Karlheinz Stockhausen and Theodor Adorno

From the 2009 documentary “Karlheinz Stockhausen: Musik für eine neue Welt,” directed by Norbert Busè.

April 18, 2010, 5:10pm

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Jonathan Bepler: “Desert Hymn”

From the album Music for Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 2 (1999)

Matthew Barney’s massive, five-part film series The Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002) defies easy summary.  Wagnerian not only in scope (nearly seven hours in total) but also in the glacial slowness of its unfolding and the density of its symbolism, Cremaster is a unique cinematic experience.  It is also an elusive one: the films have apparently been released on DVD in extremely limited numbers, and can otherwise be viewed only in officially authorized screenings.  (It was thus that I saw all the films—in one day!—in Cologne in 2005.)  Of course, such artificial scarcity is difficult to maintain in the age of digital reproduction.

While the quality of the films I find extremely uneven, ranging from the violent beauty of 2, to the austere, pseudo-operatic 5, to the painfully bad 4, one consistently excellent element in these films is the music, composed by Jonathan Bepler.

Bepler’s music for Cremaster 2, set mostly in Utah, amplifies the brooding atmosphere of the film, which has been described as an “epic avant-garde western.”  The plot (such as it is) centers on the life and death of Gary Gilmore, the convicted murderer who was executed by firing squad in 1977.  ”Desert Hymn” accompanies a scene symbolically representing the trial and judgment of Gilmore in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City.

April 16, 2010, 10:07am

http://margaretnoble.net/blog/

Margaret Noble’s beautifully curated Sound Is Art blog, featuring all manner of acoustic delicacies.  

April 13, 2010, 9:44am

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Karlheinz Stockhausen: Stimmung (excerpt; 1968)

From the album Stockhausen: Stimmung, performed by Singcircle, dir. Gregory Rose

While Stockhausen’s avowal of a pantheistic spirituality in his writings is sometimes difficult to take seriously, his 1968 composition Stimmung seems explicable only as the ecstatic credo of a devout postmodern universalist.

Stimmung is a German word rich in connotation, but most often meaning “tuning,” “mood,” or “atmosphere.”  The tonal spectrum of the work is generated from the overtones of a single low B-flat, to which the singers’ voices are anchored by an electronically-generated drone that they alone can hear.  Shifting vocal colors and gently pulsing rhythmic patterns shimmer across this sturdy harmonic edifice: the rhythmic profile and vocal timbre of each part is precisely notated, the latter using the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

The “score” for Stimmung is essentially an assembly kit comprising 51 short sections (or “moments,” as Stockhausen calls them) that are ordered uniquely for each performance, with certain limitations imposed by an overarching “form-scheme.”  Improvisation comes into play as the singers respond in various ways to the introduction of new material and determine the moments of transition to new sections.  The music is punctuated by the invocation of 29 “magic names” of divinities from various world cultures and snippets of erotic poetry penned by Stockhausen himself.

For the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Stimmung was presented in a spherical concert hall—another of Stockhausen’s brainchildren.  It was performed there 72 times:

Stockhausen designed [the hall] in conjunction with an architect and he placed fifty speakers around the hall so that the audience was surrounded with a circle of sound. He controlled the spatial quality of the sound from the desk on the platform in the centre of the sphere and he was able to make a sound mill that revolved around in circles over the audience’s heads. The spatial movement of the sounds became equally important as the other parameters of the sound such as duration and dynamics. (Rory Braddell)

In spring of 2003 I had the good fortune to hear New Music New College give three performances of Stimmung over the course of a week; the sustained, concentrated experience of these sounds created a wonderful effervescence in my head that lasted for days. This is transformative music.

April 09, 2010, 10:15pm

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Samuel Beckett: “Molloy I & II”

From the album “…the Whole Thing’s Coming out of the Dark” (2000)

An imaginative recording based on three texts by arch-modernist writer Samuel Beckett (Molloy, Company, and L’Image).

Beckett produced a number of radio plays among his literary works, and he always had an acute concern for the sonic dimension of his writing.   The title of this album is taken from a phrase he used to describe the uncanny quality of radiophonic listening.  Beckett’s disembodied voices sound out the vast, unlit spaces of the existential condition.

