a more…speculative nature, such as the “Pataphysical Tape Club.” In 1998 he founded Gagarin Records, named after the famous Russian cosmonaut and specializing in “Futurist pop, Anti-Music, Electronic Surgery, Walls of Waltz, Unnerving Beauty, Sound and Radio Art, Preußen-Noise.” A recent release, entitled Historische Aufnahmen, Vol. 1 (Historic Recordings), purports to capture such fantastic phonographic phenomena as the electrical impulses of plankton and Friedrich Trautwein’s demonstration of his Trautonium for Joseph Goebbels.

October 06, 2011, 10:54pm

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Francis Bebey: “Akwaaba (Welcome)”

From the album Akwaaba: Music for Sanza (1985)

Born in Cameroon in 1929, Francis Bebey was a brilliant musician and public intellectual, and a powerful advocate for African music in the wake of the decolonialization of the mid-20th century. A cosmopolitan who lived for a time in France and the United States, Bebey was an important figure in the global music scene from his first albums in the 1960s until his death in 2001.

Before settling into his career as a globetrotting ambassador of “world music” fusion, Bebey wore a variety of professional hats. During the 60s and 70s he was a radio journalist in France and worked for the information service of UNESCO. Bebey was also an active writer, producing a number of highly successful novels, as well as collections of essays and poems. In 1969 he published an important musicological study entitled Musique d’Afrique.

Bebey’s compositions fused traditional central African elements with aspects of American popular music and, occasionally, European classical music, such as “Kasilane” for the crossover-happy Kronos Quartet. His primary instrument was the guitar, but the sound on many of his records is dominated by the sanza, a plucked idiophone popular throughout Africa, where it is has many different names and variations. It is commonly known in English as the “thumb piano.”

“One day God, dying of boredom in a world where He so far had created nothing, built a sanza according to the counsels of Imagination. When He began to play it, He found that each note created something around Him: the sun, the moon, good weather and bad, the forest, the savannah, the desert, the village; then man, followed by woman, and by hundreds of millions of children of all colors.” (Francis Bebey)

October 01, 2011, 11:22am

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Mireille Chamass-Kyrou: Étude I (1960)

From the album Archives GRM, Disc 2: ”L’Art De L’Étude”

Mireille Chamass-Kyrou, whose very name is a melody, is a Greek-born French composer of electronic music. Born in 1931, Chamass-Kyrou worked for a time at the studio of the Groupe de recherches musicales in Paris, where in 1960 she created this etude, her only known composition. (She is also known simply as Mireille Kyrou, under which name this composition was first released.)

The music unfolds in three brief tableaus. It opens with a slowly building dissonant polyphony of sustained metallic tones. This leads into a second scene, dominated by a percussive clicking sound at once powerfully visceral and acoustically mysterious. (Is it the plucking of metal comb-teeth? Some insectoid stridulation?) The final section is announced by a deep, existential drone, from which emerges the strangely alienated timbre of a human voice. The metallic tones reappear, more violent now, then give way seamlessly to a forlorn concert of Morse code signals, a message cast into the void.

The new instrumentarium: Chamass-Kyrou with wind chimes and a feather duster

In contrast to many of her peers, Chamass-Kyrou embraced the synaesthetic valences of electronic sound: the music should evoke, in her words, “giant molecules, diffuse constellations, and fine sonic dust.” Although the cosmic mood of her Étude is undeniable, she manages to avoid the stereotypes of “space music,” which were already well established by 1960. It is an atmospheric composition of the utmost subtlety. 

This track can be found on the highly recommended anthology Archives GRM, a five-disc set released in 2004 and dedicated to the premiere French studio of electronic music. All the usual suspects are here, both GRM stalwarts (Pierre Schaeffer, François Bayle, Ivo Malec) and well-known visitors (Edgard Varèse, Iannis Xenakis). But in addition to this classic material, there are some obscure gems, especially on the first disc, Les visiteurs de la musique concrète, which features rarely heard tape compositions by Pierre Boulez, Darius Milhaud, and Olivier Messiaen.

September 27, 2011, 9:55pm

Austrian composer and visionary Josef Matthias Hauer

September 24, 2011, 11:02am

“There is a sense in which the naïve listener retains an advantage over his learned peers. He, like the child who only up to a certain age may learn easily and naturally a number of languages, may, by listening, learn of the wider possibilities of musical languages. To listen is to let music speak on its own ground.

“But the problem is that none of us are any longer naïve listeners. We are already plunged into the thought formed by our mother tongues. Only by a ‘second naïveté’ can we approach a purity of listening. This second naïveté comes only by concentration and a willingness to suspend our own tongues and beliefs. […]

“Music will speak but it will speak in many tongues, and those tongues will be rich and give forth strange new sounds as well as familiar old ones. To me, the best music education is one which emphasizes the multilingual. As a ‘naïve’ listener I will harken to all the voices.”

(Don Ihde, “A Philosopher Listens”)

September 23, 2011, 11:26am

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The Hub: “Waxlips I” (1991)

From the album Boundary Layer 

This Thursday at Vox Populi in Philly, computer music pioneers Mark Trayle and John Bischoff will be playing in a concert organized by my comrades at Philadelphia Sound Forum. Trayle and Bischoff are both alums of the network music collective The Hub, which in turn spun off from the seminal “micro-computer network band” the League of Automatic Music Composers.

