[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Ernst Krenek: Excerpt from Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus (1955)

From the album Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus / Klangfiguren

In the third and final installment of a series of posts highlighting the early productions of the West German Radio Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, we hear one of the first attempts to blend synthetic tones with the human voice. Ernst Krenek’s Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus makes an interesting parallel with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s groundbreaking composition Gesang der Jünglinge, created around the same time.

Both compositions combine electronic sounds and vocal timbres, although Krenek’s approach in this regard was relatively traditional in comparison to Stockhausen’s. Both works were also based on religious texts—Krenek and Stockhausen were devout Catholics, and understood their works in the grand tradition of sacred music. Krenek even labelled his composition an “Easter Oratorio.” (This religious sincerity was lost on some critics: the German musicologist Friedrich Blume castigated such works as musical blasphemy in a controversial 1958 lecture portentously entitled “Was ist Musik?”)

Unlike most of the composers working in the Cologne studio in the 1950s, Krenek was a well-established figure in European modern music. Still, his Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus shows a youthful eagerness to explore the new possibilities presented by the electronic medium. Krenek tweaked the sine wave generators to create a slightly “squished” scale with 13 tones to the octave, instead of the customary 12, casting a strangely distended coloration over the music. The combination of pure sine tones, dissonant “tone mixtures,” and angular, ring-modulated vocal lines likewise contributes to an eerie and unsettling musical mise-en-scène.

January 03, 2012, 8:28pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Karel Goeyvaerts: Composition No. 4 with Dead Tones (1952)

From the album The Serial Works (#1-7)

In this second installment of a series of three posts exploring the early productions of the WDR Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, we hear a remarkable and little-known work by the Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts (1923-1993).  

Composed in 1952, but realized in sound nearly three decades later, Composition No. 4 comprises a basic sound material of four tones, identical in pitch, timbre, and duration with each appearance. (Hence the “dead tones” of the title.) Technically, these tones are what were called Tongemische, or “tone mixtures”— that is, artificially generated tones consisting of sine waves in non-harmonic proportions to the fundamental frequency. The only variation in the piece is in the duration of the silences between each iteration of the tones, which is altered according to serial procedures. As the interjections of silence between each tone gradually increase and decrease over the course of the composition, the four sonic layers of the piece are brought out of phase and back into phase again. The result is a remarkable phenomenon of motion in stasis, a slowly shimmering stillness that musicologist Hermann Sabbe has anointed the first ever piece of “process music.” For Sabbe, “Composition No. 4” is also an early example of conceptual art, being based on a simple generative idea that could be realized in any number of ways. (Goeyvaerts did not specify the pitch of the tones, only their duration and timbral quality.)

In the early 1950s, Goeyvaerts and Karlheinz Stockhausen carried on an intense theoretical conversation concerning the principles of serial composition. Although the two shared a deep fascination with the technique, they diverged aesthetically: Goeyvaerts distinguished his approach from Stockhausen’s, calling the German’s music “baroque,” and claiming that he based his composition on a preconceived sonic image. Goeyvaerts, by contrast, envisioned music as (in the words of Mark Delaere) “the objectification of a spiritual idea in a structure of sound.” This distinctly modernist form of musical mysticism can be traced to such varied sources as the medieval concept of numerus sonorus—music as “sounding number,” essentially Pythagoreanism made into compositional doctrine—and the vision of a static, painterly “neoplastic music” outlined by Piet Mondrian in the 1920s. Delaere has called Goeyvaert’s early works “the most abstract compositions ever written.”

Goeyvaerts (middle) with Luigi Nono and Stockhausen (c. 1950)

December 22, 2011, 11:52pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer: Excerpt from Klang im unbegrenzten Raum (1951-52)

From the album Acousmatrix: The History of Electronic Music VI

Founded in 1951, the Studio for Electronic Music of West German Radio in Cologne was one of the seminal sources of the radical new sound art that emerged in the years following the end of the Second World War. Produced with pure synthetic sound, as opposed the recorded sounds of musique concrete, the works that emerged from the Cologne studio became known as elektronische Musik (“electronic music”), a term that consequently has a much more specific and historically fraught meaning in German than in other languages.

