Acousmata

J. K. Huysmans: “The mouth organ” From the novel A rebours (Against the Grain), 1884 For...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:54:53 -0500

J. K. Huysmans: “The mouth organ” From the novel A rebours (Against the Grain), 1884 For...

Johannes Kepler, Willie Ruff, and John Rodgers: “The...

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:23:00 -0500

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 has been done in an 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.

“Another world is possible” Peter Ablinger’s...

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:19:00 -0500

“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.

Don Simmons: “Limehouse Blues” From the album A...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:24:00 -0500

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.

Alois Hába: Suite for Four Trombones in Quarter-tone System, Op....

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:14:00 -0500

Alois Hába: Suite for Four Trombones in Quarter-tone System, Op. 72 (1950)

From the album Centenary: Alois Hába

Alois Hába is one of the most important composers associated with microtonal music in the 20th century. Born in 1893 in Vizovice (present-day Czech Republic), Hába moved between Prague, Vienna, and Berlin from 1914 to 1923, when he permanently settled in Prague. Beginning in 1924, Hába offered courses in quarter-tone music at the Prague Conservatory; these developed into a full-fledged department of microtonal music, which lasted from 1934 to 1949, although its operation was interrupted by the war.

Jiří Vysloužil’s claim in Grove Music Online that Hába “may justly be regarded as the originator of the use of quarter- and sixth-tones in Western art music” is dubious in the extreme, considering the contemporaneous endeavors of composers such as Ivan Vyschnegradsky, Willi Moellendorff, and Richard Stein, not to mention the considerably earlier experiments of Jörg Mager and Julián Carrillo. But Hába’s success in propagating microtonal music within the mainstream of European “classical” music is likely unsurpassed. Beyond his work as a composer, Hába oversaw the construction of new instruments for the performance of microtonal music, including three types of quarter-tone piano (1924–31), a quarter-tone (1928) and a sixth-tone (1936) harmonium, and a quarter-tone clarinet (1924), trumpet (1931) and guitar (1943).

This lovely mid-century suite for trombone quartet comprises five short movements, marked Maestoso, Andante cantabile, Allegretto scherzando, Moderato cantabile, and Allegro risoluto. Hába’s music, by turns magisterial, elegiac, and playful, demonstrates irrefutably the expressive viability of quarter-tone composition.

Georges Aperghis: Avis de tempête (2004) From the album Avis de...

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 16:43:00 -0500

Georges Aperghis: Avis de tempête (2004)

From the album Avis de tempête

Avis de tempête (Storm Warning) is an early 21st-century opera by Greek-French composer Georges Aperghis. The first of the opera’s 13 tableaux, presented here, seems to begin in medias res, with a kaleidoscopic array of electronic whooshes, distorted guitar noodling, jagged woodwind fragments, and schizoid vocal interjections. The middle portion is dominated by a throbbing electronic soundfield, a kind of radio static through which shimmer enigmatic and fragmentary transmissions from another plane. As the fiercely spinning centrifugal force set in motion by the opening section begins to dissipate, the piece winds down with a duet between a dolefully descending Shepard tone and a disturbed female voice reciting a bizarre macaronic text.

The libretto, written by Aperghis and Peter Szendy, is a patchwork text that includes fragments from Melville, Kafka, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, and Hugo. Another collaborator, Sebastien Roux, is credited with “computer sound design,” including an implementation of granular synthesis conceptually inspired by William S. Burroughs’ “cut-up” technique. Burroughs’ influence is also at work in Roux’s effort to musically realize the concept of virus through the use of digital clicks and glitches (with a tip of the hat to Yasunao Tone).

Fluids, sounds, images, information: they all pass through us and it becomes very difficult to focus on any one thing. Electronics enable me to realize this state of perpetual transition, to jump from one world to another. An abstract sound becomes the voice of an actor, a phoneme becomes running water, a character may be divided up and then reconstructed elsewhere. (Georges Aperghis)

Ruth Crawford Seeger: String Quartet, third movement,...

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:50:00 -0500

Ruth Crawford Seeger: String Quartet, third movement, “Andante” (1931)

From the album Chamber Works

One of the most important and neglected musical figures of the early 20th century, Ruth Crawford associated with the “ultramodernist” circle of American composers in the 1920s, including Dane Rudhyar, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles, and Charles Seeger. These composers championed a radical break with European musical traditions, and thus represented an alternative to the dominant neoclassical orientation of Aaron Copland and Walter Piston.

