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The Hub: “Waxlips I” (1991)

From the album Boundary Layer 

This Thursday at Vox Populi in Philly, computer music pioneers Mark Trayle and John Bischoff will be playing in a concert organized by my comrades at Philadelphia Sound Forum. Trayle and Bischoff are both alums of the network music collective The Hub, which in turn spun off from the seminal “micro-computer network band” the League of Automatic Music Composers.

The name “The Hub” was first used in connection with a performance by Bischoff and Perkis in San Francisco in 1985. The group appeared in its six-person form for the first time in a pair of concerts curated by Nicolas Collins in New York in the fall of that year. Breaking up into two sets of three, The Hub performed simultaneously at two separate Manhattan venues, connected via modem. (Kyle Gann dubbed this phenomenon, perhaps the first of its kind, “musica telephonica.”) Ultimately, however, the group opted for “in the flesh” performances, which allowed them to better respond to the unfolding algorithmic structure of the music.

This sephirot-like diagram shows one of the group’s MIDI configurations

In The Hub’s first incarnation, the members’ computers were wired together via a central memory unit they called “the Blob.” Around 1990, they adopted a MIDI interface, which allowed each player to communicate to any other directly, rather than through a common data pool. Later in the decade The Hub would abandon MIDI-connected homemade synthesizers for computer audio languages such as Max, and in the mid-90s they revisited the possibility of simultaneous music-making over the internet.

Waxlips, conceived by Tim Perkis in 1991, provides a great example of the group’s approach to computer-augmented improvisation:

The rule is simple: each player sends and receives requests to play one note. Upon receiving the request, each should play the note requested, and then transform the note message in some fixed way to a different message, and send it out to someone else. The transformation can follow any rule the player wants, with the one limitation that within anyone section of the piece, the same rule must be followed (so that any particular message in will always cause the same new message out). One lead player sends signals indicating new sections in the piece (where players change their transformation rules) and jump-starts the process by spraying the network with a burst of requests. The network action had an unexpected living and liquid behavior: the number of possible interactions is astronomical in scale, and the evolution of the network is always different, sometimes terminating in complex (chaotic) states including near repetitions, sometimes ending in simple loops, repeated notes, or just dying out altogether.

September 19, 2011, 10:38am

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Roger Winfield: “Windsong 2”

From the album Windsongs: The Sound of Aeolian Harps (1991)

Although the underlying acoustic principle is an ancient one, the first detailed description of a human-built Aeolian harp (also known as the wind harp) comes from the 1650 compendium Musurgia Universalis of the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. The instrument, which appears under the heading “Machinamentum X,” is featured in a series of fantastic devices for making music without human intervention.

Kircher often gets credit for introducing the wind harp into European letters, but the instrument was mentioned briefly in the Magia Naturalis of the Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta, published in 1588. As R. Murray Schafer points out, the instrument turns up in various forms in many different world cultures, including a miniature version built into a kite, well-known in China and Java.

The Aeolian harp gained new life in the late 18th and early 19th century, when it was hailed by Romantic poets as the transcendent spirit of nature made audible. Coleridge, Keats, and Wordsworth, Goethe and Schiller, and later Emerson and Thoreau all devoted lines to the instrument, which provided for sensitive souls of the time a kind of meandering, ambient music avant la lettre.

A sketch of the instrument from Kircher’s book Phonurgia Nova of 1673

Attentive listeners noticed that the sounds elicited by the wind harp were often strangely dissonant and bore no apparent relationship to the fundamental pitches of the instrument’s strings. These unexpected frequencies confounded acousticians, who concocted a number of theories to explain how such sounds arose from the interaction between the wind and the string.

Only in the late 19th century was a satisfactory explanation attained: the wind passing over the string creates tiny eddies or vortices around the string.  At a sufficient velocity these eddies break off and produce a tone, which may elicit a sympathetic tone in the strings if it corresponds to one of the string’s harmonic frequencies. These “friction tones” were a new acoustic discovery and accounted for the unique sound quality of the Aeolian harp.

This modern example of the sound of an Aeolian Harp is from the 1991 album Windsongs by British musician Roger Winfield, who recorded a variety of harps using magnetic pickups (similar to those found on electric guitars) to amplify the otherwise delicate tones of the harp into something rather more powerful. The recordings were edited after the fact to create musical contrasts, but underwent no substantial processing or effects.

