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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.

February 25, 2010, 1:14pm

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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.

January 22, 2010, 5:35pm

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Hugh Le Caine: Dripsody - An Etude for Variable Speed Recorder (stereo version, 1957)

From the album Compositions Demonstrations 1946-1974

The early composers of musique concrète often sought to focus the development their techniques of manipulation and montage by limiting the sound material with which they worked to a single sound or a set of related sounds from a common source.  This model is apparent in Pierre Schaeffer’s very first efforts in this new form of music, such as his Etude aux chemins de fer (“Railroad Etude”) and Etude aux casseroles or “Study on Pots and Pans” (also known as Etude pathétique) of 1948. The new recording medium of magnetic tape offered composers the ability to capture and explore sounds from an unlimited number of auditory “angles,” opening new perceptual territory for the ear just as the movie camera had for the eye.

The Canadian inventor and composer Hugh Le Caine was experimenting with electronic music in Ottawa even before Schaeffer’s first radio broadcasts of musique concrète in Paris.  His piece Dripsody is a miniature masterpiece of its genre: the entire composition is based on a single recording of a drip of water, which is manipulated on tape to create shimmering cascades of liqueous sound. The original monophonic version was made in 1955; I have posted the slightly longer stereo version, which Le Caine created in 1957.

November 10, 2009, 10:01am

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Karl-Birger Blomdahl: “Mima-tape 1”

From the opera Aniara (1959)

I’m still reeling a bit from my recent discovery of the world’s first space-opera, written by Swedish composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl in the late 50s and premiered in 1959.  It is based on the “epic science fiction poem” Aniara by the Nobel Prize winner Harry Martinson.

“Earth, become unclean / with toxic radiation, is accorded / a time of calm, repose and quarantine”: A group of refugees abandons the threatened planet and boards the spaceship Aniara, “and like a giant pupa without weight, / vibrationless, Aniara gyrates clear / and free of interference out from Earth.”  But a near-collision with an asteroid throws the ship off course, and its denizens confront an endless voyage into uncharted space.  They are saved from total despair by the Mima, a quasi-sentient computer worshiped by the passengers of Aniara for its ability to project “images / and tongues and scents from undiscovered countries.”  Soon the voyagers receive the news of the annihilation of “Dorisvale” (Earth); Mima, who had “beheld the granite’s white-hot weeping / when stone and ore were vaporized to mist,” could not bear the trauma of witnessing the Earth’s demise, and self-destructs.  All this in the first 30 pages!

The musical idiom generally resembles the “international style” of postwar modernism: Blomdahl based the composition of the opera on an “all-interval” twelve-tone row.  But there is a refreshing variety to the music, as represented by jazzy-dissonant dance-hall pieces and solemn choral movements.  In its stylistic diversity, Aniara anticipates the much better-known modernist opera Die Soldaten, composed around the same time, but not premiered until 1965.

For the scenes depicting the Mima, Blomdahl composed three electronic pieces he called “Mima-tape.”  These are among the first electronic works created in Sweden, and, with the exception of Jörg Mager’s creation of synthetic bell sounds for a 1931 production of Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal, perhaps the first use of electronic sounds in the history of opera.

The form of “Mima-tape 1” is loose and episodic.  A series of short sound-vignettes evokes the phantasmagoric projections of the Mima, which culminate with the live broadcast of Earth’s destruction.

The following fragments can perhaps be distinguished in this ‘sound-play,’ based on certain keywords, lines or moods in Harry Martinson’s epic: The song of the light years and cosmos—the key to the mystery seen as through walls of mountainous-deep space crystal… Evil reports penetrate space, the storm of dark rays from distant voids… Glimpses of the true light of solace.  Veils of dreams… Death plays chess with infinity… Fire and death ravage the Earth.

October 11, 2009, 4:25pm

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Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening: “Incantation for Tape” (1953)

From the album An Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music / Second A-Chronology 1936-2003

Luening and Ussachevsky were two of the primary movers in the New York “tape music” scene, America’s answer to the roughly contemporaneous movements of musique concrète in Paris and elektronische Musik in Cologne.  The American experimenters were less doctrinaire in their choice of sounds than their European counterparts— the French favoring “found sounds” and the Germans insisting on the purity of synthetically generated signals such as white noise and sine waves— but their style is no less distinctive.

The title “Incantation” is appropriate, not only for the vaguely religious mood of the music, with its tolling bells and backwards, chant-like vocals, but also because this piece signals the historical moment at which electronic music as we know it was called into being.  This music quietly announces the age of disembodied sound.

“Incantation” can be found on a superlative collection assembled by Guy-Marc Hinant and released on his Sub Rosa label.  Each of the four two-disc sets contains a fantastic cornucopia of electronic and experimental music, much of which is previously unpublished.

March 18, 2009, 12:17pm

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Giacinto Scelsi: Four pieces for orchestra, each on a single note, No. 4 (1959)

From the album Quattro pezzi per orchestra, Anahit, Uaxuctum

“If you play a sound for a very long time, it grows.  It becomes so big that you start to hear many more harmonies, and it becomes bigger inside.  The sound envelops you. […] The sound fills the room you are in, it surrounds you, you can swim in it.  But the sound is both creator and destroyer.  It is therapeutical.  It can heal, but it can also destroy. […] When you enter a sound, it surrounds you.  You become part of this sound.  Gradually, you are devoured by this sound and you need no other sound. […] It’s all in this sound, the entire universe is in this one sound that fills the room.  All possible sounds are contained in this sound from the start.”

(Giacinto Scelsi, quoted in the liner notes for the album Natura renovatur)

February 25, 2009, 9:30am

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Juan Garcia Esquivel (AKA Esquivel!): “Misirlou” / “Malaguena”

From the album Strings Aflame (1959)

It’s impossible to do justice to the universal musical genius of Juan Garcia Esquivel (1918-2002), the Mexican composer, arranger, and bandleader who helped invent the genre sometimes known as “space-age bachelor pad music,” or, less imaginatively, as “lounge.”

Esquivel’s sonic imagination is absolutely unique.  He was a man who thought in sound— not in notes or melodies or the other dessicated abstractions in which so many whom we call “composers” dress their meager ideas— but in pure, prismatic sound.

Saccharine string melodies, brassy big-band interjections, exoticist flourishes, the seductive rhythms of Latin-American dance— Esquivel effortlessly juxtaposes sound gestures of radically divergent musical provenance.  They follow one another with an inexorable logic, held together against all laws of musical propriety by the sheer manic force that animates each element.

I offer here a two-song medley comprising “Misirlou” and “Malaguena,” both from the 1959 album Strings Aflame.  Esquivel’s version of the traditional Greek/Mediterannean tune “Misirlou” predates Dick Dale’s famous “surf rock” rendition by three years.  “Malaguena,” based on a movement of the Suite Andalucia by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona which became a popular standard, showcases one of Esquivel’s most bizarre and idiosyncratic techniques: using the voice as a non-verbal sound source to sing repeated monosyllables (in this case, “zu”) instead of words.

February 23, 2009, 10:16am