Crawford composed her String Quartet in 1931, while she was studying in Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Upon returning from Europe, she married Seeger, and in 1936 the couple move to Washington, D.C., in order to work on New Deal projects for the preservation and dissemination of American folk music.

The remarkable third movement of this quartet is bereft of anything that could be called a melody. The music begins with gently surging tones in close proximity, weaving together to form a hypnotically dissonant sound-fabric. As the piece progresses, the strings move slowly upward in pitch and the music gradually becomes louder and more discordant. The tension built up by these grating sonorities finally explodes the texture: a violent, expressionistic outburst is followed by a sudden downward cascade of tones, as if a cord had snapped and the slow upward ratcheting were undone in an instant. The movement ends as it began, with ominous pulsations in the low strings.

Comparable only to the contemporary work of Varese, this music anticipates the later development of “sound mass” or Klangkomposition by Xenakis, Ligeti, and Penderecki in the 1950s and 60s.

Guest essay “The Tinkering Method: How Computer Learning Informs Music Pedagogy,” by...

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 09:58:00 -0500

Guest essay “The Tinkering Method: How Computer Learning Informs Music Pedagogy,” by...

Thomas Bloch: Formule (1995) From the album Ondes...

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:59:00 -0500

Thomas Bloch: Formule (1995)

From the album Ondes Martenot

Invented by the Frenchman Maurice Martenot (the instrument’s name means “Martenot waves”), the Ondes Martenot was first presented to the public in April 1928, though it was begun much earlier.

Like many early electronic instruments, the Ondes is based on the sound-generating principle of heterodyning, in which to very high and inaudible frequencies create an audible tone which corresponds to the difference between the two high frequencies. One of these high frequencies is constant, while the other (and thus the resulting tone) is controlled by the player. In the case of the Ondes, the instrument is played by either traditional keyboard or by moving a ring along a wire (called the ruban or “ribbon”), which allows for continuous glissando tones similar to those of the Theremin.

Because the Ondes is monophonic, the player generally uses only her right hand, keeping the left hand free to manipulate the “intensity key,” which controls the amplitude of the instrument. In order to create a sound, the key must be pressed at the same time as the keyboard or ribbon, allowing for a variety of potential attacks and phrasing.

The intensity key is located in a drawer on the left side of the instrument, along with switches controlling the timbre and transposition buttons (including quarter-tone inflections). There are also two foot pedals for activating the filter and shaping volume, in case both the player’s hands are busy.

Finally, the sound of the Ondes is routed to up to four specially-designed loudspeakers, some of which employ external resonators such as strings or a metal plate.

More than any other electronic instrument, the Ondes was embraced by contemporary composers such as Edgard Varese and Olivier Messiaen. As an indication of the cultural standing won by Martenot’s new instrument, Messaien’s 1937 composition Fête des belles eaux for six Ondes was performed on a boat in the Seine as part of that year’s World’s Fair. Such ceremonial uses of the Ondes were apparently not uncommon, judging by a photograph of an all-woman Ondes octet (plus two pianos) from around 1935.

Representing a recent and decidedly unclassical use of the instrument, this wonderful little piece entitled Formule (“Formula”) was composed by Thomas Bloch, one of the world’s foremost players of the Ondes.

Armando Sciascia: “Circuito Chiuso” From the album...

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:39:42 -0500

Armando Sciascia: “Circuito Chiuso”

From the album Psych Funk 101 (1968-1975): A Global Psychedelic Funk Curriculum (2009)

Weaponized Sound A staggering taste of Steve Goodwin’s new book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect,...

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:10:00 -0500

Weaponized Sound A staggering taste of Steve Goodwin’s new book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect,...

Pierre Barbaud: French Gagaku (excerpt, 1968) From the album...

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:59:00 -0500

Pierre Barbaud: French Gagaku (excerpt, 1968)

From the album Pierre Barbaud / Akira Tamba

Note: This is part of a collaborative post in conjunction with Continuo’s Weblog. The rare LP from which this track is taken is available there along with a biographical overview of the composer.

In 1948 (the same year as the first broadcasts of musique concrète in Paris) Nobert Wiener published his groundbreaking book Cybernetics. Released in a new edition entitled The Human Use of Human Beings in 1950, Wiener’s book launched a new intellectual discipline. Cybernetics (from the Greek word for steering or piloting) was concerned primarily with the analogy between machines and organisms. Wiener argued that machines could be made to learn through the implementation of feedback, whereby the results of previous actions were channeled into the system in order to guide future actions. Needless to say, this idea was crucial for the formation of early computing and theories of artificial intelligence.