March 25, 2010, 9:27am

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The Books: “Tokyo”

From the album The Lemon of Pink (2003)

Although dedicated in spirit to new and experimental forms of music, we at Acousmata spend much of our time rummaging through the obscure corners of the twentieth century.  So we hope to be forgiven for having just discovered this no-longer-new but excellent work by “folktronica” duet The Books.

Combining acoustic string sounds with the splice-happy sensibility of musique concrète, The Books evoke comparison with much older artists such as Henry Flynt, although the musical result is something quite distinctive.  In its frenetic, mechanized quality, this track also recalls Frank Zappa’s late albums such as Jazz from Hell and Civilization, Phaze III.  

The arrangement of familiar sounds (plucked guitars, human voices) in unexpected juxtapositions lifts this music above the monotony that afflicts many productions of so-called electronica.  

March 19, 2010, 10:45am

J. K. Huysmans: “The mouth organ”

From the novel A rebours (Against the Grain), 1884

For Francis Schwartz

He made his way to the dining-room, where there was a cupboard built into one of the walls containing a row of little barrels, resting side-by-side on tiny sandalwood stands and each broached at the bottom with a silver spigot.

This collection of liqueur casks he called his mouth organ.

A rod could be connected to all the spigots, enabling them to be turned by one and the same movement, so that once the apparatus was in position it was only necessary to press a button concealed in the wainscoting to open all the conduits simultaneously and so fill with liqueur the minute cups underneath the taps.

The organ was then open.  The stops labelled ‘flute’, ‘horn’, and ‘vox angelica’ were pulled out, ready for use.  Des Esseintes would drink a drop here, another there, playing intense symphonies to himself, and providing his palate with sensations analogous to those which music dispenses to the ear.

Indeed, each and every liqueur, in his opinion, corresponded in taste with the sound of a particular instrument.  Dry curaçao, for instance, was like the clarinet with its piercing, velvety note; kümmel like the oboe with its sonorous, nasal timbre; crème de menthe and anisette like the flute, at once sweet and tart, soft and shrill.  Then to complete the orchestra there was kirsch, blowing a wild trumpet blast; gin and whisky raising the roof of the mouth with the blare of their cornets and trombones; marc-brandy matching the tubas with its deafening din; while peals of thunder came from the cymbal and the bass drum, which arak and mastic were banging and beating with all their might.

He considered that this analogy could be pushed still further and that string quartets might play under the palatial arch, with the violin represented by an old brandy, choice and heady, biting and delicate; with the viola simulated by rum, which was stronger, heavier, and quieter; with vespetro as poignant, drawn-out, sad and tender as a violoncello; and with the double-bass a fine old bitter, full-bodied, solid, and dark.  One might even form a quintet, if this were thought desirable, by adding a fifth instrument, the harp, imitated to near perfection by the vibrant savour, the clear, sharp, silvery note of dry cumin.

The similarity did not end there, for the music of liqueuers had its own scheme of interrelated tones; thus, to quote only one example, Benedictine represents, so to speak, the minor key corresponding to the major key of those alcohols which wine-merchants’ scores indicate by the name of green Chartreuse.

Once these principles had been established, and thanks to a series of erudite experiments, he had been able to perform upon his tongue silent melodies and mute funeral marches; to hear inside his mouth crème de menthe solosand rum-and-vespetro duets.

He even succeeded in transferring specific pieces of music to his palate, following the composer step by step, rendering his intentions, his effects, his shades of expression, by mixing or contrasting related liqueurs, by subtle approximations and cunning combinations.

At other times he would compose melodies of his own, executing pastorals with the sweet blackcurrant liqueur that filled his throat with the warbling song of a nightingale; or with the delicious cacaochouva that hummed sugary bergerets like the Romances of Estelle and the ‘Ah! vous-dirai-je, maman’ of olden days.

But tonight Des Esseintes had no wish to listen to the taste of music; he confined himself to removing one note from the keyboard of his organ, carrying off a tiny cup which he had filled with genuine Irish whisky.

