Acousmata

Anthony Braxton: “Open Aspect #4” From the album...

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:17:59 -0400

Anthony Braxton: “Open Aspect #4”

From the album Open Aspects (Duo) (1982)

In a prolific career in which he has collaborated with innumerable musicians and released over 100 recordings, Anthony Braxton has staked out a unique stylistic position between the post-bebop/free jazz tradition and the experimental and improvisatory approaches to music associated with the Euro-American avant-garde. His work is representative of the collapse of conventional boundaries of musical genre in the second half of the twentieth century, but it also testifies to the enduring power of these boundaries: avant-garde listeners are unlikely to encounter Braxton in standard texts or class syllabi, while many jazz musicians and aficionados disown his work as beyond the pale.

In addition to being a composer and multi-instrumentalist, Braxton is also an intrepid writer and theorist. His understanding of his role in the musical macrosystem is expressed in the three categories of “tri-vibrational dynamics”: traditionalism, stylism, and restructuralism. Traditionalism is based on the maintenance of old cultural forms, as exemplified by most museums and symphony orchestras. Stylism is the attempt to “perfect” past experimental tendencies, making them palatable for mainstream cultural consumption. (Braxton compares “stylists” to technocrats.) Finally, restructuralism is the effort to fundamentally reshape and evolve the artistic medium. Although Braxton aligns his own music with the last of these categories— “My music, my life’s work, will ultimately challenge the very foundations of Western value systems, that’s what’s dangerous about it”— he believes that a balance of all three is necessary for a well-ordered cultural ecosystem.

Open Aspects is a set of pieces in collaboration with composer Richard Teitelbaum, formerly of the free improvisation collective Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV), with whom Braxton played briefly in 1970. On this album, Braxton plays alto and sopranino saxophone, accompanied by Teitelbaum on Moog synthesizer and microcomputer. All the pieces are completely improvised. In this example, the relationship between these two sound elements is ambivalent: while Braxton’s playing is undeniably in the foreground, Teitelbaum’s electronics provide a textural dimension that is at once supportive of the solo part and strangely indifferent to it.

Herbert Eimert: “Tone mixture” From the...

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:23:05 -0400

Herbert Eimert: “Tone mixture”

From the album Einführung in die elektronische Musik (1963)

[This is a collaborative post with Continuo’s Weblog. After listening to this example, head over to Continuo’s, where you can download the full album (320 kbps MP3 vinyl rip with scanned liner notes) and read some historical background on Herbert Eimert.]

Einführung in die elektronische Musik (Introduction to Electronic Music) belongs to a fascinating category of musical-didactic hybrid that emerged in the wake of the first electronic music studios around 1950. In presenting what could be called a taxonomy of electronic sound, these albums were intended to sensitize listeners to the new musical material of recorded and synthetic sounds, as opposed to the familiar gestural language (whether tonal or post-tonal) of vocal and instrumental music. Albums such as this can be seen as the modern analogs to the 19th-century orchestration treatise, which, which sought to systematically represent all the sound-production possibilities of the symphony orchestra.

Perhaps the best-known representative of this genre is the wonderful Solfege de l’objet sonore of Pierre Schaeffer, which was released in 1967 to accompany Schaeffer’s psychoacoustic magnum opus Traite de les objets sonores. Some other examples include Herbert Brün’s Über Musik und zum Computer (1971), John R. Pierce’s The Science of Musical Sound (1979), and IRCAM - Un portrait (1983).

In this track, Eimert explains the Tongemisch or tone mixture, which is a complex sound composed of an inharmonic spectrum in which the partials are not in whole-number ratios to the fundamental. This kind of sound occurs only rarely outside of electronic music, for example in bells, rods, plates, and other metallic objects.