(For more information: The Alsatian composer Georges Kastner wrote a massive study of the instrument in 1856 entitled La Harpe d’Éole: Sur les Rapports des Phénomènes Sonores de la Nature avec la Science et l’Art. The book has unfortunately not been translated. An excellent recent history of the Aeolian harp can be found in the book Instruments and the Imagination by Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman.)

September 02, 2011, 7:41pm

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Yasunao Tone: Excerpt from “Solar Eclipse in October”

From the album Musica Iconologos (1993)

Japanese polyartist Yasunao Tone is an alumnus of many major experimental art movements of the 1960s and 70s, including the seminal free improvisation outfit Group Ongaku, the international neo-Dada collective Fluxus, and the Japanese computer art pioneers known as Team Random.

Tone’s most characteristic music involves experimentation with the generative musical potential of digital recording technologies and the process of transduction between different forms of information. In the mid-1980s he began exploring the unexpected sound potential of compact discs, taking advantage of the error correction mechanism triggered by misreadings of the ones and zeros in which sound is digitally encoded. By applying scotch tape with tiny pinholes to the bottom of the CD, Tone scrambled the player’s storage retrieval logic and coaxed a sputtering, crystalline music from the disc’s binary data.

A similar concept underlies Musica Iconologos, a 1993 work commissioned by Thomas Buckner of Lovely Music. Taking as his source material two poems from the Shih Ching, the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry, Tone digitized the images of the poem’s characters and generated histograms from the resulting visual data. These histograms, in turn, were converted into sound via computer software controlled by Tone’s technical assistants at the Electronic Music Studio of McGill University in Montreal. Each of the 187 characters in the poems was turned into a tiny burst of sound merely 20 milliseconds long. These bursts were then elongated and woven together according the verbal logic of the poems to create the music that you hear.

Tone’s experiment resonates with a deep techno-naturalist fascination with the dream of using musical devices to unlock the latent sonic forces inhabiting the world around us. The result is a harsh but beautiful music, an alien musical language opaque in meaning yet governed by some uncanny syntax. Refracted through the transfiguring lens of computer technology, there glimmers the faint but unmistakable trace of movement, intelligence, life.

July 12, 2011, 7:04pm

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William Sethares: “Ten Fingers”

From the album Xentonality (1998)

William Sethares is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  His musical research centers on the possibilities and problems offered by microtonality or xenharmony, that is, partitions of the pitch continuum other than the conventional 12-tone equal temperament that has dominated Western music for over a century.

In particular, Sethares has investigated the relationship between timbre and tuning system.  He argues (and demonstrates with audio examples) that our conventional sense of consonance and dissonance of musical intervals is based on our hearing them played by instruments with harmonic spectra, that is, instruments whose overtones are related to the fundamental as whole number multiples (2f, 3f, 4f, etc.).  12-tone equal temperament (or 12-tet, to use the lingo) is a system of tuning that approximates the intervals inherent in sounds with harmonic spectra, such as those created by most string instruments and open pipes.  But the harmonic spectrum is not as universal as we are typically taught: sound sources such as bells and metal bars, while possessing determinate pitch, have overtones in nonharmonic proportion to the fundamental (for example, 1.6f, 2.9f, etc.).  

Sethares shows that one can construct custom scales based on the timbral properties of any given sound, such that the dissonance (measured in terms of beating between frequencies in close proximity) is minimized or controlled.  One can also reverse the process, starting with a tuning system (for example, one of Sethares’ favorites, 10-tet), and determining the overtone structure needed for instruments to play within this tuning with the minimum of dissonance.  Thus unusual tunings that might sound grating with harmonic timbres are made strangely consonant—but still distinct and different from 12-tet with harmonic timbres.

This example, whose full title is “If God Had Intended Us to Play in Ten Tones Per Octave, Then He Would Have Given Us Ten Fingers,” is composed for an artificial guitar-like timbre specially constructed to play in 10-tone equal temperament.  It is from his 1998 album Xentonality, and also found on the CD included with his book Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale.  His 2002 release, Exomusicology, uses his ideas on the relationship between timbre and tuning to explore “the music and culture of fictitious creatures and nonexistent alien species.”

