Steve Porcaro of Toto tweaks the band’s massive Polyfusion syntheszier “Damius” (1982). From Mark Vail’s Vintage Synthesizers, p. 155.

September 09, 2011, 10:58am

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Roger Winfield: “Windsong 2”

From the album Windsongs: The Sound of Aeolian Harps (1991)

Although the underlying acoustic principle is an ancient one, the first detailed description of a human-built Aeolian harp (also known as the wind harp) comes from the 1650 compendium Musurgia Universalis of the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. The instrument, which appears under the heading “Machinamentum X,” is featured in a series of fantastic devices for making music without human intervention.

Kircher often gets credit for introducing the wind harp into European letters, but the instrument was mentioned briefly in the Magia Naturalis of the Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta, published in 1588. As R. Murray Schafer points out, the instrument turns up in various forms in many different world cultures, including a miniature version built into a kite, well-known in China and Java.

The Aeolian harp gained new life in the late 18th and early 19th century, when it was hailed by Romantic poets as the transcendent spirit of nature made audible. Coleridge, Keats, and Wordsworth, Goethe and Schiller, and later Emerson and Thoreau all devoted lines to the instrument, which provided for sensitive souls of the time a kind of meandering, ambient music avant la lettre.

A sketch of the instrument from Kircher’s book Phonurgia Nova of 1673

Attentive listeners noticed that the sounds elicited by the wind harp were often strangely dissonant and bore no apparent relationship to the fundamental pitches of the instrument’s strings. These unexpected frequencies confounded acousticians, who concocted a number of theories to explain how such sounds arose from the interaction between the wind and the string.

Only in the late 19th century was a satisfactory explanation attained: the wind passing over the string creates tiny eddies or vortices around the string.  At a sufficient velocity these eddies break off and produce a tone, which may elicit a sympathetic tone in the strings if it corresponds to one of the string’s harmonic frequencies. These “friction tones” were a new acoustic discovery and accounted for the unique sound quality of the Aeolian harp.

This modern example of the sound of an Aeolian Harp is from the 1991 album Windsongs by British musician Roger Winfield, who recorded a variety of harps using magnetic pickups (similar to those found on electric guitars) to amplify the otherwise delicate tones of the harp into something rather more powerful. The recordings were edited after the fact to create musical contrasts, but underwent no substantial processing or effects.

(For more information: The Alsatian composer Georges Kastner wrote a massive study of the instrument in 1856 entitled La Harpe d’Éole: Sur les Rapports des Phénomènes Sonores de la Nature avec la Science et l’Art. The book has unfortunately not been translated. An excellent recent history of the Aeolian harp can be found in the book Instruments and the Imagination by Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman.)

September 02, 2011, 7:41pm

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Information Society: “Growing up with Shiva”

From the album Apocryphon: Electro Roots 1982-1985

My introduction to Information Society constitutes one of my very earliest musical memories. In the early 90s, my family acquired an ill-fated Sega-CD add-on to the Genesis console. The unit was a horrible flop, but I will always remember the cutting-edge CD+G disc included with the system, which contained two songs by Information Society: “Walking Away” and “Pure Energy”—not coincidentally, two of their biggest hits. The futuristic synthetic sounds of these tracks opened my imagination to new dimensions of musical possibility. (The band’s allure for me was heightened by the fact, later discovered, that they hailed from the ancestral land of my conception, the twin cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul.)

And to think, we abandoned this look for jeans and flannel.

The compilation album Apocryphon is a remarkable document of the band’s early years in the first half of the 80s. It features re-releases of their albums The INSOC EP (1983) and Creatures of Influence (1985), plus a disc of early miscellany entitled, none too humbly, Prophets without Honor.

“Growing up with Shiva,” featured here, is a driving anti-nuke statement created in the shadow of the near-apocalypse of 1983. (Note the quasi-rap vocal delivery in the breakdown section. Not too shabby for some white Minnesotans!) “Get up (Away from That Thing)” is an awesomely unabashed disco groove with an anti-TV lyrical message, while the more polished and sequencer-driven sound of “Running” anticipates the band’s aforementioned radio hits of the end of the decade, as well as manifestations of freestyle such as Stevie B.’s 1988 classic “Spring Love.”

Connoisseurs of the genre should check out the previously featured Units, a less successful but more experimental early American synth-pop outfit from San Francisco.

