Erkki Kurenniemi: Computer Music (c. 1966)

February 04, 2012, 9:01pm

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Raymond Scott: “Nursery Rhyme”

From the album Soothing Sounds for Baby, Volume 1 (1964)

In honor of my newborn son, Felix Troutt Patteson (born November 3, 2011), I present this wonderful bit of 1960s sound design by the intrepid American bandleader, composer, and inventor Raymond Scott. Conceived as a musical soporific for small children—“an infant’s friend in sound,” as the marketing proclaimed—Soothing Sounds for Baby was a set of three records corresponding to the graded age-groups 1-6, 6-12, and 12-18 months. Using his own electronic instruments, which included some of the world’s first musical sequencers, Scott created bright, shimmering sonic textures comprised of short motivic patterns overlaid with playful melodic improvisations. 

In its intended purpose, the record was a failure, but it is now seen as a striking anticipation of the repetitive electronica to emerge in the 1970s. Originally produced in collaboration with the Gesell Institute of Child Development in 1964, Soothing Sounds for Baby was re-released on CD in 1997 by the Dutch label Basta Records, which has specialized in reanimating Scott’s discography. More recently, Soothing Sounds received the full-blown remix treatment.

On a related note, fans of Raymond Scott should check out the recently released documentary film Deconstructing Dad, produced by Scott’s son Stan Warnow and Jeff Winner.

November 10, 2011, 10:45pm

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Mireille Chamass-Kyrou: Étude I (1960)

From the album Archives GRM, Disc 2: ”L’Art De L’Étude”

Mireille Chamass-Kyrou, whose very name is a melody, is a Greek-born French composer of electronic music. Born in 1931, Chamass-Kyrou worked for a time at the studio of the Groupe de recherches musicales in Paris, where in 1960 she created this etude, her only known composition. (She is also known simply as Mireille Kyrou, under which name this composition was first released.)

The music unfolds in three brief tableaus. It opens with a slowly building dissonant polyphony of sustained metallic tones. This leads into a second scene, dominated by a percussive clicking sound at once powerfully visceral and acoustically mysterious. (Is it the plucking of metal comb-teeth? Some insectoid stridulation?) The final section is announced by a deep, existential drone, from which emerges the strangely alienated timbre of a human voice. The metallic tones reappear, more violent now, then give way seamlessly to a forlorn concert of Morse code signals, a message cast into the void.

The new instrumentarium: Chamass-Kyrou with wind chimes and a feather duster

In contrast to many of her peers, Chamass-Kyrou embraced the synaesthetic valences of electronic sound: the music should evoke, in her words, “giant molecules, diffuse constellations, and fine sonic dust.” Although the cosmic mood of her Étude is undeniable, she manages to avoid the stereotypes of “space music,” which were already well established by 1960. It is an atmospheric composition of the utmost subtlety. 

This track can be found on the highly recommended anthology Archives GRM, a five-disc set released in 2004 and dedicated to the premiere French studio of electronic music. All the usual suspects are here, both GRM stalwarts (Pierre Schaeffer, François Bayle, Ivo Malec) and well-known visitors (Edgard Varèse, Iannis Xenakis). But in addition to this classic material, there are some obscure gems, especially on the first disc, Les visiteurs de la musique concrète, which features rarely heard tape compositions by Pierre Boulez, Darius Milhaud, and Olivier Messiaen.

September 27, 2011, 9:55pm

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Boris Blacher: Skalen 2:3:4 (1964)

From the album 50 Years Studio TU Berlin

This is the second installment in a two-part series on the experimental music of German composer Boris Blacher. See my previous post on Blacher’s Abstract Opera No. 1.

Beginning in 1958, Blacher worked as a composer in residence at the electronic music studio of the Technical University of Berlin. The first such space to be established in the German capital, the TU studio was founded earlier in the decade through the collaboration of music historian Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt and acoustician Fritz Winckel.

In 1964 Blacher composed the quadrophonic tape piece Skalen 2:3:4. (The title refers to the ratios of the smallest intervals of the three tuning systems used simultaneously in the composition: semi-tones, third-tones, and quarter-tones.) Blacher’s composition, the first standalone electronic piece created at the TU studio, was presented as part of the “Week of Experimental Music” festival in October 1964.

