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Electronic Music in the Junior High School: Original Compositions by Students of the Julia R. Masterman School (1968)

From the album Creelpolation 1

In November 1967, Virginia Hagemann, a teacher at the Julia R. Masterman School in Philadelphia, received a $316 grant from the superintendent to launch a laboratory for electronic music for students in grades 6 through 9. Hagemann documented this remarkable undertaking in two articles published in the Music Educators Journal.

In the first meeting, Hagemann’s electronic music class studied the different types of scales (pentatonic, diatonic, and twelve-tone) and the distinction between semitones and quarter-tones; listened to a recording of microtonal chant sung by Tibetan monks; was introduced to the pure sine wave; and considered aesthetic concepts such as musique concrete, aleatoric techniques, silence, and graph notation. The session closed with a group listening to two electronic compositions: Lemon Drops by Kenneth Gaburo and Futility by Herbert Brün. Hagemann describes the children’s reaction:

Lemon Drops, because of its delicacy, was deliberately chosen to ease the listener gently into this new world of sound. Futility, on the other hand, was selected to test the reaction of the group to the harsher elements of electronic music. One might conjecture that the children would immediately reject the second composition as a meaningless conglomeration of noises, utterly foreign to their accepted ideas of music. The reaction to Lemon Drops was favorable, but when Futility was played, the response was somewhat akin to a standing ovation. At the unanimous request of the audience, it was repeated.

With very simple means—little more than a frequency generator and a tape recorder—the students then set out to make their own music. The studio was used as a means of democratizing artistic activity, based on the principle that all people have inherent creativity that can be tapped under the right conditions. At the same time, students were encouraged to perfect their artistic technique and apply rigorous intellectual discipline in their work. (A handful of the students used John Cage’s Silence as a kind of class text.) As demonstrated in the short pieces in this recording, the children had no trouble getting a grasp on the basic techniques of electronic composition, and were quite comfortable with a musical idiom that most adults of the time still refused to accept. The project stands as an inspiring model for experimental, project-based music education.

March 18, 2011, 5:16pm

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Milton Babbitt: Ensembles for Synthesizer (1962-1964)

From the album New Electronic Music from the Leaders of the Avant-Garde

The American composer Milton Babbitt died on January 29, 2011. Apart from his highly challenging music, Babbitt was most notorious for his 1958 essay “Who Cares If You Listen?” (originally entitled “The Composer as Specialist”).  In spite of the controversy it engendered, this piece was a thoughtful and by no means polemical investigation of the socio-aesthetic status of the avant-garde composer.  Babbitt ultimately argued that the composer of advanced music should accept and even embrace the relative inaccessibility of her work, and that this music should be seen as an analog to other domains of highly specialized cultural practice, whose value isn’t conjoined to their ease of understanding. Babbitt’s article made him into a bête noire of contemporary music, and the reaction to his arguments gave rise over the years to some highly dubious manifestations of aesthetic populism, which sought to ground the cultural value of music in its so-called “social significance.”  But the increasing specialization of musical subcultures in both popular and art music over the course of the late 20th-century, with its concomitant potential for both esoteric insularity and hybridized border-crossings, has in my opinion vindicated many of Babbitt’s claims.

What I find questionable in Babbitt’s essay is the framing of musical listening as a kind of reconstruction of the formal details of the work, as opposed to a unique and original act of perception that is asymmetrically related to the compositional process. In Babbitt’s words, the “inability to perceive and remember precisely the values of any [musical parameter] results in a dislocation of the event in the work’s musical space, an alternation of its relation to a other events in the work, and thus a falsification of the composition’s total structure.”  This idea did considerable damage in portraying the challenge posed to the listener of new music as one of intellectual training instead of imaginative openness, and thus sanctioned many ill-founded criticisms of modern music in the late 20th century.

Beginning in 1961, Babbitt composed a number of works for the RCA Mark II Synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.  Like the German founders of elektronische Musik, Babbitt saw the medium of electronic music as an ideal format for the realization of rigorously serial musical organization.  He was accordingly hostile to the primarily timbral interest that many composers perceived in electronic sound-production.  (Babbitt famously declared that “nothing gets old as quickly as new sounds.”)  But in spite of this attitude, Babbitt’s electronic works are to my ears among his most aesthetically appealing, and this in large part due to the shimmering, prismatic colors of the music, so far removed from the monochromatic dullness of most academic electronic music of the period.

