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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Bernd Alois Zimmermann: “Preludio”

From the opera Die Soldaten (The Soldiers, 1965)

The German Bernd Alois Zimmermann is one of the most underappreciated composers among the so-called “post-war avant-garde” in Europe.  In the 1950s and 60s he developed a highly idiosyncratic compositional style that synthesized rigorous serial technique with quotations from jazz, classical, and popular music.

Zimmermann began work on his magnum opus, the opera Die Soldaten, in 1957; after being labelled “unperformable” due to its incredible musical and dramaturgical complexity, it was finally premiered in 1965 after undergoing numerous revisions.  Inspired by St. Augustine’s philosophy of time, Zimmermann conceived of a scenario in which action takes place simultaneously on three different stages.  The score also calls for multiple loudspeakers and film projectors, making productions of the work exceedingly rare.

Essentially an overture to the opera, the “Preludio,” with its cacophonous brass swells and insistant, minatory (and unnervingly irregular) tympani pulse, powerfully condenses the nightmarish violence of the plot.

June 12, 2009, 4:30pm

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Pauline Oliveros: “Alien Bog” (excerpt, 1967)

From the album Music from Mills

Oliveros’ electronic music from the 60s is often overshadowed by her later work, which is of a more acoustically restrained and meditative nature.  But her early compositions at the San Francisco Tape Music Center are significant in signaling a turn from the carefully spliced productions that characterized electronic music up to that point toward the real-time manipulations of what came to known as “live electronics.”

“Alien Bog” was composed using the Buchla Box, a modular analog synthesizer that was developed by Don Buchla in California in the mid-1960s, at the same time that Robert Moog built his now-famous instrument in New York.  Unlike Moog’s devices, the Buchla had a sequencer, and its sounds were triggered by touch-sensitive pads instead of a conventional keyboard.

The full version of “Alien Bog,” in all its 33-minute glory, is available on disc as well.  It is surely one of the most ambitious and immersive electronic works of its time.

May 28, 2009, 1:45pm

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Joji Yuasa: Projection Esemplastic for white noise (1964)

From the album OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music

One of the most fascinating aspects of electronic music in its early phases was the attempt to create sonic forms on the basis of simple sound phenomena.  In the early 1950s, the composers working at the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne identified three fundamental sound materials on which they were to base their work:

1) The sine wave, a pure periodic tone not found in nature, yet which formed the theoretical basis of complex waves in accordance with the Fourier theorem;

2) The impulse, a burst of sound so short that the human ear cannot resolve any pitch or timbral quality beyond a “click”;

3) White noise, a sound having equal energy in the entire frequency spectrum across a given bandwidth.  Colored noise refers to similar sounds in which certain frequency ranges are attenuated.

Though these three sound phenomena were thought to be equally elemental, most of the music to come out of the Cologne studio was based on sine waves.  Because these could be precisely tuned and superimposed, they provided the ideal substance for the rigorously mathematical constructions of the Cologne school.  The impulse and white noise proved less amenable to a model of composition that, for all its radicality, was still attached to the idea of stable, periodic tones as the building blocks of music.

Along with Henri Pousseur’s Scambi (1957) and Halim El-Dabh’s Meditation in White Sound (1959), Joji Yuasa’s Projection Esemplastic is one of the first serious compositions to use white noise as its sole sound material.  By creatively filtering particular frequency ranges, the otherwise static white noise is “colored” and given life and movement.  The high-pitched whistling sounds at the beginning of the piece result from a very narrow “bandpass” filter, which blocks frequencies on either side of a central point, allowing it to be heard as a single pitch.  These note-like sounds, often sliding up and down in broad glissandi, are juxtaposed with less filtered, raw bursts of noise, creating a subtle and haunting effect.

April 16, 2009, 11:38am

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Harry Partch: “A Son in Search of His Father’s Face”

From the album Delusion of the Fury: A Ritual of Dream and Delusion (1966)

American composer and inventor Harry Partch (1901-1974) is among the most fascinating musical experimenters of the 20th century.  Partch devised a unique scale based on the division of the octave into 43 steps, instead of the customary 12.  He also created an array of new instruments on which to play his music, favoring shimmering percussion and string timbres that sometimes evoke the sound-world of the Indonesian gamelan orchestra.

Partch’s music exemplifies the dilemma of radical innovation in the arts: the more particular and distinct your work, the less accesible it becomes— not only aesthetically, but also, in this case, in a technological sense.  Because his music must be performed on his extremely rare instruments, performances and recordings of Partch’s music are quite infrequent.  Perhaps Partch discovered one of the few ways of maintaining an auratic scarcity in the age of musical omnipresence.

This piece comes from Partch’s last major work, the staggering Delusion of the Fury, composed in 1966.

March 04, 2009, 3:15pm

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Ennio Morricone: “L’Uomo dell Armonica” (“The Man with the Harmonica”)

From the album Once Upon a Time in the West (1969), the soundtrack to the 1968 film directed by Sergio Leone (original Italian title: C’era una volta il West)

Perhaps the most awesomely dramatic three-and-a-half minutes of music ever recorded.

Starting with the plaintive, reverberant harmonica riff that is one of the soundtrack’s many recurring musical symbols, the music builds to an imposing wall of sound comprising harpsichord, orchestral accompaniment, and an epic melody played on a distorted electric guitar.  Strings, chorus, and a military drumbeat bring the music to a glorious climax, then fade away, leaving the harmonica alone again.

Needless to say, the music has added power when heard in the context of the film.  It accompanies the final showdown between “Harmonica” (Charles Bronson) and Frank (Peter Fonda).  The slow unfurling of the music is carefully synched to the cinematic pacing, down to the last detail: the drums and chorus enter at the instant Frank’s jacket hits the ground.

February 18, 2009, 12:51pm