In terms of compositional process, the work demonstrates one of the many new working configurations made possible by electronic music technology. The composition began as a rather loose sketch, which Blacher presented to studio technician Rüdiger Rüfer. The two then collaboratively realized the piece, Rüfer operating the studio equipment and Blacher guiding the formal development.

Blacher took a relatively modest view of the electronic medium, viewing it as an extension of traditional means of composing, rather than the basis for a paradigm shift in musical aesthetics: “Electronic music, in my opinion, signifies no new world compared to, say, a conventionally composed piano sonata. Electronic experiments are notable only in that they help to clarify problems of form.” Unlike much electronic music, the interest of the piece lies less in the exploration of new sonic territory than in the precise coordination of pitch/time relationships. 

This music has a certain statistical charm, a quality of gently directed chaos. The beauty of such music is bound up with its historical condition. A decent computer musician today could cook up an algorithm in MAX/MSP or the like and create similarly weird music in half an hour or less. But hearing Blacher’s music, one feels both the constraints imposed by the period’s technology and the sense of experimentation in the new medium. Together, these confer an almost childlike innocence that helps take the edge off the music’s abrasive sound quality. 

For more information, check out this web history of the TU studio (mostly in German, but with summaries in English).

To save money, the studio had this mixing board built from spare parts in 1959

July 19, 2011, 12:42pm

Anestis Logothetis: Graphic Scores

From Zeichen als Aggregatzustand der Musik (1974)

July 01, 2011, 8:00am

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Jean Dubuffet: “Prospère, Prolifère”

From the album Expériences Musicales de Jean Dubuffet

Best known as a visual artist whose bold, childlike images are among the most striking and identifiable works of the mid-twentieth century, the French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) was also one of the most fascinating outsider musicians of recent times. His musical output consists solely of a number of recordings made in 1960-61 with the Danish painter Asger Jorn, after which Dubuffet abandoned music in order to devote himself fully to visual art.

Dubuffet’s music was composed through a process of edited improvisation: first he played freely on a number of instruments, both conventional and otherwise, then he listened to the recordings and removed the parts that he found unsatisfactory. Like Pierre Schaeffer, for whom the concept of musique concrète referred less to the nature of the sounds employed than to the starting point of “concrete” sound material which was “composed” only after it had been captured on tape, Dubuffet declares that “all written music is a false music,” and replaces the inscription of musical notation with that of the recording mechanism: “It is impossible to write true music except with a stylus on wax.”

I believe that our western music is an avatar among all the possibilities that were offered to music. Now, by an optical error, one imagines that this is the only music possible, while, in reality, it is only a very specious music among millions of possibilities that were available and, without doubt, will be available tomorrow… In my music I wanted to place myself in the position of a man of fifty thousand years ago, a man who ignores everything about western music and invents a music for himself without any reference, without any discipline, without anything that would prevent him from expressing himself freely and for his own good pleasure.

Jean Dubuffet: Virtual Virtue (1963)

Dubuffet makes a provocative distinction between two kinds of music, both of which he attempts to capture by turns in his own work: first, there is the “music we make,” a kind of “permanent music” expressive of basic human moods and actions and derived from the sonorous environment of everyday life. Second, there is the “music we hear,” a music “completely foreign to us and our natural tendencies,” which “could lead us to hear (or imagine) sounds which would be produced by the elements themselves, independent of human intervention”: 

[These sounds] would be as strange as what we might hear if we were to put our ear to some opening leading to a world other than our own or if we were to suddenly develop a new form of hearing with which we would become aware of a strange tumult that our senses had been unable to pick up and which might come from elements which were supposedly involved in silent action, such as humus decomposing, grass growing or minerals undergoing transformation.

Whatever the nature of his musical material, Dubuffet finds himself drawn to “composite sounds which appear to be formed by a great number of voices calling to mind distant murmurs, communities, hustle and bustle and hives of activity.” He seeks a “music without variations, not structured according to a particular system but unchanging, almost formless, as though the pieces had no beginning and no end but were simply extracts taken haphazardly from a ceaseless and ever-flowing score.”

