[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

François Bayle: “Grande Polyphonie 2” (1974)

From the album Vibrations Composées / Grande Polyphonie

Along with Bernard Parmegiani, Luc Ferrari, and others, François Bayle was one of the foremost composers of the Groupe de Recherche Musicales (Musical Research Group) in the years following the departure of founder Pierre Schaeffer.  Bayle was director of the of the GRM from 1966 to 1997, during which time he created a large body of works under the rubric of musique acousmatique or “acousmatic music.” Among his many contributions to the art form is the Acousmonium, an orchestra of loudspeakers designed to give the composer control of the spatial distribution of sound in playback (known as diffusion).  Bayle is still composing as of this writing.

Bayle’s music is typically more harmonically conscious than most electronic art music.  While many of his colleagues throw out harmonic considerations in order to develop an “art of noises” entirely freed from the pitch dimension, Bayle uses harmonic tension in a manner wholly distinct from traditional notions of tonal centers.  (In this respect he could be compared to Gyorgi Ligeti, who frequently pursued similar ends in the domain of instrumental and vocal music.)  Consonance and dissonance fluctuate in cloud-like agglomerations, coexisting in a true dynamic equilibrium, unlike the fixed match of preordained harmony that is Western tonality.

Characterized by a strangely compelling fusion of lush, almost psychedelic timbral excess with an acute sense of form and proportion exemplifying the proverbially French aesthetic of clarté, Bayle creates a sound-world teeming with birdsong-like electronic twitters, bells, gongs, and all manner of resonant bodies joined together in a joyous, childlike clangor. 

August 06, 2010, 10:00am

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Roland Kayn: “Isotrope,” Part II

From the album Infra (1978-79)

Roland Kayn is surely one of the most fascinating and obscure composers in the history of electronic music.  Kayn was a journeyman in the avant-garde European music scene in the 1950s and 60s: he made appearances at several of the newly-founded electronic music studios, undertook advanced composition studies with Boris Blacher in Berlin, and had works premiered at the famous summer courses in Darmstadt.  

In 1964 Kayn joined the Gruppo d’Improvvisatione Nuova Consonanza, a collective of composer-performers founded by Franco Evangelisti in Rome.  He was a member of the group until 1968, when he left in order to pursue his vision of “cybernetic music,” which had haunted him since his first contact with electronic sound production at the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne in 1953.  In 1970, Kayn was invited to work at the Instituut voor Sonologie (Institute of Sonology) at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.  The composer Gottfried Michael Koenig, director of the studio since 1964, had recently overseen the installation of a state-of-the-art analogue system of independent modular units, such as oscillators, filters, envelope generators, and logic circuits. At the center of this configuration was a “variable function generator,” essentially a primitive sequencer that could be programmed to store a series of voltages which were then used to control the various components of the studio.  With this system, Kayn was able for the first time to realize his ideas of cybernetic music, which involved elaborate configurations of connections and feedback loops that create complex and unpredictable sonic interactions.  Kayn “composes” the initial setup of the studio components, but once the sound is set in motion, it is allowed to take its own course.  In this way, Kayn believes thatthe electronic system develops a sort of capacity to think for itself, a capacity which in a sense can be described as artificial intelligence…. Existential Being, as it were, takes the place of a logically functioning consciousness.”

For more Roland Kayn, check out my earlier post and his official website.  MP3 rips of several out-of-print LPs of Kayn’s music from the 1970s have been made available on the blog No Longer Forgotten Music:

Elektroakustische Projekte

Infra 

Makro 

Simultan

Here are some lovely images from the liner notes to Kayn’s albums (with the exception of the picture of Kayn himself, which is from the 1967 documentary film Nuova Consonanza: Komponisten improvisieren im Kollektiv):

Excerpt from the score for Allotropie (1962-64)

Excerpt from the score for Galaxis (1962)

Excerpt from the score for Cybernetics

A glimpse into Kayn’s studio

Roland Kayn in 1967

July 12, 2010, 3:41pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Bernard Szajner: “Welcome (to Deathrow)”

From the album Some Deaths Take Forever (1980)

Some music works on you gradually, slowly seeping through your pores and into your brain like a sonic time-release capsule.  Other music affects you directly, a sensory blast of absolute immediacy.  ”Welcome (to Deathrow)” is such a piece of music.  The first 40 seconds of this song are a call to arms, a manifesto for the dawning age of fully synthetic music. 

