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Tod Dockstader: “Part Three from Apocalypse” (1961)

From the album Apocalypse

Tod Dockstader is the first American master of electronic music.  Born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1932, Dockstader began making music around 1960, adopting Edgard Varese’s concept of “organized sound” for his work, which made equal use of “electronic” and “concrete” sounds. He writes, “in listening to this music, it is usually impossible, and most pointless, to sort out the sources as electronic or concrete. It is their use, their arrangement, upon which the success of these pieces as music depends.”

Dockstader’s working method likewise involved both chance and conscious design. In creating the first six of his Eight Electronic Pieces (1961), his first commercial release, Dockstader let two or three tapes of various material run at the same time, recording the unplanned concatenations of sound and later whittling the results down to short, sculpted compositions.

Apocalypse, released in 1961, gives voice to the immanent anxiety of a world on the brink of nuclear war: Dockstader described the work as a “concrete Dies irae.” The sonic material of Part Three is—believe it or not—entirely concrete, its recurring vocal lament created by the slowed-down recording of a child’s toy.  Also used are the sounds of a piano, an oil well, chimes, and a human voice.

After the closing of Gotham Recording Studios in New York, where Dockstader had realized his music from 1960 to 1965, he was rejected by a number of university-affiliated studios on account of his lack of academic credentials: a melancholy index of the ascendant academic-institutional structure dominating the production of electronic music in the 1960s.  Against this tendency toward privatization, Dockstader upheld the belief in the egalitarian potential of electronic music: 

It also seemed to me, this new art of sound, a very democratic art. I’d studied painting for five years and gave it up, primarily because I came to dislike the exclusivity of it; a painting became the property of one person, one institution. I liked the idea that Schaeffer’s first work was created in a (public) radio studio; his first premieres were broadcasts, not the “narrowcasts” of concert hall performances. And, when you bought a recording of it, you owned the work just as much as anyone else, because the work was a recording.

Dockstader’s music was revived in the early 1990s through a series of re-releases on the Starkland label.  Since 2003 he has released a number of new works, most notably the Aerial series, based on sound material gathered from recordings of short-wave radio broadcasts.

November 07, 2010, 9:10am