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Jack Ellitt: “Journey #1” (excerpt)

From the album Artefacts of Australian Experimental Music, 1930-1973 (2008)

In the early 1930s, when most of Europe and the United States was still under the deep freeze of neoclassicism, the Australian composer Jack Ellitt created this flabbergasting piece of electronic music, one of the earliest of its kind. Consisting of a rapid barrage of sounds both recognizable and abstract (from birdsong and train whistles to unimaginably chaotic collocations of synthetic tones), “Journey #1” occupies an aesthetic position between the surrealistic audio-documentary of Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend (composed just a few years earlier) and the schizoid sound-collage of John Cage’s first tape piece, the Williams Mix of 1952.

Ellitt was one of many musicians around the world experimenting around 1930 with the compositional possibilities of “drawn sound,” a process in which graphical inscriptions are photoelectrically converted into acoustic waves. According to the historian Hugh Davies, Ellitt first toyed with sound film around 1932, so it seems likely that it was the original medium for this piece, since magnetic tape would not be invented until 1935 and was not widely available until after WWII. This would also explain some of the more bizarre synthetic timbres in the piece, which could have been created by etching abstract shapes onto the film strip.

Another piece by Ellitt from around this time is his remarkable piano soundtrack for the abstract film Tusalava by New Zealander experimental cinema pioneer (and later kinetic sculpture builder) Len Lye. (There are conflicting accounts as to the fate of Ellitt’s soundtrack for Tusalava; several sources say—in contradiction to the version of the film in my possession—the music was performed live at the first screening but thereafter lost.)

March 12, 2011, 12:00pm