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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)

September 01, 2010, 2:23pm

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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.

July 06, 2010, 11:00pm

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Pink Floyd: “Sysyphus” (excerpt)

From the album Ummagumma (1969)

The late 1960s witnessed the glorious psychedelic marriage of the traditions of rock-and-roll and experimental/electronic music.  The years 1968-69 alone saw The Beatles’ musique concrète-inspired “Revolution 9,” Pierre Henry’s collaboration with the British prog-rock band Spooky Tooth on the album Ceremony, and the release of Pink Floyd’s monumental double album Ummagumma, the band’s fourth album and arguably the most adventurous project they would ever undertake. 

The first half of Ummagumma consists of a set of live recordings of songs from the band’s earlier releases, while the second half is a collection of studio work by each of the band members individually.  Roger Waters contributed the pastoral ballad “Grantchester Meadows” and a bizarre piece of self-described “concrete poetry” entitled “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict.”  David Gilmour’s piece is called “The Narrow Way,” and Nick Mason rounds out the album with his “Grand Vizier’s Garden Party,” the body of which is a studio-created exploration of percussive sonority that evokes Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation.

Keyboardist Richard Wright’s contribution, entitled “Sysyphus,” opens with a minatory theme for orchestral strings à la Mellotron, punctuated by timpani strokes and cymbals.  From here we move seamlessly into a different expressive zone, where Wright demonstrates his classical chops with an ornate, Chopinesque piano interlude that gradually decomposes into a dissonant haze of sustained clusters. The next section, presenting yet another striking contrast of musical style, is a wonderfully disjunct mix of directly plucked piano sounds, percussive interjections, and tape-stretched vocal timbres.  After a bit of a lull toward the end (omitted in this excerpt), a cacophonous orchestral explosion ushers in a noisy sound-field from which the original “Sysyphus” theme slowly rises like a spectral figure from the fog. This is a “symphonic” conception of experimental rock that would be developed further in Pink Floyd’s later albums, starting with their very next release, Atom Heart Mother, whose title track is a 24-minute instrumental work of unsurpassed brilliance.

June 01, 2010, 10:16am

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Max Brand: “Stormy Sea” (1963)

From the album In Memoriam — Max Brand (1999)

Max Brand (1896-1980) was a classically-trained Austrian composer who late in life became an isolated pioneer of electronic music. He is not to be confused with the American author of the same name.

After military service in World War I, Brand studied composition with Franz Schreker and Alois Hába in Berlin. After returning to Vienna in 1924, he heard a performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet, Op. 26, which inspired Brand to begin composing with the twelve-tone technique. He was the first composer outside of Schoenberg’s circle to do so.

The premiere of Brand’s Zeitoper Maschinist Hopkins (Hopkins the Engineer) in 1929 was a huge success, and the work was favorably compared to Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera and Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf.

In the early 1930s, Brand founded the Mimoplastisches Theater für Ballett and worked on music for experimental films, including a award-winning score for a film interpretation of Heinrich von Kleist’s early 19th-century play Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug). (This version should not be confused with the 1937 UFA version, for which Wolfgang Zeller provided the music.)

In anticipation of the coming annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, Brand fled Vienna in 1937, arriving in New York in 1940 by way of Rio de Janeiro, where he met up with Heitor Villa-Lobos.

In the United States, Brand continued his involvement with music theater. His “scenic oratorio” The Gate was premiered by the Metropolitan Opera in 1944. Brand became an American citizen in 1945. Frustrated with the difficulty of obtaining performances of his music, Brand took an interest in electronic sound production around 1956. In the late 50s he set up a private electronic studio in New York with the technical assistance of Robert Moog. The unique apparatus that emerged over the course of a 10-year development (1957-67) represents one of Moog’s earliest original contributions to synthesizer technology. Known as the Max-Brand-Synthesizer, it is kept today in Max Brand Archive of the Vienna City Library.

Brand returned to Austria in 1975, but his studio equipment was badly damaged during transport. He died in 1980. His studio remains a center of activity for the Viennese electronic music scene.

Brand’s electronic work is diverse, ranging from the bruitist early work Notturno brasileiro (1959-60), which was perhaps an hommage to Villa-Lobos, to The Astronauts: an Epic in Electronics (1961), “a veritable paean to technological achievement” that featured recordings of the voice of John Glenn, to electronic accompaniments to advertisements reminiscent of Raymond Scott’s commercial work, to a commissioned piece meant to accompany a theatrical performance of Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 play Rhinoceros, which Brand ultimately withdrew.  ”Stormy Sea” is one of three pieces Brand composed for a multimedia presentation in New York in 1963.