February 01, 2011, 9:56am

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Group Ongaku: Automatism (1960; excerpt)

From the album Music of Group Ongaku

The decade of the 1960s witnessed the sudden proliferation of groups specializing in improvised experimental music performance.  Collectives such as AMM, Musica Elletronica Viva, and Gruppo di Improvvisazioni Nuova Consonanza (to name just a few of the better known) all charted bold paths toward the fusion of various convergent musical Zeitgeists of the era: post-Cageian notions of aleatorics and indeterminacy, extended instrumental techniques deriving from avant-garde European concert music, live electronics, Afro-American-inspired free jazz, and cybernetic theories of feedback and self-regulating systems of action.

Perhaps the earliest such collective was the little known Group Ongaku (“Music Group”), started in 1958 by Shukou Mizuno and Takehisa Kosugi, two undergraduates at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. They were soon joined by many other members, but the group, like many others of its kind, was riven by disagreements over aesthetic principles, and it disbanded in 1962. Several Group Ongaku alumni would later join the loose collective of experimental performance artists known as Fluxus.  One member, Yasunao Tone, would attain notoriety as the founder of glitch music thanks to his experiments, beginning in 1985, with physically altering the digital information of CDs  (Tone’s work can be heard on his 1997 album Solo for Wounded CD.)

Recorded at Mizuno’s home in 1960, “Automatism” makes use of both conventional musical instruments (piano, organ, cello, and alto saxophone) and everyday objects (vacuum cleaner, radio, dolls, and dishes).  The music was created spontaneously by performers moving about between the various rooms of the house.  In addition, one of the members manipulated the reel of the tape recorder by hand, adjusting the intake speed and thus the overall pitch and timbre of the recording. 

The three tracks on this album can be downloaded from UbuWeb.

January 25, 2011, 10:28am

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Tod Dockstader: “Part Three from Apocalypse” (1961)

From the album Apocalypse

Tod Dockstader is the first American master of electronic music.  Born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1932, Dockstader began making music around 1960, adopting Edgard Varese’s concept of “organized sound” for his work, which made equal use of “electronic” and “concrete” sounds. He writes, “in listening to this music, it is usually impossible, and most pointless, to sort out the sources as electronic or concrete. It is their use, their arrangement, upon which the success of these pieces as music depends.”

Dockstader’s working method likewise involved both chance and conscious design. In creating the first six of his Eight Electronic Pieces (1961), his first commercial release, Dockstader let two or three tapes of various material run at the same time, recording the unplanned concatenations of sound and later whittling the results down to short, sculpted compositions.

Apocalypse, released in 1961, gives voice to the immanent anxiety of a world on the brink of nuclear war: Dockstader described the work as a “concrete Dies irae.” The sonic material of Part Three is—believe it or not—entirely concrete, its recurring vocal lament created by the slowed-down recording of a child’s toy.  Also used are the sounds of a piano, an oil well, chimes, and a human voice.

After the closing of Gotham Recording Studios in New York, where Dockstader had realized his music from 1960 to 1965, he was rejected by a number of university-affiliated studios on account of his lack of academic credentials: a melancholy index of the ascendant academic-institutional structure dominating the production of electronic music in the 1960s.  Against this tendency toward privatization, Dockstader upheld the belief in the egalitarian potential of electronic music: 

It also seemed to me, this new art of sound, a very democratic art. I’d studied painting for five years and gave it up, primarily because I came to dislike the exclusivity of it; a painting became the property of one person, one institution. I liked the idea that Schaeffer’s first work was created in a (public) radio studio; his first premieres were broadcasts, not the “narrowcasts” of concert hall performances. And, when you bought a recording of it, you owned the work just as much as anyone else, because the work was a recording.

Dockstader’s music was revived in the early 1990s through a series of re-releases on the Starkland label.  Since 2003 he has released a number of new works, most notably the Aerial series, based on sound material gathered from recordings of short-wave radio broadcasts.

November 07, 2010, 9:10am

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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 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.  Outside of synthetically generated sound, this kind of timbre occurs in the spectra of 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 smilingly 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