But what does this have to do with music? The idea of machines for composing is not a new one. Already by the 17th and 18th centuries, composers had begun thinking of a piece music as a system of units which could be manipulated according to mathematical formulas. Around 1650, the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher invented the Arca musurgica, a box filled with cards containing short phrases of music. By drawing the cards in combination, one could assemble a polyphonic composition in four parts, composed in perfect accordance with the stylistic constraints of the time.

Another example of this kind of automatic composition is found in the musical dice-games which flourished in the late 18th century. But in both of these cases, the unit of musical construction is the phrase as opposed to the individual note or sound. And the object here seems to be the automated composition within a given period style, rather than the exploration of new formal possibilities.

The next step in this process was the reconception of sound as information, which was made possible by 20th-century recording technologies, and specifically magnetic tape, which on account of its ease of editing became the primary recording medium around mid-century. An important conceptual stride toward the implementation of cybernetic or “systems” thinking in music was taken by Iannis Xenakis, who wrote an essay in 1955 entitled “The Crisis in Serial Composition,” in which he argued that contemporary music, although written note-by-note, was creating musical structures that were heard statistically, as cloud-like agglomerations of sound, rather than the points and lines of traditional contrapuntal organization. (Indeed, in his 1980 book Vademecum de l’ingénieur en musique, Pierre Barbaud credits Xenakis with “the liberation of music from dodecaphonic pillory.”) By the late 1950s a number of composers, including Barbaud, Xenakis, Lejaren Hiller, Herbert Brün, and Roland Kayn, had begun to pursue what they called algorithmic or cybernetic music.

French Gagaku is a fascinating example of “motion within stasis” for thirty string instruments playing in quarter tones. It was composed with the aid of the TONITA (Tonal Integrator Tabulator) and ANITA (Analytical Integrator Tabulator) programs of the Honeywell-Bull company. In the words of Michael Philippot, this music “is not the result of the symbiosis man/machine but the product of human imagination reinforced by a precision and a sense of humility which only the machine can bestow.” The intriguing association with the ancient Japanese court music known as gagaku seems to be based on an affinity with the austere indifference of that music.

Acousmata, Year Two: A (Slightly) New Format Dear readers and listeners, February 18 will mark the...

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 18:36:00 -0500

Acousmata, Year Two: A (Slightly) New Format Dear readers and listeners, February 18 will mark the...

György Ligeti: Ricercare - Omaggio a Frescobaldi (1951) From the...

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:35:00 -0500

György Ligeti: Ricercare - Omaggio a Frescobaldi (1951)

From the album György Ligeti Edition 6. Keyboard Works

When you think of organ music, you probably think of the North German masters of the late Baroque, composers such as Bach and Buxtehude blasting radiant sound-beams of Protestant piety to rattle the stained glass and shake the souls of the faithful.

But in fact the pipe organ tradition goes back further, at least to the early 17th century, to intrepid, non-German composers with names like Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck and Girolamo Frescobaldi. The latter is the subject of this musical homage, an early work by Ligeti written before he left Hungary for the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Built around a dolorous theme that wends chromatically ever downward, Ligeti’s Ricercare is a tribute to the lugubrious glories of early Baroque counterpoint. (And if you don’t think 17th-century music could be so wonderfully dissonant, listen to Sweelinck’s Fantasia Chromatica.)

This one begins very quietly, but builds to a powerful din. Don’t blow out your speakers.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: “A Preacher Leading His...

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:50:52 -0500

Martin Luther King, Jr.: “A Preacher Leading His Flock”

From the album In Search of Freedom

From a sermon given at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on February 4, 1968.

Richard Maxfield: Pastoral Symphony (1960) From the album An...

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:51:00 -0500

Richard Maxfield: Pastoral Symphony (1960)

From the album An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music: Fifth A-Chronology, 1920-2007

If Richard Maxfield had not committed suicide in 1969, and if his electronic music pieces were not so difficult to find or to hear, then our ideas of how music has changed and opened out during the past thirty-five years might be very different…. At the heard of avant-rock, hybrid electronics, and plunderphonics, yet completely obscured by the vagaries of history, is Richard Maxfield. (David Toop, Ocean of Sound)

Young Maxfield seemed destined to scale the heights of midcentury musical modernism: during the 1950s he studied with such heavies as Sessions, Krenek, Copland, and Babbitt, as well as with Dallapiccola and Maderna while in Italy on a Fulbright Scholarship. But in the later part of the decade his interests began to turn toward experimental and electronic music, and it is in this domain where his influence, though subterranean, is still felt.