One of Sethares’ imaginary musical instruments: the “Trident,” a marimba that plays in 7-tone equal temperament 

February 15, 2011, 1:07pm

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Iancu Dumitrescu: Monades (Gamma) for 6 monochords, crystals, and metallic objects

From the album Edition Modern 1002 (1991)

As a young composer in Romania in the 1960s, Iancu Dumitrescu heard the distant siren-call of the European avant-garde: “The music of Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, Messiaen, Berio, circulated clandestinely, being prohibited, from one hand to another, by copies of tapes which had become almost unlistenable. But imagination continues to hear what, in fact, did not exist any more. The spirit of modernism, of new worlds being beyond these deformed sounds, raucous, grating…”

In the 1970s, Dumitrescu studied with the the brilliant and eccentric conductor Sergiu Celibidache, whose metaphysically-tinged musical philosophy, fed by such diverse intellectual sources as phenomenology and Zen Buddhism, had a powerful influence on the young composer.  Dumitrescu would later refer to Celibidache as his “spiritual father.”

Dumitrescu’s mature compositional work has been tightly organized around two institutions: the Hyperion Ensemble, which he founded in 1976 with his wife, the composer Ana-Maria Avram, and the record label Edition Modern, started in 1990, on which many of Dumitrecu’s and Avram’s recordings have been released.

While his music can be broadly grouped with the spectralist movement, Dumitrescu distances his work from that of the French spectralists (Grisey, Murail, Dufourt). He views his music as an attempt, through modern techniques, to reanimate the primal Orphic power of music:

My approach implies many ancestral, primitive sources. All that is archaic, elementary, magic, today finds the value of an acute modernism… What remains [beyond logic] is the field of the mystic. I believe that music has an enormous proportion of this mysterious remainder. It would not have any value if it were different. Its value lies only in the fact of bringing to consciousness something not otherwise able to be thought. It brings nuances to us, modulations of thought which do not have an equivalent.

February 09, 2011, 11:25am

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Robert Rutman: “Dresden”

From the album Zuuhh!!  Muttie Mum!! (1998)

A self-described “sculptor, instrument builder, sound inventor, painter, musician, and graphic artist,” Robert Rutman was born in Berlin in 1931.  In 1938, he fled Nazi Germany with his mother, who was Jewish.  Rutman arrived in the United States in 1950 after spending the intervening years in England.  From 1955 to 1962, he studied art in New York and Mexico City.  He started developing the first prototypes of his original musical instruments around 1966, and in 1975 he founded the U.S. Steel Cello Ensemble, based on the technique of using a bow to play large sheets of hanging metal.  Rutman’s group toured extensively in the United States and Europe during the 1970s.

In 1990 Rutman moved back to Berlin, where he has lived ever since.  Like many of the pioneering musicians of the 60s and 70s, Rutman had to wait several decades for his work to become known and available.  In 1989, Pogus Records released an album of his music called 1939, and two other albums came out in the following decade: Music to Sleep by (Tresor, 1997) and the enigmatically titled Zuuhh!! Muttie Mum!! (Die Stadt, 1998).  (1939 has since been re-released on CD and is still available from Pogus.)  As an token of his newfound cachet, Rutman joined the seminal German experimental band Einstürzende Neubauten for their U.S. tour in 1998.

The sound of Rutman’s steel cello is surprisingly versatile, capable of everything from deep, otherworldly drones reminiscent of an aeolian harp to the jagged, resonant clangor of a postindustrial primal scream.  Both extremes are on display in this track, “Dresden,” whose title seemingly invokes the horrors of civilian bombing in World War II.

November 21, 2010, 4:30pm

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Miriodor: “Funambule” (“Tightrope Walker”)

From the album Jongleries Élastiques (1996)

Formed in Quebec City in 1980, Miriodor is a Canadian band that has been based for most of its existence in Montreal.  The group has undergone numerous personnel changes since its first album, Rencontres, released in 1986.  Pascal Globensky (keyboards, acoustic guitar) and Rémi Leclerc (drums) are the only two members to have participated in every Miriodor release.  In 2009, they finished their seventh album, entitled Avanti!.

Miriodor fuses jazz virtuosity and prog-rock ambitiousness with a certain playful and fantastic quality which I hope I will be forgiven for hearing as quintessentially French.  Their music has a polished, MIDI-fied sheen that may be a turnoff for those who didn’t grow up listening to video game music.

This should appeal to fans of previous Acousmata features Hellebore, Magma, and Univers Zero (for whom Miriodor recently opened at the Sonic Circuits festival in Washington DC).