The tone-mixture was a crucially important concept for the theoretical development of electronic music as envisioned by Eimert, for it allowed the atonal organization of sound to penetrate down to the level of timbre itself. Conventional instruments, so Eimert and others argued, are in a certain sense hardwired for tonality, because the harmonic spectrum emphasizes tonal relationships such as the octave, fifth, and major third. This explains why, for these composers, electronic music was by definition serial music, and vice versa. As Eimert states in his commentary to the these sound examples: “The tone-mixture is an entirely new dimension of composition; in it, the many insurmountable contradictions of so-called atonality are finally resolved. […] Such tone-mixtures can be compositionally ordered such that the structure of the sounds becomes integrated into the structure of the work.”

Eimert (left) and Karlheinz Stockhausen at work in the studio (1953)

Chris Watson: “Winter Flags” (Massed knot roost on...

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:19:59 -0400

Chris Watson: “Winter Flags” (Massed knot roost on shingle bank, Snettisham, Norfolk)

From the album Outside the Circle of Fire (1998)

Sheffield-born Chris Watson was a founding member of the seminal experimental outfits Cabaret Voltaire and the Hafler Trio. He gave up music (in this limited sense) around 1990 to begin working in sound recording for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Since 1996, he has released four full-length albums of his field recordings made in locations all over the world.

These recordings can be heard as an auditory counterpart to the footage featured in outstanding nature documentaries such as Planet Earth or The Private Lives of Plants, which has profoundly sensitized us to the fascinating lives of plants and animals. Whether listened to as a non-representative “sound object” in the sense of Pierre Schaeffer or used to imaginatively evoke distant environs, these remarkable recordings enable us to experience otherwise inaccessible dimensions of the sounding universe.

Syzygys: “Rimsky Train” From the album The Complete...

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:01:00 -0400

Syzygys: “Rimsky Train”

From the album The Complete Studio Recordings (2003)

“A female duo who plays microtonal pop music,” the Japanese band Syzygys is the project of Hitomi Shimizu (keyboards) and Hiromi Nishida (violin). (The band’s name, presumably an alternative plural of the polysemic word “syzygy,” comes from a Greek root meaning “conjunction.”)

Like all good music, that of Syzygys defies description: it is at once familiar and strange. Many of the gestures are redolent of that ubiquitous but unnameable modern idiom of composition heard in incidental music for popular media, but a subversive and experimental element is also always present— and in this way the music of Syzygys is comparable to the otherwise very different work of, say, Raymond Scott.

The delightful weirdness of this music derives in part from the completely ingenuous fusion of catchy pop song elements with the hauntingly unfamiliar sonorities of a 43-note just intonation scale invented by Harry Partch. Shizimu plays a modified electric reed organ tuned this scale. (Across the top of the band’s homepage there is a “playable” 43-note keyboard. A classy touch.)

If this music sounds like the somewhat deranged soundtrack of a forgotten Nintendo game, it’s not coincidental: Shimizu has done the music for several titles for the Sony PlayStation. She’s also a prolific composer for film and TV.

Naum Gabo: Project for a Radio Station (c. 1921)

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:40:30 -0400

Naum Gabo: Project for a Radio Station (c. 1921)

James Tenney: Spectrum 6 (2001), for flute, clarinet,...

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 13:00:00 -0400

James Tenney: Spectrum 6 (2001), for flute, clarinet, percussion, violin, and cello (excerpt)

From the album Spectrum Pieces

In his series of eight compositions bearing the title Spectrum (1995-2001), the brilliant American composer and theorist James Tenney embarked on a new exploration of the musical potential of the harmonic series, a phenomenon that had inspired him throughout his career.

While in many of his earlier works based on the harmonic series, such as his Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow (1974) or Septet for six electric guitars and electric bass (1981), Tenney had methodically introduced the partials in an upward sweep from the fundamental, in the Spectrum pieces the pitches of the series are used all at once. If the effect of his earlier music had been strongly tonal, thanks to the emphasis on the lower partials of the spectrum, these later works betray their harmonic foundations only in fleeting glimmers; the dominant mood is ungrounded and suggestive.