May 14, 2010, 9:37am

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Victor Lundberg: “An Open Letter to My Teenage Son”

From the album An Open Letter (1967)

When I stumbled upon this record in a dusty thrift store in Vero Beach, Florida, I knew I had found something special.  I’ve long since disposed of all my LPs (and Mr. Lundberg was not spared), but fortunately I had the good sense to digitize this priceless piece of work before parting ways with it.

Victor Lundberg was a radio personality in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who experienced a meteoric spurt of fame with his 1967 record “An Open Letter to My Teenage Son.”  The track made a brief appearance on the Billboard charts and even won a Grammy for best spoken word record.  Spurred by this success, Lundberg released an entire LP devoted to his political opinions, all accompanied by background music of varying degrees of kitschy hilarity.  It is a poignant document of Nixonian fury at the height of the 1960s culture war.

There are many great moments on this record, from ”To the Flower Power,” a delightfully spiteful fit of hippie-punching accompanied by Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, to ”Frogs and Freedom,” with its warnings of Medicare-as-socialism anticipating by some 40 years the political rhetoric of the contemporary American right.  I’m especially fond of “A Man’s Hands,” where we hear Lundberg’s poetic side: “A man’s hands: holding his son, aiming a gun, teasing a woman…”

But the album’s indisputable highlight remains “An Open Letter to My Teenage Son.” Addressing such weighty topics as long hair on men, intergenerational politics, and the death of God, Lundberg confronts his son’s opposition to the Vietnam War.  His closing lines will echo in your soul long after the last swells of the Battle Hymn of the Republic have died away:

“Your mother will love you no matter what you do, because she is a woman.  And I love you too, son.  But I also love our country, and the principles for which we stand.  If you decide to burn your draft card, then burn your birth certificate at the same time.  From that moment on, I have no son.”

For a remarkable catalog of similar records, check out WFMU’s post on the “hyper-patriotic hit single.” 

May 11, 2010, 10:22am

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Karlheinz Stockhausen: Stimmung (excerpt; 1968)

From the album Stockhausen: Stimmung, performed by Singcircle, dir. Gregory Rose

While Stockhausen’s avowal of a pantheistic spirituality in his writings is sometimes difficult to take seriously, his 1968 composition Stimmung seems explicable only as the ecstatic credo of a devout postmodern universalist.

Stimmung is a German word rich in connotation, but most often meaning “tuning,” “mood,” or “atmosphere.”  The tonal spectrum of the work is generated from the overtones of a single low B-flat, to which the singers’ voices are anchored by an electronically-generated drone that they alone can hear.  Shifting vocal colors and gently pulsing rhythmic patterns shimmer across this sturdy harmonic edifice: the rhythmic profile and vocal timbre of each part is precisely notated, the latter using the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

The “score” for Stimmung is essentially an assembly kit comprising 51 short sections (or “moments,” as Stockhausen calls them) that are ordered uniquely for each performance, with certain limitations imposed by an overarching “form-scheme.”  Improvisation comes into play as the singers respond in various ways to the introduction of new material and determine the moments of transition to new sections.  The music is punctuated by the invocation of 29 “magic names” of divinities from various world cultures and snippets of erotic poetry penned by Stockhausen himself.

For the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Stimmung was presented in a spherical concert hall—another of Stockhausen’s brainchildren.  It was performed there 72 times:

Stockhausen designed [the hall] in conjunction with an architect and he placed fifty speakers around the hall so that the audience was surrounded with a circle of sound. He controlled the spatial quality of the sound from the desk on the platform in the centre of the sphere and he was able to make a sound mill that revolved around in circles over the audience’s heads. The spatial movement of the sounds became equally important as the other parameters of the sound such as duration and dynamics. (Rory Braddell)

In spring of 2003 I had the good fortune to hear New Music New College give three performances of Stimmung over the course of a week. The sustained, concentrated experience of these sounds created a wonderful effervescence in my head that lasted for days. This is transformative music.

April 09, 2010, 10:15pm

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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.

February 26, 2010, 5:24pm

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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 its 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.

February 04, 2010, 7:59pm

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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.

January 18, 2010, 9:50pm

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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”)

January 14, 2010, 11:51am