In 1959, Maxfield took over John Cage’s class on experimental music at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He used this forum to teach techniques of “pure” electronic music (using synthetically generated sounds, as opposed to those recorded by microphones), albeit of a style quite distinct from the usually austere productions of Stockhausen and company in Cologne. According to La Monte Young, who studied with Maxfield and was one of his earliest advocates, Maxfield was the first American composer of purely electronic music. But Maxfield also worked with recordings: his 1960 tape piece Amazing Grace is a surrealistic collage based on the recorded voice of a revival preacher.

Maxfield’s electronic music combines purity of sound with a twittering, frenetic energy that anticipates the atomized textures of much later electronica. In Pastoral Symphony, as in the longer kindred composition Night Music, electrophonic production, driven to its extreme, miraculously evokes the primal, pre-human utterances of insects, birds, and cosmic rays.

It seems to me that pure electronic music
is self-sufficient as an art form
without any visual added attractions or distractions.
I view as irrelevant
the repetitious sawing on strings and baton wielding spectacle
we focus our eyes upon during a conventional concert.

(Richard Maxfield, “Music, Electronic and Performed”)

John Cage and Lejaren Hiller: HPSCHD (1967-69)From the album...

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:24:00 -0500

John Cage and Lejaren Hiller: HPSCHD (1967-69)

From the album HPSCHD

On May 16, 1969, the 16,000-seat Assembly Hall of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was the site of one of the most ambitious multimedia spectacles of the 20th century: HPSCHD (from the computer abbreviation for harpsichord), a collaborative work by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller.

The piece comprised seven specially-composed solos for amplified harpsichord, based on aleatorically generated results of the Musikalisches Würfelspiel (Musical Dice Game) attributed to Mozart, as well as randomly selected excerpts from Mozart’s piano sonatas and samples from the music of Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Busoni, Schoenberg, and others. The harpsichord parts, to be played simultaneously or in succession in a manner determined by the performers, were accompanied by the computer-generated sounds recorded on tape and projected from a circle of 52 loudspeakers surrounding the audience. Each tape part used a different division of the octave, with scales ranging from five to 56 steps.

For the premiere, multimedia artist Ronald Nameth prepared more than 6,400 slides and 40 films to be projected on the 11 massive screens of the hall. The footage included Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon and the computer films of John and James Whitney.

The first performance of HPSCHD lasted about five hours and was attended by some 8,000 people.

This excerpt of the work is taken from the 2003 recording realized by Joel Chadabe, with Robert Conant playing the harpsichord solos.

Stefan Wolpe: Suite im Hexachord. Second movement,...

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:23:00 -0500

Stefan Wolpe: Suite im Hexachord. Second movement, “Pastorale” (1936)

From the album Music for Any Instruments

Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972) is a lamentably under-appreciated German composer who throughout his creative life sought to synthesize the most advanced strains of European musical modernism with other, more popular elements, whether political songs, Middle Eastern traditional music, or Afro-American jazz.

In the 20s Wolpe encountered Ferruccio Busoni and H. H. Stuckenschmidt, and spent some time at the Bauhaus, where he was deeply influenced by the school’s utopian and inter-media aesthetics. In 1933 Wolpe studied with Anton Webern, whose highly analytic approach to twelve-tone composition is reflected in much of Wolpe’s later work. After emigrating to the U.S. in 1938, Wolpe took a series of teaching positions in the eastern part of the country, including Director of Music at Black Mountain College from 1952 to 1956. He remained in the U.S. for the rest of his life.

Suite im Hexachord, written for oboe and clarinet, is a fine example of Wolpe’s ability to infuse the supposedly severe and “intellectual” method of twelve-tone composition with playfulness and lyricism.

“The Realm of Music,” by Ferruccio Busoni (1910) Come, follow me into the realm of...

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:48:00 -0500

“The Realm of Music,” by Ferruccio Busoni (1910) Come, follow me into the realm of...

Masanka Sankayi and Kasai Allstars feat. Mutumilaya:...

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 13:03:00 -0500

Masanka Sankayi and Kasai Allstars feat. Mutumilaya: “Wu Muluendu”

From the album Congotronics 2: Buzz’N’Rumble from the Urb’N’Jungle (2005)

Noisy, funky, lovely sounds from the ”electro-traditional” music scene of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I was hooked as soon as I heard the amazingly synth-like timbre of the overdriven electric likembe, “with its pickups made of copper telephone wire wound around crushed car alternator magnets.” The Congotronics series (comprising three releases at the time of this writing) and its enthusiastic reception by American listeners have been intelligently discussed by Mike Powell at Stylus.