The WDR studio would become virtually synonymous with rigorously serial compositional techniques and a dry or even abrasive sonic quality, as exemplified by the now-classic early electronic studies of Karlheinz Stockhausen. But as Konrad Boehmer argues in his notes for this album in theAcousmatrix series, the various composers who worked in the studio over the span its first decade were anything but uniform in their approaches or their musical output. In the following three posts, I explore compositions from the early years of the WDR studio that demonstrate the rich aesthetic diversity of this music.

Eimert (above) with engineer Leopold von Knobelsdorff

Klang im unbegrenzten Raum (Sound in Limitless Space) is a collaboration between studio co-founders Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer. Eimert, who would later lead the studio for many years, was a well-established modernist figure in the Schoenbergian line, having published a handbook of 12-tone composition as early as 1924. Beyer, too, had come of age as a journalist and film composer in the heady days of the Weimar Republic. In 1928 he wrote a jaw-dropping essay of techno-futurist speculation entitled “Das Problem der kommenden Musik” (“The Problem of the Music to Come”), which both cataloged the technological achievements of the 1920s and prophesied many future developments.

While the WDR’s later sound would be marked by the use of rudimentary sonic material such as sine waves, impulses, and white noise, the early experiments in the studio made use of the harmonically rich timbres of electric instruments such as the Melochord and the Trautonium. Tones played on these devices were recorded and manipulated—spliced, multiplied, and bathed in artificial reverberation—to create otherworldly soundscapes unlike anything ever heard before. (In technique, if not quite in effect, these pieces resembled the works of “tape music” created around the same time in the United States by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky.) 

This music can be heard as a realization of Beyer’s fantastic visions, recorded over two decades earlier, of “machines that make it possible to separate the voice from the body and convey it over distances, to let sounds play backward, to traverse a timbral domain of an almost cosmic expanse…machines whose power lies in their unique mastery of the laws of nature; a new objective, whose wonder lies hidden deep in the secrets of science.”

December 16, 2011, 10:34pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Percy Grainger: “Experiments to Provide Instruments for Free Music” (c. 1952)

From the album The Lyre’s Island: Some Australian Music, Sound Art, and Design (1996)

Best known for his copious folk-song arrangements and rather conventional works for wind band, Australian composer Percy Grainger (1882-1961) also moonlighted as one of the 20th century’s most fearlessly harebrained musical experimenters.  

In 1912, he created “Random Round,” a remarkable composition that anticipated musical indeterminacy a half-century before Umberto Eco’s The Open Work. In the early 1920s Grainger produced highly elaborate and sometimes unplayable arrangements of folksongs for the Aeolian player piano company in London. Later in the decade he developed a practice of “elastic scoring,” a flexible way of notating orchestral music to make it more easily adaptable to ensembles of various size and instrumental makeup. 

Inspired by his childhood experience of the sound of the ocean and by the prophetic ideas espoused in Ferruccio Busoni’s 1907 Sketch of a New Aesthetics of Music,Grainger had long imagined a “gliding music” free of the discrete pitch levels that characterized Western melody. (Grainger had studied with Busoni for a brief time in 1903.) This he realized for the first time in a 1935 sketch called “Free Music,” first for string quartet and later arranged for four Theremins. Of the idea of free music, Grainger wrote,  ”My impression is that this world of tonal freedom was suggested to me by wave-movements in the sea…It seems to me the only music logically suitable to a scientific age.”

Grainger’s 1951 sketch showing a sewing machine driving a hand drill controlling a Morse code oscillator.