All the spectrum pieces are written in “time-space” notation, meaning that the duration of each note is determined not by its shape (half note, quarter note, etc.) but by its visually-measured length on the staff, each line of which in this case lasts exactly 30 seconds. Tenney used a computer program which allowed him to steer the general parameters (density, register, etc.) while the computer automatically generated the actual notes. This is the principle of stochastic processes, or constrained randomness, which was introduced into music in the 1950s by Iannis Xenakis.

Tenney’s Spectrum pieces sound to me like a distant echo of the most disembodied textures of the early 20th-century Austrian composer Anton Webern: the tones seem to float serenely in a rarefied space, expressive of something profound yet wordless.

The Tone Generation

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:07:45 -0400

The Tone Generation: Covering the “analogue age,” from the beginning of the 20th century...

François Bayle: “Grande Polyphonie 2” (1974) From...

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 10:00:00 -0400

François Bayle: “Grande Polyphonie 2” (1974)

From the album Vibrations Composées / Grande Polyphonie

Along with Bernard Parmegiani, Luc Ferrari, and others, François Bayle was one of the foremost composers of the Groupe de Recherche Musicales (Musical Research Group) in the years following the departure of founder Pierre Schaeffer. Bayle was director of the of the GRM from 1966 to 1997, during which time he created a large body of works under the rubric of musique acousmatique or “acousmatic music.” Among his many contributions to the art form is the Acousmonium, an orchestra of loudspeakers designed to give the composer control of the spatial distribution of sound in playback (known as diffusion). Bayle is still composing as of this writing.

Bayle’s music is typically more harmonically conscious than most electronic art music. While many of his colleagues throw out harmonic considerations in order to develop an “art of noises” entirely freed from the pitch dimension, Bayle uses harmonic tension in a manner wholly distinct from traditional notions of tonal centers. (In this respect he could be compared to Gyorgi Ligeti, who frequently pursued similar ends in the domain of instrumental and vocal music.) Consonance and dissonance fluctuate in cloud-like agglomerations, coexisting in a true dynamic equilibrium, unlike the fixed match of preordained harmony that is Western tonality.

Characterized by a strangely compelling fusion of lush, almost psychedelic timbral excess with an acute sense of form and proportion exemplifying the proverbially French aesthetic of clarté, Bayle creates a sound-world teeming with birdsong-like electronic twitters, bells, gongs, and all manner of resonant bodies joined together in a joyous, childlike clangor.

Bayle in front of the Acousmonium

The League of Automatic Music Composers: “Martian Folk...

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 13:00:00 -0400

The League of Automatic Music Composers: “Martian Folk Music” (1980)

From the album The League of Automatic Music Composers 1978-1983

Take the anarchic, self-organizing ethos of free improvisation, add the raw, low-bit waveforms of early computer sound chips, and tie it all together with cybernetic concepts of interactivity and information exchange, and you get the League of Automatic Music Composers. A product of the uniquely Northern Californian fusion of counterculture and high technology (brilliantly chronicled in Erik Davis’ book Techgnosis), the League pioneered the use of computers in live performance and created music of rare and distinctive beauty.

The KIM-1, released in 1976 and packing 1152 bytes of RAM, was one of the first mass-market microcomputers (so-called to distinguish them from the massive mainframes that were the most common form of computer at the time). Jim Horton, an electronic musician who had been active for years in the Bay Area scene, quickly bought a KIM-1 and started exploring the unit’s potential as a musical instrument. Horton had earlier specialized in building massive, self-generating analog synthesizer patches which he would let run for hours on end— a remarkable parallel with the simultaneous efforts undertaken in Europe by Roland Kayn. (A late solo work by Horton was previously featured on this blog.)

It was Horton who conceived the notion of a “silicon orchestra” of human-controlled interconnected computers which reacted to each other’s output in deliberately complicated configurations. He was soon joined by John Bischoff, Rich Gold, and David Behrman, and this quartet performed for the first time as the League of Automatic Music Composers in November 1978.

In 1980 Gold and Behrman left the group and Tim Perkis became a member. “Martian Folk Music” is performed by this later lineup of Perkis, Bischoff, and Horton. This track is typical of the League’s trademark sound: pure digital waves, spasmodically careening across the sound-field, interacting according to the laws some occult dynamics that lies just beyond the listener’s comprehension.

