[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer: Excerpt from Klang im unbegrenzten Raum (1951-52)

From the album Acousmatrix: The History of Electronic Music VI

Founded in 1951, the Studio for Electronic Music of West German Radio in Cologne was one of the seminal sources of the radical new sound art that emerged in the years following the end of the Second World War. Produced with pure synthetic sound, as opposed the recorded sounds of musique concrete, the works that emerged from the Cologne studio became known as elektronische Musik (“electronic music”), a term that consequently has a much more specific and historically fraught meaning in German than in other languages.

The WDR studio would become virtually synonymous with rigorously serial compositional techniques and a dry or even abrasive sonic quality, as exemplified by the now-classic early electronic studies of Karlheinz Stockhausen. But as Konrad Boehmer argues in his notes for this album in theAcousmatrix series, the various composers who worked in the studio over the span its first decade were anything but uniform in their approaches or their musical output. In the following three posts, I explore compositions from the early years of the WDR studio that demonstrate the rich aesthetic diversity of this music.

Eimert (above) with engineer Leopold von Knobelsdorff

Klang im unbegrenzten Raum (Sound in Limitless Space) is a collaboration between studio co-founders Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer. Eimert, who would later lead the studio for many years, was a well-established modernist figure in the Schoenbergian line, having published a handbook of 12-tone composition as early as 1924. Beyer, too, had come of age as a journalist and film composer in the heady days of the Weimar Republic. In 1928 he wrote a jaw-dropping essay of techno-futurist speculation entitled “Das Problem der kommenden Musik” (“The Problem of the Music to Come”), which both cataloged the technological achievements of the 1920s and prophesied many future developments.

While the WDR’s later sound would be marked by the use of rudimentary sonic material such as sine waves, impulses, and white noise, the early experiments in the studio made use of the harmonically rich timbres of electric instruments such as the Melochord and the Trautonium. Tones played on these devices were recorded and manipulated—spliced, multiplied, and bathed in artificial reverberation—to create otherworldly soundscapes unlike anything ever heard before. (In technique, if not quite in effect, these pieces resembled the works of “tape music” created around the same time in the United States by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky.) 

This music can be heard as a realization of Beyer’s fantastic visions, recorded over two decades earlier, of “machines that make it possible to separate the voice from the body and convey it over distances, to let sounds play backward, to traverse a timbral domain of an almost cosmic expanse…machines whose power lies in their unique mastery of the laws of nature; a new objective, whose wonder lies hidden deep in the secrets of science.”

December 16, 2011, 10:34pm

UbuWeb: Electronic Music Resources

Long the go-to resource for devotees of experimental art, UbuWeb recently added this new section devoted to the documentary history of electronic music. The collection will focus on the older history of the genre, with an emphasis on technology as opposed to aesthetic debates. As curators Michael Johnson and Matthew Wellins admirably state, 

Most previous treatments of electronic music have tended to shy away from the details of the medium itself. In hopes of rendering the subject palatable they have removed much of its flavor, for it is precisely within the box, teeming with currents, where the true beauty resides - the other side of the panel.

There is already much there—including a trove of patents by early 20th-century German inventor (and subject of one of my dissertation chapters) Jörg Mager. But perhaps the most impressive items on offer there are the lovingly scanned seven issues of the rare journal Electronic Music Review, edited by Reynold Weidenaar and Robert Moog and published from 1967 to 1968. Though I’ve not yet looked through them, they look to be packed with writings by both known and obscure figures of the period. The double issue 2/3 is especially important, consisting of an exhaustive catalog of every known electroacoustic composition created worldwide up to that point, compiled by noted British organologist and instrument-builder Hugh Davies. Hats off to UbuWeb for this major contribution.

July 07, 2011, 4:47pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Paul Hindemith: Des kleinen Elektromusikers Lieblinge for three Trautoniums, No. 6: “Lebhaft, mit Kadenzen” (1930)

From the album Elektronische Impressionen (1998)

In 1930, a new electric instrument was unveiled: named after its inventor, the engineer Friedrich Trautwein, the Trautonium was a monophonic instrument in which the touch of the player’s finger pressed a wire against an underlying metal strip, closing the circuit and generating a tone. Following musical convention, the frequency of the generated tone increased as the player’s finger moved from left to right. Like many other first-wave electric instruments, the Trautonium allowed a continuous glissando between tones, but to enable more precise staccato playing, Trautwein affixed a number of leather “tongues” above the metal strip, which could be positioned to mark the pitches of a scale. Thus the instrument could be played either directly on the metal band, or through the configurable keys.

To show off the new instrument, the German composer Paul Hindemith, at that time among the most famous figures in European music, wrote a set of seven short pieces for three Trautoniums. Hindemith’s composition was called Des kleinen Elektromusikers Lieblinge (The Little Electro-musician’s Favorites), and was premiered at the New Music Berlin festival in 1930. The character of the pieces is typical of Hindemith’s 1920s compositional style: sprightly, contrapuntal, and tonal, yet suffused with pungent dissonances. The structure of this piece, the sixth in the set, is a simple ternary form (ABA) followed by a brief cadenza for each of the instruments and a coda. The resulting mix of futuristic, otherworldly sounds and neoclassical formal molds is uniquely characteristic of the early 20th-century phenomenon known as “electric music.”