The name “The Hub” was first used in connection with a performance by Bischoff and Perkis in San Francisco in 1985. The group appeared in its six-person form for the first time in a pair of concerts curated by Nicolas Collins in New York in the fall of that year. Breaking up into two sets of three, The Hub performed simultaneously at two separate Manhattan venues, connected via modem. (Kyle Gann dubbed this phenomenon, perhaps the first of its kind, “musica telephonica.”) Ultimately, however, the group opted for “in the flesh” performances, which allowed them to better respond to the unfolding algorithmic structure of the music.

This sephirot-like diagram shows one of the group’s MIDI configurations

In The Hub’s first incarnation, the members’ computers were wired together via a central memory unit they called “the Blob.” Around 1990, they adopted a MIDI interface, which allowed each player to communicate to any other directly, rather than through a common data pool. Later in the decade The Hub would abandon MIDI-connected homemade synthesizers for computer audio languages such as Max, and in the mid-90s they revisited the possibility of simultaneous music-making over the internet.

Waxlips, conceived by Tim Perkis in 1991, provides a great example of the group’s approach to computer-augmented improvisation:

The rule is simple: each player sends and receives requests to play one note. Upon receiving the request, each should play the note requested, and then transform the note message in some fixed way to a different message, and send it out to someone else. The transformation can follow any rule the player wants, with the one limitation that within anyone section of the piece, the same rule must be followed (so that any particular message in will always cause the same new message out). One lead player sends signals indicating new sections in the piece (where players change their transformation rules) and jump-starts the process by spraying the network with a burst of requests. The network action had an unexpected living and liquid behavior: the number of possible interactions is astronomical in scale, and the evolution of the network is always different, sometimes terminating in complex (chaotic) states including near repetitions, sometimes ending in simple loops, repeated notes, or just dying out altogether.

September 19, 2011, 10:38am

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Charanjit Singh: “Raga Madhuvanti”

From the album Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat (1983)

I’m famously ignorant when it comes to the history of beat-oriented electronic music—which is, after all, what most people mean when they talk about the genre. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the electro/techno wing of electronic music, even less that I dismiss it with Stockhausen-esque disdain (however valid some of his points may be). For whatever reason, I just haven’t absorbed the stylistic lineage, which is much more complicated than an outsider might guess, as shown by the exemplary Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music.

Still, in spite of my ignorance of the finer points of history and genre-development, I know what I like. And this album by the Bollywood session musician Charanjit Singh has absolutely blown my mind. 

Created using the cutting-edge technology of a Roland Jupiter-8 analog synthesizer, a TR-808 drum machine, and a TB-303 bass sequencer, Singh’s album is a visionary fusion of the sinuous melodic improvisations of Indian traditional music with the pulsing rhythms of electronic music. Though not entirely without precedent (the Italo-disco of Giorio Moroder is cited as a likely influence), Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat was a formative moment in the global development of techno. 

The album was re-released by the label Bombay-Connections in 2010.

September 15, 2011, 10:19am

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Thomas D’Urfey: “Young Collin Cleaving of a Beam”

From the album Thomas D’Urfey’s Pills to Purge Melancholy: Lewd Songs and Low Ballads from the 18th Century

Thomas D’Urfey (also known as Tom Durfey) began his career as a playwright, his first plays being staged in 1676. In spite of being a stutterer, he soon made a career for himself as a singer and performer, and later branched out into music, contributing to the development of a uniquely English genre known as the ballad opera. (One of the earliest examples of this genre, the Beggar’s Opera of 1728, provided the model for the famous Threepenny Opera of Bert Brecht and Kurt Weill.)

But D’Urfey’s true musical legacy, as far as I’m concerned, is as a prolific creator of humorous and bawdy songs. His position as the 18th century’s Weird Al is based largely on his collection Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy, published in six volumes in 1719-20. The set contains over 1000 songs on various off-color topics, including drinking, sex, and numerous bodily functions. (One of D’Urfey’s biggest hits was called “The Fart.”)

Unlike Weird Al, however, D’Urfey wrote most of his own music. Apparently not one for humility, he wrote in the preface to Wit and Mirth that “scarce any other Man could have perform’d the like, my double Genius for Poetry and Musick giving me still that Ability which others perhaps might want.”

The lyrics of this boisterous three-voice catch are fairly representative of D’Urfey’s literary style. The music is attributed to none other than Henry Purcell:

Young Collin, cleaving of a Beam, / At ev’ry Thumping, thumping blow cry’d hem ; / And told his Wife, and told his Wife, / And told his Wife who the Cause would know, / That Hem made the Wedge much further go: / Plump Joan, when at Night to Bed they came, / And both were Playing at that same; / Cry’d Hem, hem, hem prithee, prithee, prithee; / Collin do, / If ever thou lov’dst me, Dear hem now; / He laughing answer’d no, no, no, / Some Work will Split, will split with half a blow; / Besides now I Bore, now I bore, now I bore, / Now, now, now I bore, / I Hem when I Cleave, but now I Bore.

All six volumes of Wit and Mirth can be downloaded from IMSLP.

September 12, 2011, 4:37pm