August 28, 2011, 9:05pm

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Pérotin: Excerpt from “Viderunt omnes” (c. 1200)

From the album Pérotin - The Hilliard Ensemble

One of the earliest composers we know by name, Pérotin was a prominent figure in the so-called Notre Dame school of music, which flourished in Paris around the year 1200. Pérotin and his younger contemporary Léonin composed one of the earliest forms of notated polyphonic music, a genre known as organum.

The form of Notre Dame organum—and thus the distinctive sound of the music—rests upon a remarkable structural conceit. The lowest voice in the texture (the cantus firmus or fixed voice, which forms the harmonic foundation) sings notes drawn from fragments of Gregorian chant, but stretched to extremely long durations, many hundreds of times their original length. With these sustained tones as the basis, the upper voices sing newly composed melodic filigrees in a quick triple time (known as tempus perfectum, in analogy to the Trinity). There are also brief passages of discant, in which all voices move in rhythmic unison, creating a lighter and more active texture.

The sound of this music is striking not only because of the intense droning of the cantus firmus, but also because of the timbral changes that take place with each new syllable in the bottom voice. When this voice changes its pitch, it also changes its syllable and thus its vowel, creating a remarkable acoustic effect that could be compared to the changing of perspective or lighting in the visual field.

(You can experiment with this yourself, singing a continuous pitch and changing from “ah,” “eh,” “ee,” “oh,” “oo” to hear how the timbre of your voice changes. As you sing each vowel sound, your vocal tract is functioning as a complex filter to shape the vibrations generated by your vocal folds.)

In this example, the first such change takes place about one minute into the piece. The second change, about 30 seconds later, coincides with a shift toward a darker, “minor” modality (the term is anachronistic here), creating a wonderful effect that is totally unique to this music.

If you listen closely, you can hear that the cantus firmus very slowly moves through the syllables of the phrase “Viderunt omnes” (Latin for “all the world has seen”) over the course of the first four minutes of this excerpt. Afterward you hear the monophonic Gregorian chant from which the cantus firmus is derived.

August 25, 2011, 9:04pm

Geoff Manaugh, author of the brilliant architectural/design site BLDGBLOG, shares the following thoughts on blogging in the introduction to The BLDGBLOG Book, released in 2009. His attitude is in essence mine:

“I’ve often joked that BLDGBLOG is organized around one thing only: the pleasure principle. It’s not theoretically rigorous or disciplinarily loyal or beholden to one particular style of design—even one historical era—but that’s the point. […] 

“In other words, forget academic rigor. Never take the appropriate next step. […] Most importantly, follow your lines of interest.

“With BLDGBLOG, the fundamental motivation has always been to write about things—ideas, buildings, books, landscapes, cities—that excite me, that make me want to keep writing, keep thinking, to go out right away and talk to friends. After all, why not remindmyself—and others—of all the interesting things that actually exist in the world? Even if those things don’t exist; even if they’re just speculations and plans. Why not concentrate only on them?”

While this notion of following one’s blogging bliss may not sound particularly revolutionary, I believe it is key to the prospect of internet writing as a path beyond the self-immolating irrelevance of academic discourse and the wanton idiocy of consumer culture. Only joyful knowledge can enlighten the world.

August 22, 2011, 9:14pm

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Xenharmonic triad, part 3

Alois Hába: Suite for Quarter-Tone Guitar No. 2 (1947). Fifth movement, “Allegro energico”

Downloaded from the Huygens-Fokker Foundation

Rounding out our brief tour of microtonal and xenharmonic music is this movement for quarter-tone guitar by Czech composer Alois Hába. The most prolific microtonal composer of the 20th century, Hába announced his mission in a 1927 book entitled New Theory of Harmony, which was one of the earliest systematic treatments of the harmonic foundations of microtonal composition. The book fused Schoenberg’s principle of the “emancipation of the dissonance” with the microtonal impetus of Ferruccio Busoni’s 1907 pamphlet Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music.

Taking advantage of his position as leader of the Department of Microtonal Music at the Prague Conservatory (the first such institution in the world), Hába spearheaded the development of a number of new instruments specially built for microtonal performance, including quarter-tone pianos (1924-1931), a sixth-tone harmonium (1936), a quarter-tone clarinet (1924) and trumpet (1931), and a quarter-tone guitar in 1943. Hába was especially fond of this last instrument, for which he composed the accompaniment of a number of song cycles, as well as two suites.