In 1933, the radio company Telefunken began mass-producing a simplified model of the instrument called the Volkstrautonium, but like virtually all the electric instruments of the period, this device was doomed to failure by a combination of socio-economic turmoil and a resilient culture of musical technophobia. In spite of its flop as a consumer instrument, the Trautonium enjoyed a substantial afterlife, primarily through the single-handed advocacy of the instrument’s sole virtuoso, Oskar Sala. Around 1950, Sala began developing a new, expanded form of the instrument he called a Mixturtrautonium, which featured a number of improvements, including the ability to generate subharmonic frequencies below the primary tone. Sala’s instrument was used in a number of film soundtracks of the time, most famously in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). 

(This photograph shows a later, three-voice version of the Trautonium, developed in the mid-1930s. Notice the three terraced manuals, consisting of flat strips of metal overlaid with “tongues” corresponding roughly to the keys of a piano. The extensions on either side of the manuals contain the tone-generating circuitry and feature dials to adjust the timbre. The pedals are for volume and additional timbre control.)

May 31, 2011, 2:57pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Edgard Varèse: “First Interpolation of Organized Sound”

From the work Déserts (1950-54)

Varèse’s story is a familiar part of the foundation myth of post-1950 electronic music, well-known to everyone conversant with that history. Bouncing between Berlin, Paris, and New York in the 1910s and 20s, Varèse made a name for himself as a visionary of a radical new music beyond the technological capabilities of the age, meanwhile writing a small but explosive bunch of compositions that challenged virtually every convention of classical concert music as it was then understood. Only decades later, in the 1950s, was Varèse finally able to create works of electronic music, thus realizing the ideal of the technological “liberation of sound” he had dreamt of for some 40 years. (This narrative also has the unfortunate effect of reinforcing a dismissive ignorance toward the music-technological reality of the 1920s, which I will attempt to correct in my forthcoming dissertation on this “first wave” of electronic music—but that’s another story.)

Déserts, completed in 1954, was Varèse’s first tape composition, and the work with which he broke a compositional silence of nearly 20 years. The piece comprises four “episodes” of music for winds and percussion interspersed with three short pieces of music for magnetic tape, which Varèse called “interpolations of organized sound.” These interpolations can be described, in the terminology of the time, as musique concrète, as they were based on recorded as opposed to synthetically generated sounds, though Varèse treats these sounds with a brashness and violence that was without parallel at the time. (Perhaps the closest thing was Louis and Bebe Barron’s soundtrack to Forbidden Planet from 1956.)

The first interpolation—whose sound material was recorded on a factory floor in Philadelphia, the city where a number of Varèse’s groundbreaking works had been premiered in the 1920s under the baton of Leopold Stokowski—constitutes a remarkable piece of industrial music avant la lettre, whose metallic screeches and wails can be heard as the swan song of the industrial West. Varèse brought the recordings to Paris in 1954, where he created the finished tape parts at the RTF studio, assisted by Pierre Henry. The premiere of the work in December of that year was predictably scandalous, owing not only to the brutally noisy nature of the music—Henry, who was at the mixing board during the playback of the tape pieces, supposedly responded to the unrest in the concert hall by turning up the volume—but also to conductor Hermann Scherchen’s inexplicable pairing of Déserts with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6.

The post-industrial gothic, Philadelphia style (photograph by the author, 2011)

April 07, 2011, 9:21pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

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

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Karl-Birger Blomdahl: “Mima-tape 1”

From the opera Aniara (1959)

I’m still reeling a bit from my recent discovery of the world’s first space-opera, written by Swedish composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl in the late 50s and premiered in 1959.  It is based on the “epic science fiction poem” Aniara by the Nobel Prize winner Harry Martinson.

“Earth, become unclean / with toxic radiation, is accorded / a time of calm, repose and quarantine”: A group of refugees abandons the threatened planet and boards the spaceship Aniara, “and like a giant pupa without weight, / vibrationless, Aniara gyrates clear / and free of interference out from Earth.”  But a near-collision with an asteroid throws the ship off course, and its denizens confront an endless voyage into uncharted space.  They are saved from total despair by the Mima, a quasi-sentient computer worshiped by the passengers of Aniara for its ability to project “images / and tongues and scents from undiscovered countries.”  Soon the voyagers receive the news of the annihilation of “Dorisvale” (Earth); Mima, who had “beheld the granite’s white-hot weeping / when stone and ore were vaporized to mist,” could not bear the trauma of witnessing the Earth’s demise, and self-destructs.  All this in the first 30 pages!

The musical idiom generally resembles the “international style” of postwar modernism: Blomdahl based the composition of the opera on an “all-interval” twelve-tone row.  But there is a refreshing variety to the music, as represented by jazzy-dissonant dance-hall pieces and solemn choral movements.  In its stylistic diversity, Aniara anticipates the much better-known modernist opera Die Soldaten, composed around the same time, but not premiered until 1965.

For the scenes depicting the Mima, Blomdahl composed three electronic pieces he called “Mima-tape.”  These are among the first electronic works created in Sweden, and, with the exception of Jörg Mager’s creation of synthetic bell sounds for a 1931 production of Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal, perhaps the first use of electronic sounds in the history of opera.

The form of “Mima-tape 1” is loose and episodic.  A series of short sound-vignettes evokes the phantasmagoric projections of the Mima, which culminate with the live broadcast of Earth’s destruction.

The following fragments can perhaps be distinguished in this ‘sound-play,’ based on certain keywords, lines or moods in Harry Martinson’s epic: The song of the light years and cosmos—the key to the mystery seen as through walls of mountainous-deep space crystal… Evil reports penetrate space, the storm of dark rays from distant voids… Glimpses of the true light of solace.  Veils of dreams… Death plays chess with infinity… Fire and death ravage the Earth.

October 11, 2009, 5:25pm