The sonic affinity with early video game soundtracks is not coincidental, as the sounds of the KIM-1 are essentially the same as those of famous SID chip of the Commodore 64. Chip music meets the avant-garde: a match made in heaven.

A flyer made by Rich Gold showing one of the League’s configurations

The League at work: Tim Perkis, Jim Horton, and John Bischoff (source)

Stockhausen: “This is silly. I want to get...

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:28:30 -0400

Stockhausen: “This is silly. I want to get out.”

Cage: “Now now, Karlheinz. Don’t be pissy just because you didn’t get to sit up front.”

Banco del Mutuo Soccorso: “Cento mani e cento...

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:34:00 -0400

Banco del Mutuo Soccorso: “Cento mani e cento occhi”

From the album Darwin! (1972)

In the dubious estimation of musical common sense, the 1970s are typically represented as years of sorrow, a vast artistic wasteland. The unfortunately prominent developments of adult contemporary and disco helped stain this decade with the reputation of slick, soulless overproduction. But— aside from the fact that there is a time and place for Giorgio Moroder and yes, even Barry Manilow— beneath the surface, the 1970s is one of the most rich and varied periods in the entire century, spanning everything from the brilliant funk/soul fusion of Curtis Mayfield in the U.S. to the groundbreaking works of “acousmatic music” presented in France by composers such as Francois Bayle and Bernard Parmegiani.

One of the most fascinating phenomena of the decade is the international diffusion of progressive rock, which had been launched by a handful of (mostly) British bands in the late 60s. Prog rock, with its classical and jazz influences, its sophisticated song structures, and its expansion of the sonic palette beyond the tired, guitar-dominated sound of conventional rock, quickly spread across the European continent, and took on distinctive new forms far removed from its often cloying and affected Anglophone incarnations.

One of the most impressive products of this development was Banco del Mutuo Soccorso (roughly, “Bank of Mutual Aid”), an Italian prog-rock band founded by the brothers Vitorio and Gianni Nocenzi in Rome in 1969. Their eponymous debut album was released in 1972. Later that year, Banco recorded what is widely regarded as one of the defining works of the genre, a concept album inspired by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and entitled simply Darwin!

“Cento mani e cento occhi” (“A hundred hands and a hundred eyes”) is to my ears the album’s highlight. At just over five minutes long, the song is quite compact by prog-rock standards, but its modest length compresses a multi-sectional, developmental structure of compelling dynamism, from the pseudo-classical fanfare of the opening to the stripped-down, two-chord intensity of the outro— all of it held together by the powerful operatic vocals of singer Francesco Di Giacomo.

Hans Haass: Fugue in C Major (1926) From the album Piano Music...

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:35:00 -0400

Hans Haass: Fugue in C Major (1926)

From the album Piano Music without Limits: Original Compositions of the 1920s

Experimental music for the player piano is usually associated with the work of Conlon Nancarrow, an American composer who beginning in 1948 worked for many years in obscurity in Mexico before being discovered and championed in the late 1970s and 80s. (Nancarrow was featured here in August 2009.) But in fact the history of original, “unplayable” music for player piano goes back much further, to the first decades of the 20th century. Although the earliest pieces date from the late teens, the majority of compositions in this vein were written in the 1920s, in the experiment-happy environment of Weimar Republic Germany.

The period’s dominant mood of “new objectivity,” as well as the general adulation of the machine in both capitalist and socialist thinking, led to a fascination with so-called “mechanical music.” This could mean anything from gramophone recordings to new electronic instruments, but it was perhaps best exemplified by the player piano, which was able to reproduce with utter precision and superhuman ability virtually anything that was demanded of it.

At the new music festivals in the towns of Donaueschingen and Baden-Baden in 1926 and 1927, a handful of works for player piano were premiered by Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, and other composers. These pieces were deliberately composed to take advantage of the mechanical potential of the instrument (specifically, a model of player piano known as the Welte-Mignon), apart from all conventions of piano technique derived from the physical nature of the human hand. The paper rolls which stored the musical information were created not through live recording, as was customary, but by hand-pricking each tiny perforation in order to exactly determine the pitches, durations, tempo, and dynamics of the music.