March 10, 2010, 9:54am

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Johannes Kepler, Willie Ruff, and John Rodgers: “The Planets from Mercury Outward”

From the album The Harmony of the World: A Realization for the Ear of Johannes Kepler’s Data from Harmonices Mundi (1619)

Most famous for his “first law” declaring that the orbit of planets around the sun traced ellipses, and not circles, as was previously believed, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) is not usually thought of in connection to music.  But in his 1619 book Harmonices Mundi (The Harmony of the Worlds), Kepler gave the ancient Pythagorean and Platonic notion of the “music of the spheres” a new and precisely empirical formulation.  He compared the angular velocity of the planets at perihelion and aphelion (the orbital points closest to and furthest from the sun), and expressed the relationship between these speeds as musical intervals:

(The interval in question is between the outermost notes of each scale; the inner notes are filled in as a formality.)

Kepler’s calculation of the “music of the spheres” was remarkable for a number of reasons.  First, as explained in Joscelyn Godwin’s excellent book Harmonies of Heaven and Earth, the intervals are calculated not in relation to the Earth, but rather, in accordance with the heliocentric theory of Copernicus, from the auditory perspective of the sun.  Second, although Kepler’s notation could not indicate it, he imagined their tonal ranges as being continuously sounded in the manner of a glissando.  Finally, Kepler’s cosmic music is explicitly polyphonic.  Previous theories were constrained by conventional understandings of what was musically acceptable: Aristotle, for example, rejected the notion that each planet simultaneously sounded the note of a scale, for the result would be cacophony.  But Kepler saw no reason to believe that the music of the spheres would cleave neatly to human notions of musical beauty.  He believed, with his medieval predecessor John Scotus Eriugena, that “all the musical consonances can be made by the eight celestial sounds, not just in the three genera (diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic), but even in others beyond the conception of mortals.”

Because the time-scale of these planetary motions is exceedingly vast (Saturn’s trip up and down a major third requires no less than 30 years), things have to be accelerated to make these harmonies audible to humans. This is what has been done in this exceptional recording made by Willie Ruff and John Rodgers.  The music you are hearing introduces the planets one by one: first Mercury, high and fast, with its eccentric orbit covering a large interval of a minor 10th; then, both in the treble register, Venus and Earth, whose nearly circular orbits create tones that barely change—Venus oscillates within a quarter-tone, Earth a semitone.  Next enters Mars in the alto range, with a fairly wide ambitus traversed in 10 second cycles. Quite a bit lower, Jupiter sounds its stentorian baritone, spanning a minor third. Finally comes Saturn, a growling bass about an octave below Jupiter.  Its range is a major third.

The outer planets, unknown in Kepler’s time, are represented by rhythmic impulses instead of musical tones: Uranus vacillates between a rapid 9 and 10 pulses per second, Neptune keeps a near-constant rate of 5 per second, and Pluto enters with a slow but irregular beat, which is the last to be heard after all the other voices drop out.

For a similarly inspired piece, check out Greg Fox’s Carmen of the Spheres (2006), which measures the orbital period of each of the planets in seconds, then divides that figure by two (using the principle of octave equivalence) again and again until it represents a frequency within the audible spectrum for humans.  A similar procedure is used to determine the duration of the pitches.  Interesting music, though Mr. Fox’s website is unforgivable.

March 06, 2010, 3:23pm

“Another world is possible”

Peter Ablinger’s “speaking piano” declares the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court.  A stunning piece of work—conceptually, technically, and emotionally.

March 03, 2010, 10:19am

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Don Simmons: “Limehouse Blues”

From the album A Session with Don Simmons (1966)

It is necessary to hear the Wurlitzer organ as the summation, in a single apparatus, of the sonic ideal of an entire human milieu.  Just as the Baroque pipe organ was that era’s templum musicum, a machine for the transmission and reception of divine forces, the Wurlitzer musically invoked a higher power in the public rituals of American modernity, namely shopping and leisure.

Like the pipe organs, but with a much shorter life span, the Wurlitzers are now carefully preserved relics, the sole denizens of otherwise abandoned holy places. And indeed, one has a similar uncanny sensation in old movie theaters and shopping-centers—these forlorn palaces of consumerism—as in the empty cathedrals of Europe.

The Wurlitzer repertoire is filled with songs you’ve heard before a millions times but never known the name of—anonymous earworms like “Sweet Georgia Brown, “We Three,” and “Limehouse Blues.”  This last number gives a good sense of the Wurlitzer’s sound.  It’s played here by Don Simmons, who (seriously) was the resident organist at the Oaks Park Roller Rink in Portland, Oregon, from 1962 until his death in 1985.

February 26, 2010, 5:24pm