The title of this album, Expériences Musicales, could be translated either as “Musical Experiences” or “Musical Experiments.” Along with a 1971 record of Dubuffet’s music entitled Musique Brut, it can be downloaded from the ever-resourceful UbuWeb.

Dubuffet in his musical studio

June 23, 2011, 3:57pm

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Attilio Mineo: “Gayway to Heaven”

From the album Man in Space with Sounds (1962)

From the depths of the space age comes this remarkable album recorded on the occasion of the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle. Visitors were regaled with spoken introductions to the fair’s various exhibits and the decidedly “futuristic” music of Brooklyn-born bandleader and composer Attilio Mineo while being shuttled about in an orb-shaped, transparent vehicle called the “Bubbleator.”

What’s strange about this album is the clash between the buoyant futurist message of the spoken narration and the tone of the music, which ranges from mildly dramatic dissonance to bad-trip cacophony. (Although Mineo’s music can sound kitschy and superficial to our jaded ears, it was likely the most far-out thing that most of the visitors of the fair had ever heard. The music is all the more impressive considering it was written in the early 1950s, making it contemporary with some of the earliest experiments in electronic music.) This ironic contrast between manifest verbal content and latent musical message runs through the entire album.

The track featured here, entitled “Gayway to Heaven,” features the following introduction:

“Our first stop: the gayway to heaven that spins you skyward on the great space wheel: the fabulous gayway, where you guide your own rocket and taxi to tomorrow.”

Priceless! But the ominous music that follows, which hits all the film-music conventions for signaling fear and tension, suggests that the gayway is not all fun and games.  Other tracks follow a similar pattern. “Man Seeks the Future” announces that “we look to a new century in which science will scale the heights of creative imagination,” but the music, with dissonant string ostinati, minatory brass bursts, and spacey percussion drenched in tape-delay echo effects, foreshadows the man-made nightmares of Vietnam and Chernobyl. “Boeing Spacearium” is a fitting tribute to a company that would ascend to the top of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned of in 1961. “Century 21” features a somewhat less disturbing soundtrack that might pass for a mildly demented Henry Mancini tune, but still the effect is hardly to instill confidence in the shining future of consumer capitalism. The entire musical span of Man in Space with Sounds is a grim vision of technological dystopia the likes of which may never before have been expressed in such a popularly accessible format. 

June 15, 2011, 4:03pm

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Konrad Boehmer: Aspekt (excerpt; 1966-68)

From the album Acousmatrix V: Konrad Boehmer

Born in Berlin in 1941, Konrad Boehmer was trained as a composer in Cologne, working at the WDR studio for electronic music from 1961-63 and receiving his PhD from the University of Cologne in 1966. Shortly thereafter Boehmer relocated to Amsterdam, where he has remained since. Aspekt was created in the years 1966-68 at the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, whose director, fellow German expatriate Gottfried Michael Koenig, had recently installed a state-of-the-art system of analog synthesizer components. (Boehmer had studied under Koenig back in Cologne.) Another German composer, Roland Kayn, also worked at the Institute of Sonology around this time, although his music took a much different direction from that of Koenig and Boehmer.

Like the Italian composer Luigi Nono, Boehmer was a committed Marxist who rejected the notion that a politically engaged form of art must be conventional and accessible. Instead, Boehmer pursued the Adornian utopia of a social critique through aesthetic construction. The music, in its violence, chaos, and rupture, mirrors the contradictions of a false reality, and in this act of negation it holds out the promise of a transfigured world of beauty and truth. Aspekt is dedicated to the North Vietnamese martyr Nguyen Van Troi.

In addition to his compositional work and political activism, Boehmer is a tireless advocate of experimental music. He curated the Acousmatrix series in which this album, a collection of his music, appeared as Volume 5. The series has since been re-released as a 9-CD boxed set entitled Acousmatrix: History of Electronic Music, which offers a fascinating, if highly idiosyncratic, phonographic tour of the genre.

June 10, 2011, 12:00am

A young Raymond Kurzweil shares his musical computer on I’ve Got a Secret in 1965. 

April 29, 2011, 9:03pm

April 14, 2011, 3:15pm