One of the pieces premiered in 1927 was this Fugue in C Major (also known as theCapriccio Fugue) by Hans Haass, an accomplished composer and concert pianist who had became a director of recording for Welte-Mignon in 1925. He recorded over 300 rolls of popular and classical music, and knew as well as anyone the capabilities and limitations of the machine. According to player piano expert Jürgen Hocker, Haass’ pieces for the Welt-Mignon are the among the most adventurous and depart radically from the conventions of piano composition.

Though recognizable as a fugue thanks to its omnipresent theme and consistent imitative polyphony, this composition is really a showpiece for the unique effects of the medium: breakneck tempo, simultaneous use of the entire keyboard, and ultra-fast runs and trills which overload the ear’s ability to distinguish individual notes, creating what Hocker calls “clouds” and “hurricanes” of sound.

(Note: This post is based on my dissertation research on music technology in early 20th-century Germany. More music and information on this fascinating period will be forthcoming over the next two years.)

P-Model: “Art Mania” From the album In a Model Room...

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 10:31:00 -0400

P-Model: “Art Mania”

From the album In a Model Room (1979)

P-Model was a self-described “techno-punk” band from Japan founded in 1979 by Susumu Hirasawa. Their first two albums— In a Model Room (1979) and Landsale (1980)— exhibit a twitchy, electronically-infused punk/pop style that powerfully demonstrates the global dimensions of the New Wave phenomena circa 1980.

The band’s next two releases, Potpourri (1981) and Perspective (1982) took a turn into more diffuse stylistic territory, less punkish and in many ways more experimental, with the earlier albums’ hard-edged production values traded in for a high-reverb sound-wash. These albums are not as immediately engaging as P-Model’s first works, but they represent some of the strangest and most fascinating musical endeavors of the early 1980s.

In addition to his work as the frontman for P-Model, Hirasawa has also had a prolific career as a solo artist, releasing 13 albums since 1989.

Roland Kayn: “Isotrope,” Part II From the album...

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 15:41:00 -0400

Roland Kayn: “Isotrope,” Part II

From the album Infra (1978-79)

Roland Kayn is surely one of the most fascinating and obscure composers in the history of electronic music. Kayn was a journeyman in the avant-garde European music scene in the 1950s and 60s: he made appearances at several of the newly-founded electronic music studios, undertook advanced composition studies with Boris Blacher in Berlin, and had works premiered at the famous summer courses in Darmstadt.

In 1964 Kayn joined the Gruppo d’Improvvisatione Nuova Consonanza, a collective of composer-performers founded by Franco Evangelisti in Rome. He was a member of the group until 1968, when he left in order to pursue his vision of “cybernetic music,” which had haunted him since his first contact with electronic sound production at the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne in 1953. In 1970, Kayn was invited to work at the Instituut voor Sonologie (Institute of Sonology) at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. The composer Gottfried Michael Koenig, director of the studio since 1964, had recently overseen the installation of a state-of-the-art analogue system of independent modular units, such as oscillators, filters, envelope generators, and logic circuits. At the center of this configuration was a “variable function generator,” essentially a primitive sequencer that could be programmed to store a series of voltages which were then used to control the various components of the studio. With this system, Kayn was able for the first time to realize his ideas of cybernetic music, which involved elaborate configurations of connections and feedback loops that create complex and unpredictable sonic interactions. Kayn “composes” the initial setup of the studio components, but once the sound is set in motion, it is allowed to take its own course. In this way, Kayn believes thatthe electronic system develops a sort of capacity to think for itself, a capacity which in a sense can be described as artificial intelligence…. Existential Being, as it were, takes the place of a logically functioning consciousness.”