The Suite No. 2 is, in the context of Hába’s compositional idiom, a strongly tonal piece, gravitating toward the pitch center of E, with varying major/minor inflections. Still, the music is athematic and freely circulates all 24 pitches of the quarter-tone scale, creating a decidedly strange duality of modernist chromaticism and historical reference. (The fifth and final movement, heard here, opens with a flamenco-esque flourish and ends with a wonderfully out-of-place blues chord of the dominant seventh.) A performance of first movement of this suite by guitarist Tolgahan Çoğulu is available on YouTube, in case you were wondering what a quarter-tone guitar looks like.

Hába’s resplendent Suite for Four Trombones in the Quarter-tone System, composed in 1950, makes for an interesting point of comparison with the Suite No. 2, composed three years earlier. Together, the two pieces give a very good impression of Hába’s mature, mid-century compositional voice.

August 21, 2011, 11:27am

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Xenharmonic triad, part 2

Ivan Wyschnegradsky: Étude ultrachromatique, for Fokker 31-tone organ, Op. 42 (1959)

From the album 50 Jaar Stichting Huygens-Fokker

In 1951, the Dutch physicist and musician Adriaan Fokker (1887-1972) oversaw the construction and installation of a unique, 31-tone keyboard instrument in Teyler’s Museum in Haarlem. This would became known as the Fokker Organ. Fokker’s tuning system was based on the theories of the 17th-century Dutch polymath Christian Huygens, whose notion of a 31-part equal division of the octave was in turn inspired by earlier instruments such as Vicentino’s arcicemablo. The instrument’s labyrinthine keyboard interface demanded a fundamentally new technique from those who would dare to play it.

The keyboard of the Fokker Organ

Huygens and Fokker both envisioned this configuration as a means of enabling the performance of music in various mean-tone tunings, rather than a path toward microtonality as it is generally understood. Other composers, however, viewed the refined division of the octave as the technological basis for a new chromatic overdrive: the principle of the equal importance of all notes that motivated atonality and Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique was now to be applied to a greater (and theoretically unlimited) number of tones.

This was the approach taken by the Russian-French composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky, who wrote this piece for the Fokker Organ in 1959. A champion of microtonal music since the early 20th century, Wyschnegradsky used various systems of tuning, all unified by his vision of “ultrachromaticism,” in which microtonal pitch organization was infused with a heavy dose of Scriabin-esque musical mysticism. 

This portable version of the Fokker Organ, the Archiphone, was developed in the 1960s

This recording was released on a CD made for the 50th anniversary of the Huygens-Fokker Foundation Centre for Microtonal Music, in Amsterdam. The foundation’s website is one of the best resources on the history and theory of microtonal/xenharmonic music on the internet. 

August 17, 2011, 10:45am

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Xenharmonic triad, part 1

F. F. F. Fiale: “Quattro supernovate in faccia”

From the album Possible Worlds (2011)

One of the phenomena of 20th and 21st-century music I find most consistently fascinating is the constellation of investigation and experiment around the idea of challenging the hegemony of 12-tone equal temperament (12-tet), the tuning system that has prevailed in European-influenced music since the late 1800s.

These efforts are known by different names: one term, “microtonality,” was popularized in the early 20th century and is still used today. It is used to describe tuning systems based on an interval smaller than the tempered semitone (minor second), which is the intervallic atom of 12-tet. Under the auspices of microtonality, composers such as Julian Carrillo, Alois Hába, and Ivan Wyschnegradsky delved into the possibility of scales with 24, 31, 48, 72, or more tones within the octave.

But microtonality proved to be an insufficient concept to explain every alternative to 12-tet. What about systems based on the division of the octave into fewer than 12 equal parts? Or systems that rejected the very notion of a single repeated modulus, building instead a network of relations of varying and incommensurable intervallic distances? Or the various forms of just intonation?

To encompass these possibilities, the American composer Ivor Darreg coined the term “xenharmonic,” which describes all music that works outside the system of 12-tet, whether strictly microtonal or not. (The concept of microtonality, for better or worse, has survived and is occasionally used in a broad sense as a synonym for “xenharmonic.”)

In the next three posts, I will feature three examples of xenharmonic music, a kind of mini-tour of the genre. (Those interested may also want to revisit xenharmonic compositions I’ve explored in previous posts.) We’ll begin from the present and work backward through time. 

The first example comes from the compilation album Possible Worlds, released by Spectropol Records in July of this year, which provides an excellent survey of the stylistic diversity of contemporary xenharmonic music. The album can be downloaded free from the label’s Bandcamp page.