Born in France of Polish-Jewish parents in 1944, Bernard Szajner (pronounced Shy-nair) worked for many years as a lighting designer for performing musicians before he began to make music himself.  Around 1980, Szajner invented an instrument called the “laser harp,” (also known as the “Syeringe”) in which notes or other sound events are triggered when the player’s hands breaks the beams of light emitted in a fan-like spectrum from a projector. The laser harp was supposedly inspired by an instrument described in Samuel Delany’s 1968 science-fiction novel Nova.  It was popularized by Jean-Michel Jarre during his concert tour of China in 1981.

Szajner’s breakthrough 1980 album Some Deaths Last Forever emerged from the soundtrack he composed for a 30-second anti-death penalty commercial made by Amnesty International.  Some Deaths is a concept album about the experience of two inmates awaiting execution on death row; as Szajner explained the motivation for the album, “it was not made to make people feel at ease. If people feel uneasy that’s perfectly right because one of the aims was to make people think, ‘something’s not right about inflicting death.’”  Szajner put out several other albums before withdrawing from music in the late 80s.  He has recently re-emerged with promises of new material, and many of his old albums have been newly released.

Szajner’s music came out in the heyday of electronic pop, in a scene dominated by acts from the well-established Kraftwerk to newer bands such as The Human League.  Szajner’s music moves freely between these influences the darker and more experimental touches of British industrial outfits such as Cabaret Voltaire.  In fact, he explicitly aligned himself against the “pleasant” and polished sounds of German electronica:

“The Germans were making only pleasant, obvious sounds which would please the ear immediately, that were beautiful and all that. I thought, well, this is so limited, pleasantness is only one aspect of perception. Unpleasant things exist also— you can express them and you can create emotion with them. You can enjoy something which is even ugly if you’re interested in that sort of ugliness.”

May 20, 2010, 12:32pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

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

Cosmogony in sound: A review of Iannis Xenakis’ The Legend of Er (1977-78)

As released on DVD by Mode Records (2005)

The Pompidou Center in Paris: a monument to modernism erected at the historical moment of that movement’s decline.  It was here, at the inauguration of the Pompidou in 1978, that the composer and architect Iannis Xenakis presented his “gesture of light and sound” known as Le Diatope. 

Made of red vinyl stretched over a metal frame, the Diatope’s curvilinear form recalls the famous Philips Pavilion designed by Xenakis and Le Corbusier for the Brussels World Fair in 1958, which housed the Poème électronique of Edgard Varèse.  Indeed, the immersive multimedia plan of the Philips Pavilion was the model for a number of later works Xenakis called Polytopes.  He created four of these prior to the Diatope: the Polytope de Montreal in 1967, an open-air spectacle in Persepolis in 1971, and two Polytopes in the Parisian Abby of Cluny in 1972 and 1973.

Inside the Diatope Xenakis arranged a light show involving 1600 flashbulbs and four lasers guided by four hundred adjustable mirrors.  Both abstract and representational figures were meticulously choreographed and traced by light. Xenakis’ sketches for the light show mention shapes such as “lotuses,”galaxies,” and “wheels.”