For more Roland Kayn, check out my earlier post and his official website. MP3 rips of several out-of-print LPs of Kayn’s music from the 1970s have been made available on the blog No Longer Forgotten Music:

Elektroakustische Projekte

Infra

Makro

Simultan

Here are some lovely images from the liner notes to Kayn’s albums (with the exception of the picture of Kayn himself, which is from the 1967 documentary film Nuova Consonanza: Komponisten improvisieren im Kollektiv):

Excerpt from the score for Allotropie (1962-64)

Excerpt from the score for Galaxis (1962)

Excerpt from the score for Cybernetics

A glimpse into Kayn’s studio

Roland Kayn in 1967

Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker: “Fünf Mann...

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:00:00 -0400

Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker: “Fünf Mann Menschen” (1968)

From the album Musik für Radio, 1950-2000

This is part of a feature on the Austrian poet and experimentalist Ernst Jandl (1925-2000), in collaboration with Continuo’s Weblog. At Continuo’s you can find a wonderful album of Jandl’s sound poetry recorded at the BBC in 1966.

Fünf Mann Menschen (Five Man Mankind) was first broadcast on Stuttgart’s Southwestern Radio on November 14, 1968. Created by Jandl and his companion, the poet Friederike Mayröcker, Fünf Mann Menschen was credited with turning the genre of the Hörspiel (radio play) away from its literary postwar form back toward its experimental roots in the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). While the so-called “classical” Hörspiel that took shape after World War II was usually a straightforward spoken text (a kind of “audiobook” avant la lettre), the new Hörspiel of the 1960s sought to exploit the unique potential of the radio medium, which included the entire spectrum of sound recently unleashed in electronic music studios around the world. (An excellent source on all this is Mark E. Cory’s essay “Soundplay: The Polyphonous Tradition of German Radio Art,” in the wonderful anthology Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde.)

Only 14 minutes in length (the typical Hörspiel was at least twice as long), Fünf Mann Menschen consists of a number of vignettes that evoke the successive stages of modern life and ironically undermine the conformist tendencies of contemporary society. Although much of the effect of the piece is language-specific, and thus meaningless to those who don’t speak German, it can also be appreciated as a kind of voice-based musique concrète. The creative use of stereophony in this work was also largely without precedent in the Hörspiel. It is presented here in an excerpted version.

Musica mundana update, June 2010 Two excellent stories to which I was alerted this morning by NPR,...

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:06:00 -0400

Musica mundana update, June 2010 Two excellent stories to which I was alerted this morning by NPR,...

Newman Guttman: “Pitch Variations” (1957) From the...

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:40:00 -0400

Newman Guttman: “Pitch Variations” (1957)

From the album Music from Mathematics

It seems appropriate that some of the first pieces of computer music were composed by a man with the fantastically dorky name of “Newman Guttman.” Realized on the state-of-the-art IBM 7090 computer at the legendary Bell Labs in New Jersey, the work of Guttman, Max Mathews, and others helped inaugurate a new age of synthetic sound.

The theoretical foundation of computer music was nothing less than a recapitulation of the 2500-year-old wisdom of Pythagoras: ”Any sound can he described mathematically by a sequence of numbers.” From this basic principle, the pioneers of computer music laid out an ambitious program of unhindered musical creativity:

“Man’s music has always been acoustically limited by the instruments on which he plays. These are mechanisms which have physical restrictions. We have made sound and music directly from numbers, surmounting conventional limitations of instruments. Thus, the musical universe is now circumscribed only by man’s perceptions and creativity.” (From the liner notes to Music from Mathematics)

But, as Pierre Schaeffer and others were discovering, there was a chasm between the neat equations of pure mathematics and the pyscho-acoustic realities of human hearing. ”Pitch Variations” explores the nonlinear relationship between frequency and perceived pitch that arises in periodic vibrations too quick to be perceived as rhythm, yet too slow to be heard as tone— the realm of what would later be called pulsar synthesis. This noisy little piece of electronic music history thus anticipates many later developments, from granular synthesis to glitch.

This wonderful album, first released in 1962 and long out of print, has been graciously immortalized and is available for download from Orpheus Music.