I chose this track to demonstrate an approach to xenharmonic music from outside the classical tradition with which alternate systems of tuning are generally associated. ”Quattro supernovate in faccia” (“Four Supernovas in Your Face”), by Fabrizio Fulvio Fausto Fiale, an Italian musician and a self-described “classical pianist, choir singer, and death metal drummer,” is a “crazy virtual jam session,” based on two kinds of esadecaphonic (16-tone) scales.

August 14, 2011, 12:36pm

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Pascal Comelade: “The Hallucinogenic Espontex Sinfonia”

From the album Espontex Sinfonia (2006)

Pascal Comelade is a French Catalan musician whose work has explored a variegated yet highly distinctive constellation of sounds and styles. His first album, released under the title Fluence (1975), was heavily influenced by the Euro-prog work of such pioneers as Richard Pinhas (of Heldon), who made a cameo appearance playing guitar on the record’s opening track. (The collaboration between the two musicians would be revisited in the 2000 album Oblique Sessions, Vol. 2.)

Beginning in the early 1980s, with albums such as Logique du sens (1983), Comelade’s music went in a more tuneful direction, developing a style that mixed the repetitive tonal patterns of American minimalism, a mood of wistful nostalgia, and distinctive orchestrations that make heavy use of toy instruments. The extended jams of his early records gives way to quirky, laconic character pieces. 

Throughout the 80s and 90s, Comelade released a prolific set of recordings as the bandleader of the Bel Canto Orquestra, a seven-piece group that juxtaposes the sound of cheap, plastic instruments with the more conventional piano, violin and guitar. With time, the sound of his music diverged from the gritty, one-take aesthetic of the earlier work into more polished compositions that occasionally skirt the border between new-age and film music—for instance, the lovely piano piece “Nocturn, à Joan Salvat-Papasseit” on Topographie anecdotique (1992).

Comelade’s diverse output is unified by an inventive melodic spark and the consistent pursuit of clear, simple arrangements and colorful orchestrations. Both of these qualities are on display in this buoyant overture to his 2006 album Espontex Sinfonia.

August 09, 2011, 11:44am

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Tristan Perich: 1-Bit Symphony, Movement 1 (2010)

I am of two minds about the chip music phenomenon.

On the one hand, as any reader of this blog will know, I am an unapologetic partisan of low-bit sound. A raw square wave from a SID chip affects me the way I imagine the swell of a string quartet would have touched the soul of a nineteenth-century Viennese. 

But at the same time, I’m wary of the mood of fetishistic technostalgia that hangs over the whole endeavor. I want to believe that chip music can be something more than the rehashing of unimaginative dance music via “new” Gameboy arrangements to create muzak for the Nintendo generation.

So I was intrigued to learn of the “1-bit music” pioneered by the New York-based composer Tristan Perich. (In digital audio terms, 1-bit means that the sounds are essentially binary—either on or off. More bits mean more “detail,” more possible gradations of volume or timbre.) Perich’s two “albums” consist of CD jewel cases with a battery-powered circuit glued inside. As you can see from the image below, the circuit contains, from left to right, the battery, an on-off switch, the sound-chip, a button to skip through the tracks, a volume knob, and a headphone jack. When the switch is flipped, the chip begins to play.

There’s something undeniably fascinating about seeing the physical components that create the sound—what Perich calls “the transparency of the circuit.” His albums are like digital music boxes: the music is not played back, as in a recording, but “performed” right before your eyes.

But what’s the difference, really, between ones and zeros being read off a disc by a laser and the equivalent information flowing from a chip in one of Perich’s configurations? It seems that in the digital domain, the once-pivotal distinction between the “live” and the recorded is effaced once and for all. Depending on your perspective, you could say that the playback of a recording constitutes a performance, or that the apparent performance is a kind of playback.

The unique format of Perich’s albums has overshadowed the originality of his music. His two “chip” albums differs considerably: 1-Bit Music features 11 relatively short pieces whose style ranges from rather abstract sound-studies to catchy numbers evocative of Commodore 64 soundtracks. 1-Bit Symphony, as befits the title, has five longish movements and a much richer, “orchestrated” sound. Although by no means derivative, the music is heavily influenced by American minimalism—Perich cites Philip Glass as a major influence—and the historical idiom of video game composition.

Perich’s other music, composed for various combinations of 1-bit sound and conventional instruments, I find less compelling, although the timbral effect is sometimes quite stunning. More interesting is his Interval Studies, a recent sound installation based on microtonal clusters formed by panels dotted with tiny loudspeakers, each emitting a single tone.

August 05, 2011, 11:13am