From 1945 until his death in 1961, while living in White Plains, New York, Grainger developed a series of elaborate experimental instruments designed for the realization of free music. He was assisted by his wife Ella and the American physics teacher Burnett Cross. These became known as the “Cross-Grainger free music machines.” They included the Reed-Box Tone-Tool (1950-51), an automated instrument using harmonium reeds tuned in eighth-tones, the “Electric-Eye Tone Tool,” begun in 1953 and unfinished, which used transistors to create tones from graphical inscriptions via photoelectric cells, and the “Kangaroo Pouch” machine, a massive Rube Goldberg contraption which I will not attempt to explain here. (The reader is referred to Rainer Linz’s survey of Grainger’s free music instruments.)

The remarkable audio you are hearing is taken from the CD companion to volume 6 of Leonardo Music Journal, curated by Douglas Kahn. The track titles are “Butterfly Piano,” “Reed-Box Tone-Tool,” “AM Oscillator Test,” “Hiles-and-Dales Oscillator,” and “Oscillator Test Pattern.”

October 14, 2011, 10:13pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Xenharmonic triad, part 2

Ivan Wyschnegradsky: Étude ultrachromatique, for Fokker 31-tone organ, Op. 42 (1959)

From the album 50 Jaar Stichting Huygens-Fokker

In 1951, the Dutch physicist and musician Adriaan Fokker (1887-1972) oversaw the construction and installation of a unique, 31-tone keyboard instrument in Teyler’s Museum in Haarlem. This would became known as the Fokker Organ. Fokker’s tuning system was based on the theories of the 17th-century Dutch polymath Christian Huygens, whose notion of a 31-part equal division of the octave was in turn inspired by earlier instruments such as Vicentino’s arcicemablo. The instrument’s labyrinthine keyboard interface demanded a fundamentally new technique from those who would dare to play it.

The keyboard of the Fokker Organ

Huygens and Fokker both envisioned this configuration as a means of enabling the performance of music in various mean-tone tunings, rather than a path toward microtonality as it is generally understood. Other composers, however, viewed the refined division of the octave as the technological basis for a new chromatic overdrive: the principle of the equal importance of all notes that motivated atonality and Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique was now to be applied to a greater (and theoretically unlimited) number of tones.

This was the approach taken by the Russian-French composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky, who wrote this piece for the Fokker Organ in 1959. A champion of microtonal music since the early 20th century, Wyschnegradsky used various systems of tuning, all unified by his vision of “ultrachromaticism,” in which microtonal pitch organization was infused with a heavy dose of Scriabin-esque musical mysticism. 

This portable version of the Fokker Organ, the Archiphone, was developed in the 1960s

This recording was released on a CD made for the 50th anniversary of the Huygens-Fokker Foundation Centre for Microtonal Music, in Amsterdam. The foundation’s website is one of the best resources on the history and theory of microtonal/xenharmonic music on the internet. 

August 17, 2011, 10:45am

Giorgio Sancristoforo: Variations on Incontri di Fasce Sonore (2011)

Using the sound material of Incontri di Fasce Sonore by Italian composer Franco Evangelisti, Giorgio Sancristoforo uses a Buchla unit to trigger sounds in MAX/MSP in a brilliant attempt at a “live remix” of a seminal piece of 1950s electronic music.

Sancristoforo’s website is a veritable cabinet of curiosities, and includes such wonders as:

• Berna, a software emulation of the classic electronic music studio of the 1950s (an idea from my dreams, but sadly for Mac only) 
• the Roton, a lovely graphic score inspired by Cornelius Cardew’s famous Treatise, comprising 23 circular plastic transparencies
• and, perhaps most surprisingly, an album of blazing, four-on-the-floor neo-disco realizations.

July 28, 2011, 11:31am

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Boris Blacher: “Angst”

From the work Abstract Opera No. 1 (1953)

This is the first of a two-part feature on the experimental music of the German composer Boris Blacher (1903-1975). Blacher’s first major works dated from the 1920s and his breakthrough came with his 1937 orchestral composition Concertante Musik, but his music was suppressed as “degenerate” by the Nazis. After World War II he became a prominent figure on the European scene, eventually becoming director of the Music Academy of Berlin, where he distinguished himself as a composition teacher during the 50s and 60s.