Brian Ferneyhough: La chute d’Icare (1988) From the...

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 08:46:34 -0400

Brian Ferneyhough: La chute d’Icare (1988)

From the album La chute d’Icare, Superscription, Intermedio alla Ciaccona, etc.

One of the most successful and notorious composers working in an unapologetically modernist idiom in the second half of the 20th century, Brian Ferneyhough is a British composer who has lived in California since 1987.

Ferneyhough’s intention is to write scores of such extreme complexity that they are, in many cases, literally unperformable. The perfect realization of the notes as written becomes an impossible ideal which the musician can at best asymptotically approach. Playing this music thus becomes a sort of self-abnegating spiritual exercise, in the course of which the performer is likely to become, in the composer’s words, “lost in the forest of his own imperfections.” (Ferneyhough’s scores, which resemble musical labyrinths, remind one of the German word for a maze: Irrgarten, literally ”garden of error.”) This all sounds rather sadistic, but musicians who have dedicated themselves to the interpretation of Ferneyhough’s work have attested to the exhilaration that comes with each new attempt: these pieces can never be “mastered,” which means they always present new challenges to the intrepid performer.

The title of this work, meaning “The Fall of Icarus,” was taken from a rather strange 16th-century painting by Pieter Brueghel. La chute d’Icare can be heard as a relatively rare example of modernist program music, with the clarinet part representing the erratic and ultimately doomed flight of Icarus. To my ears, in spite of its fearful complexity this music has a verve and playfulness far more sincere than that of much other, simpler music which also aspires to these ideals.

Jim Horton: “Rebirth” (1990) From the album Numbers...

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:32:00 -0400

Jim Horton: “Rebirth” (1990)

From the album Numbers Racket

Beginning in the late 1960s, Jim Horton (1944-1998) was an active member of the San Francisco Bay Area experimental music scene. In the early 70s he studied at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College under the leadership of Robert Ashley. With Tim Perkins and John Bischoff, Horton founded the “world’s first computer network band,” the League of Automatic Music Composers, in 1978. The League pioneered the collaborative use of microcomputers in live improvisation. Many of their “compositions” were driven by game-like interactions between the players. Around this time, Horton also began using computers to implement alternate systems of tuning, and in particular various forms of just intonation.

These influences are at work in this piece composed by Jim Horton in 1990 and released on a 1992 cassette by the Just Intonation Network entitled Numbers Racket. The sounds in this piece are vintage 80s digitalia. Although I’m generally fond of these bright, metallic sounds, the timbre of the piece wears a bit thin by the end of it. The real interest here is on the level of tuning and form.

The composer provided the following cryptic notes to “Rebirth”:

The computer, empty of suffering, simulates high-speed attainment of nirvana by playing the medieval Tibetan Buddhist game “Determination of the Ascension of Stages,” invented by Sakya pandita Kunga Gyaltsen (“Whose Banner is Total Joy”). The board shows 104 places of a fantastic cosmic geography.

The game mentioned by Horton is a variation on an ancient Indian board game in which “the player progresses according to the throw of dice from hell states and other inauspicious conditions by way of the Tantric path to Buddhahood and nirvana.” (Amazingly, it belongs to the same lineage as the modern children’s game Snakes and Ladders.) This strange “program” behind the piece resonates with the cyclical quality of the music, which climbs ever upward only to tumble back down again and start anew. Each iteration is slightly different, and the various levels seem always to be slightly out of phase, thus creating the overall sense of motion and vitality suggested by the title.

Behold “La joueuse de tympanon” (“The Dulcimer...

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 09:41:00 -0400

Behold “La joueuse de tympanon” (“The Dulcimer Player”), one of many musical automata from the late 18th century. Then, as now, such creations provoked powerful responses:

“The attempts of mechanicians to imitate, with more or less approximation to accuracy, the human organs in the production of musical sounds, or to substitute mechanical appliances for those organs, I consider tantamount to a declaration of war against the spiritual element in music. The more perfect this sort of machinery is, the more I disapprove of it…” — E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Automata (1814)