November 04, 2010, 2:48pm

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Eliane Radigue: “Koumé” (excerpt)

From the album Trilogie de la Mort (1988-1993)

A music of catastrophic slowness; a music that trembles on the precipice of absolute immobility; a music that confronts us with the infinitesimal margin of energy that separates motion from stasis, being from nothingness:  for the last 40 years, Eliane Radigue has cultivated a unique body of works characterized above all by the extreme dilation of musical time and the radical negation of rhetoric and gesture.  It is a music “infinitely discreet,” in the words of Michel Chion, “next to which all other musics seem to be tugging at one’s sleeve for attention.”

And yet it is the miracle of Radigue’s art that, once your ears have adapted to its tempo, its once-placid surface begins to throb with energy.  For sound, by its nature, is always moving: static music is a contradiction in terms.  But it is the phenomenon of imperceptible change which is the paradoxical animating spirit behind this music.  Again and again, we experience the purely retrospective recognition of formal movement: we perceive not that something is changing, but only that it has changed. This trompe d’oreille or auditory illusion, as simple in concept as it is endlessly rich in experience, constitutes the unifying thread between all the diverse manifestations of Radigue’s music. 

Radigue was born in Paris in 1932.  Her musical training began with conservatory studies in piano and harp.  Through a chance hearing of a radio broadcast she encountered the work of Pierre Schaeffer, and she soon became involved with the young art of electronic music: she worked with Schaeffer at the Groupe de recherche musicales (GRM) in the late 1950s and, a decade later, at the private studio Apsome with Pierre Henry.  From Schaeffer and Henry, Radigue absorbed the teachings ofmusique concrete, which consisted of not only the classical studio techniques of recording, manipulation, and tape montage, but also, and perhaps more fundamentally for Radigue’s later development, a rigorous and empirical discipline of listening grounded in a systematic investigation of the acoustic properties of objects.

But Radigue’s ears soon lead her astray from the already-canonized conventions ofmusique concrete.  While working with Henry she discovered the unexpected allure of electronic feedback, tape hiss, and other peripheral byproducts of the electronic music studio.  Radigue was fascinated by this discovery of what she called “the garbage of sounds,” and much of her music from this time was made with long, out-of-phase loops of recorded feedback, a material with which Radigue attained immersive sonic effects far removed from the virtuosic jump-cuts of Schaeffer and Henry. In 1970, Radigue went to the United States, in her words, “because there were no synthesizers in France.”   At New York University in 1970-71, she encountered the Buchla 100 series synthesizer, which had been installed in the NYU electronic music studio by Morton Subotnick just a few years earlier. She used the Buchla in her first work for synthesizer, Chry-ptos, composed in 1971.  Soon thereafter she acquired an Arp 2500, a massive unit that would serve as her primary creative technology for the next 30 years.  Radigue has described this instrument as the “Stradivarius” of modular analog synthesizers, a device whose capacity for nuance allowed her to work, in her words, “within the flesh of sound.”

Following her stint at NYU, Radigue held residencies at the University of Iowa and the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s.  In 1974 she arrived at Mills College in Oakland, then the epicenter of the West Coast experimental music scene.  At Mills she presented her breakthrough composition Adnos, which established the basic elements of Radigue’s mature aesthetic: pure electronic tones, gently throbbing detunings, and a glacial slowness of unfolding that could bring the listener into a meditative state of heightened perception.  In a possibly apocryphal encounter which has become ensconced in the Radigue mythology, she was confronted after the concert by a group of French music students who asked, “You do realize that it’s not you creating your music?”  Radigue, who had not consciously sought to express anything particularly spiritual through her work, was deeply moved by the notion that she was merely the human conduit of a kind of sonic meditation, a musical bridge to higher states of consciousness.  The students referred her to a center for Tibetan Buddhism in Paris, and, upon returning to France a year later, Radigue visited the center and converted soon thereafter.

After becoming a Buddhist, Radigue entered a three-year period of spiritual retreat during which her beloved ARP fell silent, and she even considered abandoning music altogether.  But, at the behest of her spiritual master, Radigue returned to composition in the late 1970s.  Her music did not change substantially after her conversion, since, in her own words, it was music that led her to Buddhism, and not the other way around.  However, in the 1980s, supported by commissions from the French government, Radigue composed two works that were inspired directly by her Buddhist faith: Songs of Milarepa and Jetsun Mila. These pieces were the product of an intensive engagement with the artistic means of electronic music, on the one hand, and the spiritual and metaphysical concerns of Buddhism on the other, an engagement which culminated in the composition of what is widely regarded as Radigue’s magnum opus, the Trilogie de la Mort, composed from 1988 to 1993 and inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Radigue has stated that L’Île Re-sonante, completed in 2000, is likely her final piece of electronic music.  In the past decade, she has begun to compose in collaboration with select performers, writing for traditional instruments for the first time since her student days.  Her first such work, finished in 2003, was Elemental II, a composition for electric double-bass processed by MAX/MSP, which was created especially for the bassist and electronic musician Kaspar Toeplitz. 