Most of Blacher’s music shows the enduring influence of the 1920s style of the Neue Sachlichkeit, which favored clear textures, restrained expression, and strong rhythmic profiles. But he had an experimental streak, as exemplified by his enigmatic 1953 composition Abstract Opera No. 1. (The title is deceptive; there would be no number two.)

The opera consists of seven movements, each treating an archetypal emotional situation, such as anger, love, and fear. The libretto, written by fellow composer Werner Egk, is almost entirely wordless, consisting of artfully composed nonsense syllables. The single exception is the movement entitled “Verhandlung” (“Negotiation”), a duet for English and Russian speakers exchanging meaningless platitudes—words, but still no sense. In his preface to the score, Egk states that “the composed words are invented musically and phonetically and are directed at the listener’s capacity for forming automatic associations.”

With craft and humor, Blacher seeks to illustrate how these classic scenarios can be musically conveyed without the verbal substrate of the libretto. The result is a work that both parodies the stereotyped expressive forms of opera (the love duet is especially effective in this regard) and points toward the radical renovations of the musical stage undertaken by later composers such as György Ligeti and Maurico Kagel. Not surprisingly, Blacher’s music was not well received at its premiere in Mannheim in 1953: one reviewer bestowed upon it the singular distinction of being “the worst opera ever written.”

July 17, 2011, 2:31pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Morton Feldman: Intersection for magnetic tape (1953)

From the album First Recordings: The 1950s

Among the composers of the postwar avant-garde, a dividing line can be drawn between those who saw electronic sound production as an essential aspect of the new music and those who, after some experiments, more or less dismissed it. The former group was likely the larger of the two, including composers such as Cage, Stockhausen, Babbitt, and Xenakis, but the electro-skeptics were a formidable bunch, including in their numbers Berio, Ligeti, and Boulez. (Berio and Ligeti, of course, made substantial contributions to the genre around 1960, but soon moved on; Boulez produced an early Etude, then dismissed electronic music, only to return as an advocate of “live electronics” when he became director of IRCAM in the early 1980s.)

Another major modernist composer of the second half of the century who eschewed electronics was Morton Feldman. Feldman’s lone effort in this domain was created under the influence of John Cage, who initiated a “Project for Magnetic Tape” in 1952. The score for Intersections consisted of eight channels of graphically notated spans of tape length in which a certain number of sound events are directed to take place. The sounds themselves were chosen by Cage and Earle Brown, so the piece can be seen as a kind of collective composition which reflects the aesthetics of the group rather than that of any one person.

Feldman later said he “loathed” the sound of electronic music, and compared it to neon lights and plastic paint, but this piece is an important part of the history of tape-based composition in the so-called New York School in the early 1950s. Along with Cage’s Williams Mix, Christian Wolff’s For Magnetic Tape (both 1952), and Brown’s Octet (1953), Feldman’s foray into electronic music illuminates a distinctive approach to the medium that stands alongside the simultaneous European schools as well as the better-known American efforts of Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky. All the tape compositions produced in the Cage circle have in common a slapdash texture, projecting a flurry of disparate sonic fragments with disorienting, cartoonish rapidity. This is especially striking in light of Feldman’s later music, which would abandon all radical contrast in pursuit of a monolithic and slowly shifting sound-field.

[Note: if you are in the Philadelphia area or within travelling distance, check out American Sublime, a festival of Feldman’s rarely-performed late works taking place in Philly until June 12.]

June 07, 2011, 12:16pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Edgard Varèse: “First Interpolation of Organized Sound”

From the work Déserts (1950-54)

Varèse’s story is a familiar part of the foundation myth of post-1950 electronic music, well-known to everyone conversant with that history. Bouncing between Berlin, Paris, and New York in the 1910s and 20s, Varèse made a name for himself as a visionary of a radical new music beyond the technological capabilities of the age, meanwhile writing a small but explosive bunch of compositions that challenged virtually every convention of classical concert music as it was then understood. Only decades later, in the 1950s, was Varèse finally able to create works of electronic music, thus realizing the ideal of the technological “liberation of sound” he had dreamt of for some 40 years. (This narrative also has the unfortunate effect of reinforcing a dismissive ignorance toward the music-technological reality of the 1920s, which I will attempt to correct in my forthcoming dissertation on this “first wave” of electronic music—but that’s another story.)

