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John Bull: “Why aske you,” arranged by Vladymir Martynov and Yuriy Bogdanov

From the album Metamorphoses: Electronic Interpretations of Classic and Modern Musical Works

(For Eliot)

This one’s filling a request for a piece of “psychedelic, synthy, electronic sound-effectsy, or otherwise futuristic or bizarrely anachronistic Renaissance or Baroque music.”  It’s challenges like this that remind me why I’m in this business.

Not surprisingly, there’s not a lot of music out there fitting this description.  Of course, there’s Wendy Carlos and her many excellent albums of Bach a la Moog, but I had a feeling Eliot was looking for something a bit more recherché.  Carlos’ arrangements, after all, tend more to the Apollonian than to the psychedelic.  Then, as I’ve recently discovered, there’s a staggering glut of more or less blatant rip-offs of Switched-On Bach that flooded the market in the wake of that album’s 1968 release, but these, alas, mostly rehash the played-out late Baroque, Classical, and Romantic repertoire that dominates NPR and concert programs the world over.

Finally, after considerable searching, hope came from an unlikely quarter: the Soviet Union.  Hardly known in its day as a hotbed of electronic music, the USSR nonetheless made a number of important contributions to the genre, some of which I plan on covering in later posts.  One of these nuggets is the 1980 release Metamorphoses: Electronic Interpretations of Classic and Modern Musical Works, featuring arrangements of music by Debussy, Monteverdi, Prokofiev, and (inevitably) J.S. Bach, among others.  Among the more unexpected tracks are a version of the 13th-century English round “Sumer is icumen in” and this realization of the song “Why aske you” by the English Renaissance composer John Bull.  All the music on this album was apparently made with the mammoth EMS Synthi 100, released in 1974.

July 27, 2009, 9:27pm