In 2005, at the request of the American cellist Charles Curtis, Radigue began composing the first part of a new composition entitled Naldjorlak.  The music was collaboratively conceived as a series of gestures to be played by Curtis on a specially detuned cello; in Radigue’s words, it is “not a piece for an instrument, but a piece for an instrumentalist.”  Naldjorlak was later expanded to a second movement, composed again in intimate collaboration with the basset horn players Bruno Martinez and Carol Robinson, and a third movement for all three instruments together.  The complete composition, which typically takes 2½ hours to perform, has no score, but rather exists in what Radigue calls an “oral tradition” in which the boundaries between composer and performer are almost entirely effaced.  The complete Naldjorlak cycle was premiered in Paris in 2009.

Concerning her compositions for traditional instruments, Radigue has written: “What a strange experience after so much wandering, to return to what was already there, the perfection of acoustic instruments, the rich and subtle interplay of their harmonics, sub-harmonics, partials, just intonation left to itself, elusive like the colors of a rainbow.”

[This essay was included in the program notes for the American premiere of Eliane Radigue’s composition Naldjorlak in Philadelphia on September 24, 2010.]

September 24, 2010, 5:00pm

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Chris Watson: “Winter Flags” (Massed knot roost on shingle bank, Snettisham, Norfolk)

From the album Outside the Circle of Fire (1998)

Sheffield-born Chris Watson was a founding member of the seminal experimental outfits Cabaret Voltaire and the Hafler Trio.  He gave up music (in this limited sense) around 1990 to begin working in sound recording for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.  Since 1996, he has released four full-length albums of his field recordings made in locations all over the world.  

These recordings can be heard as an auditory counterpart to the footage featured in outstanding nature documentaries such as Planet Earth or The Private Lives of Plants, which has profoundly sensitized us to the fascinating lives of plants and animals. Whether listened to as a non-representative “sound object” in the sense of Pierre Schaeffer or used to imaginatively evoke distant environs, these remarkable recordings enable us to experience otherwise inaccessible dimensions of the sounding universe.

August 23, 2010, 5:19pm

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Jim Horton: “Rebirth” (1990)

From the album Numbers Racket

Beginning in the late 1960s, Jim Horton (1944-1998) was an active member of the San Francisco Bay Area experimental music scene. In the early 70s he studied at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College under the leadership of Robert Ashley. With Tim Perkis and John Bischoff, Horton founded the “world’s first computer network band,” the League of Automatic Music Composers, in 1978. The League pioneered the collaborative use of microcomputers in live improvisation. Many of their “compositions” were driven by game-like interactions between the players.  Around this time, Horton also began using computers to implement alternate systems of tuning, and in particular various forms of just intonation.

These influences are at work in this piece composed by Jim Horton in 1990 and released on a 1992 cassette by the Just Intonation Network entitled Numbers Racket. The sounds in this piece are vintage 80s digitalia. Although I’m generally fond of these bright, metallic sounds, the timbre of the piece wears a bit thin by the end of it.  The real interest here is on the level of tuning and form.  

The composer provided the following cryptic notes to “Rebirth”:

The computer, empty of suffering, simulates high-speed attainment of nirvana by playing the medieval Tibetan Buddhist game “Determination of the Ascension of Stages,” invented by Sakya pandita Kunga Gyaltsen (“Whose Banner is Total Joy”). The board shows 104 places of a fantastic cosmic geography.

The game mentioned by Horton is a variation on an ancient Indian board game in which “the player progresses according to the throw of dice from hell states and other inauspicious conditions by way of the Tantric path to Buddhahood and nirvana.” (Amazingly, it belongs to the same lineage as the modern children’s game Snakes and Ladders.) This strange “program” behind the piece resonates with the cyclical quality of the music, which climbs ever upward only to tumble back down again and start anew. Each iteration is slightly different, and the various levels seem always to be slightly out of phase, thus creating the overall sense of motion and vitality suggested by the title.

June 10, 2010, 2:32pm