Déserts, completed in 1954, was Varèse’s first tape composition, and the work with which he broke a compositional silence of nearly 20 years. The piece comprises four “episodes” of music for winds and percussion interspersed with three short pieces of music for magnetic tape, which Varèse called “interpolations of organized sound.” These interpolations can be described, in the terminology of the time, as musique concrète, as they were based on recorded as opposed to synthetically generated sounds, though Varèse treats these sounds with a brashness and violence that was without parallel at the time. (Perhaps the closest thing was Louis and Bebe Barron’s soundtrack to Forbidden Planet from 1956.)

The first interpolation—whose sound material was recorded on a factory floor in Philadelphia, the city where a number of Varèse’s groundbreaking works had been premiered in the 1920s under the baton of Leopold Stokowski—constitutes a remarkable piece of industrial music avant la lettre, whose metallic screeches and wails can be heard as the swan song of the industrial West. Varèse brought the recordings to Paris in 1954, where he created the finished tape parts at the RTF studio, assisted by Pierre Henry. The premiere of the work in December of that year was predictably scandalous, owing not only to the brutally noisy nature of the music—Henry, who was at the mixing board during the playback of the tape pieces, supposedly responded to the unrest in the concert hall by turning up the volume—but also to conductor Hermann Scherchen’s inexplicable pairing of Déserts with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6.

The post-industrial gothic, Philadelphia style (photograph by the author, 2011)

April 07, 2011, 9:21pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Jenny Johnson: “Example in a Single Voice”

From the album Vox Humana: Alfred Wolfsohn’s Experiments in Extension of Human Vocal Range (1956)

Traumatized by his experience at the front in World War I and deeply disturbed by the oppressive employment of the voice in Nazi propaganda, the German voice teacher Alfred Wolfsohn (1896-1962) developed in the 1950s a unique approach to vocal pedagogy that sought to help singers discover their voice as a means of therapeutic self-realization. Wolfsohn’s method was inspired by the belief that all people, barring physical disability, were capable of using their voices to create a wider range of sound than is customarily thought possible. He dismissed the conventional division of human vocal ranges, arguing that such designations are meaningless if singers can be trained to produce over a nine-octave range. (He also rejected the idea of a significant difference in capabilities of vocal production between men and women.)

Wolfsohn’s experiments are documented on this 1956 release, part of a remarkable series of albums of experimental and electronic music put out by Folkways Records from the 50s to the 80s. (These albums have since been digitized and are available as reasonably priced downloads from Smithsonian Folkways, complete with the original liner notes.) On this record one can hear Wolfsohn’s singers’ remarkably extended vocal range, from a croaking mega-bass to an uncanny sopranino that resembles nothing so much as the electronic keening of the Theremin. The singers also experimented with tone production, learning to mimic the timbres of familiar instruments: one track on the album features four women singing an excerpt from a string quartet.

The record comes complete with an imprimatur in the form of an introduction by Henry Cowell, the high priest of the American musical avant-garde. In his introduction, Cowell hails the possibility not merely of vocal imitation of known timbres, but of the discovery and compositional exploitation of new timbres by the liberated voice—an ideal quite similar to that pursued contemporaneously in electronic music studios. Cowell sees Wolfsohn’s work as heralding a “modern sort of English madrigalism,” a prophecy that would be fulfilled by the radical vocal compositions of Berio, Stockhausen, and others in the 1960s. But perhaps the most direct connection to Wolfsohn’s methods is in the solo vocal work of Demetrio Stratos, whose Promethean efforts to extend the limits of his voice were rumored to have caused his early and unexpected demise.

March 03, 2011, 5:02pm