[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

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

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

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 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

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

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

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

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

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

John Cage and Lejaren Hiller: HPSCHD (1967-69)

From the album HPSCHD

On May 16, 1969, the 16,000-seat Assembly Hall of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was the site of one of the most ambitious multimedia spectacles of the 20th century: HPSCHD (from the computer abbreviation for harpsichord), a collaborative work by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller.

The piece comprised seven specially-composed solos for amplified harpsichord, based on aleatorically generated results of the Musikalisches Würfelspiel (Musical Dice Game) attributed to Mozart, as well as randomly selected excerpts from Mozart’s piano sonatas and samples from the music of Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Busoni, Schoenberg, and others.  The harpsichord parts, to be played simultaneously or in succession in a manner determined by the performers, were accompanied by the computer-generated sounds recorded on tape and projected from a circle of 52 loudspeakers surrounding the audience.  Each tape part used a different division of the octave, with scales ranging from five to 56 steps.

For the premiere, multimedia artist Ronald Nameth prepared more than 6,400 slides and 40 films to be projected on the 11 massive screens of the hall.  The footage included Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon and the computer films of John and James Whitney.

The first performance of HPSCHD lasted about five hours and was attended by some 8,000 people.

This excerpt of the work is taken from the 2003 recording realized by Joel Chadabe, with Robert Conant playing the harpsichord solos.

January 07, 2010, 5:24pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Erkki Kurenniemi: “Improvisaatio”

From the album Recordings 1963-1974 (2002)

For various cultural and economic reasons, the standard version of the history of electronic music tends to be dominated by western Europe and the United States. The hot spots are always the same: the Italian Futurists, Varese, (thirty year lacuna), Schaeffer in Paris and Stockhausen in Cologne, (maybe) Berio in Milan, Cage in New York, then Moog and Milton Babbitt, the birth of the synthesizer and computer music, MIDI, etc., and onward into the no longer narratable mess of the postmodern present.

One of the more remarkable characters inhabiting the margins of this story is the Finnish composer/inventor/futurist Erkki Kurenniemi, whose pioneering work in the 1960s made crucial contributions to music, technology, and the then-fledgling discipline of electronic art.  Kurenniemi has finally gotten some attention in recent years, including the 2002 album Recordings 1963-1973, from which the above track is taken, and the 2003 release of the documentary The Future is Not What It Used to Be, which charts Kurenniemi’s brilliant career and his bizarre ongoing existence.

More on Kurenniemi can be found at the Philadelphia Sound Forum Blog.

November 02, 2009, 6:56pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Györgi Ligeti: Continuum (1968)

From the album Continuum / Zehn Stücke für Bläserquintett / Artikulation / Glissandi / Etüden für Orgel / Volumina

The Hungarian composer Györgi Ligeti (1923-2006), who spent most of his career in Germany and Austria, is widely regarded as one of the most imaginative musical minds of the second half of the 20th century.  He wrote pioneering works in many different media, including electronics, traditional “concert” instruments, and mechanical music.

Ligeti is probably best known for his compositional experiments undertaken in the 1960s, starting with the orchestral work Atmosphères (1961).  In this piece, each of the 55 string instruments plays its own melodic line, creating a dense web of sound in which the identity of the individual parts is lost.  Instead of distinct melodies one hears slowly shifting planes of sound, a glacial condensation and rarefaction of timbral space.  It is an utterly new kind of musical organization, which was also discovered independently around the same time by composers such as Iannis Xenakis, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Friedrich Cerha.

Interestingly, Ligeti and other composers have stated that their experiments with orchestral sound production in the 1960s were inspired in part by the new spectrum of electronic sound that was “in the air” at the time. This is ironic in that much of the history of electronic music has been occupied with efforts to artificially reproduce the sound of traditional instruments.  Here, the tables were turned.

Ligeti described Continuum as an attempt to create a kind of “continuous sound” as he had in Atmosphères, but now using the limited sonic resources of the harpsichord.  Here Ligeti was to explore the threshold between an extremely fast succession of sound events and the perception of a continuous sound— hence the title of the piece.  The principle is the same one that allows us to perceive a mechanically generated succession of 24 images per second as the “moving pictures” of cinema. Continuum is at once a performative tour de force, a highly compressed vehicle of musical expression, and an exploration of the limits of hearing.

September 19, 2009, 12:54pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Raymond Scott: “Cindy Electronium” (1960-63)

From the album Manhattan Research, Inc. (2000)

A sprightly little ditty by American inventor, bandleader, and electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott.  The title of the piece refers to a device created in 1960 by Scott and called the “Electronium,” which was one of the first musical sequencers.

“”In the music of the future, the composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely think his idealised conception of his music. His brain waves will be picked up by mechanical equipment and channelled directly into the minds of his hearers, thus allowing no room for distortion of the original idea. Instead of recordings of actual musical sound, recordings will carry the brain waves of the composer directly to the mind of the listener.” (Raymond Scott, 1949)

August 28, 2009, 3:28pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Conlon Nancarrow: “Study No. 36” (c. 1970)

From the album Studies for Player Piano

Born in 1912 in Texarkana, Arkansas, Conlon Nancarrow was an American composer in the grand experimentalist tradition.

After fighting in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, Nancarrow returned to the U.S. but was denied a passport, likely due to his membership in the Communist Party.  He moved to Mexico City, taking with him a copy of Henry Cowell’s book New Musical Resources, in which the author speculated on the possibility of new forms of musical writing that would allow the notation of rhythmic patterns in any imaginable temporal ratio.  (I have written previously on Cowell’s experiments with the Rhythmicon.)

Cowell mused that many such complicated rhythms could perhaps be performed only by a player piano.  Nancarrow took this idea and ran with it: from 1940 until the 80s, he wrote exclusively for this mechanical instrument, meticulously punching tiny holes into piano rolls in order to create music of stunning complexity, often integrating funky dance rhythms and canonic structures.

In its virtuosic precision and expressive frenzy, Nancarrow’s music anticipates trends that would emerge much later with the appearance of MIDI and digital sequencing technology.

August 19, 2009, 9:19am

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

The Mike Sammes Singers: “Ariel”

From the album Music for Biscuits (2006)

The 1960s saw an incredible vogue for a capella-style virtuoso vocal groups such as the Swingle Singers. These groups’ lush vocal harmonies are all over the music of the time, from solo albums, to backing vocals, to advertising jingles.  Here’s a fantastic little ditty by the Mike Sammes Singers, rescued from oblivion by Trunk Records.  Wouldn’t it be nice to hear music like this in a commercial today?

July 22, 2009, 11:12am