In the program booklet for the original 1977 presentation, Xenakis included five quotations that together capture the metaphysical ambiance of the work.  I reproduce them here in the order in which they originally appeared:

Each group would spend seven days in open country, and on the eighth, they had to break camp and head out for four days to finally reach a place where one discovers, stretching all across the sky and over the earth, a beam of light straight as a pillar, akin to a rainbow, but much more radiant and pure. – Plato, The Republic

From there emerged a crying out, indistinct, one I likened to a voice of fire,  just as there emerged from the light…a holy Word blanketing all of Nature, and the purest of fire was thrust out of the humid natural world toward the sublime area above. – Hermes Trismegistus, Pymander

For indeed, what is man within nature?  A void in the face of infinity, a whole before the void, a center between nothingness and wholeness…unable to perceive the void from whence he came, nor the infinity in which he is submerged. – Blaise Pascal, Pensées

 Christ went on: “I traversed the worlds, I ascended into the suns, and soared with the Milky Ways through the wastes of heaven; but there is no God. I descended to the last reaches of the shadows of Being, and I looked into the chasm and cried: ‘Father, where art thou?’ But I heard only the eternal storm ruled by none, and the shimmering rainbow of essence stood without sun to create it, trickling above the abyss. – Jean-Paul Richter, Siebenkäs

 In the first stages of the explosion, the general distribution of the star’s energy closely matches the distribution known for theoretical black holes at a temperature of 12,000 degrees Kelvin.  In the case of SN 1970g the radius was measured at 3x10¹⁴ centimeters, in other words, as large as the orbit of Uranus.  Once the supernova’s radius is known, it is possible to determine its absolute luminosity.  For SN 1970g, this was calculated at 10⁴² ergs per second, or one trillion times that of the sun…  During the 30 days following the explosion, the radius of the surface from which the light was emitted increases at a near-constant speed of 5,000 kilometers per second.  At the end of this period, the star’s photosphere, in other words, its visible surface, reaches a radius of 2x10¹⁸ centimeters, a much larger radius than that of our solar system. – Robert P. Kirshner, Supernova

These quotations offer no program or story, but rather, at best, set a mood for the spectacle: a sort of saturnine melancholy tinged with childlike wonder.  The first quote, taken from the end of Plato’s Republic, demands explanation, as it the source of the title Xenakis chose for the musical component of the Diatope.  It concerns a soldier named Er who returns from the dead and describes what he saw on the other side.  The vision culminates with Er’s sighting of the “Spindle of Necessity,” a great shaft encircled with eight rings representing the eight celestial spheres known to ancient astronomy.  On each ring is perched a siren singing a tone corresponding to the circumference of its orbit and together forming a cosmic harmony.  Seated on thrones amidst the sirens are the three Fates, or “daughters of necessity,” who accompany with their voices the harmony of the sirens: Lachesis, singing of the past, Clotho of the present, and Atropos of the future.

Finally, there is the music: comprised of seven tracks distributed over 11 loudspeakers placed throughout the Diatope, Xenakis’ tape composition La legénde d’Eer (The Legend of Er) is a sprawling, 46-minute journey in sound.  (For the DVD release, Xenakis’ original seven-channel mix has been reduced to a 5.1 version.)

Given Xenakis’ reputation as a composer of fearful complexity, the form of the music is remarkably transparent: beginning with pure, high twinkling tones that Xenakis described as “sonic shooting stars,” layer upon layer of sound is added, from harsh, wailing industrial noises, to recognizable instrumental timbres such as thumb piano and mouth harp, to a throbbing electronic vortex that emerges midway through the composition.  These sound layers enter at lower and lower registers, suggesting a descent from the rarefied upper realms into the chthonic domain below.  Hearing this music at high volume over a surround-sound system in a large room, one is confronted with the sublime aesthetic terror of sensory overload.  As one listener described the experience, it is the auditory equivalent of staring directly into the sun.

Finally the density of sound subsides, and at the end the listener is left once again with the shooting stars.  These too gently fade away into a now-resonant silence. The emergence and passing of these distinct sonic textures gives the music a powerful if extremely dilated sense of motion.  Indeed, the time scale of The Legend of Er, and the primal violence of its sounds, are suggestive less of human music than of natural phenomena: as if we, like Er himself, are here witness to some vast cosmological process otherwise inaccessible to human ears and eyes.

April 20, 2010, 5:39pm

[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