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Mireille Chamass-Kyrou: Étude I (1960)

From the album Archives GRM, Disc 2: ”L’Art De L’Étude”

Mireille Chamass-Kyrou, whose very name is a melody, is a Greek-born French composer of electronic music. Born in 1931, Chamass-Kyrou worked for a time at the studio of the Groupe de recherches musicales in Paris, where in 1960 she created this etude, her only known composition. (She is also known simply as Mireille Kyrou, under which name this composition was first released.)

The music unfolds in three brief tableaus. It opens with a slowly building dissonant polyphony of sustained metallic tones. This leads into a second scene, dominated by a percussive clicking sound at once powerfully visceral and acoustically mysterious. (Is it the plucking of metal comb-teeth? Some insectoid stridulation?) The final section is announced by a deep, existential drone, from which emerges the strangely alienated timbre of a human voice. The metallic tones reappear, more violent now, then give way seamlessly to a forlorn concert of Morse code signals, a message cast into the void.

The new instrumentarium: Chamass-Kyrou with wind chimes and a feather duster

In contrast to many of her peers, Chamass-Kyrou embraced the synaesthetic valences of electronic sound: the music should evoke, in her words, “giant molecules, diffuse constellations, and fine sonic dust.” Although the cosmic mood of her Étude is undeniable, she manages to avoid the stereotypes of “space music,” which were already well established by 1960. It is an atmospheric composition of the utmost subtlety. 

This track can be found on the highly recommended anthology Archives GRM, a five-disc set released in 2004 and dedicated to the premiere French studio of electronic music. All the usual suspects are here, both GRM stalwarts (Pierre Schaeffer, François Bayle, Ivo Malec) and well-known visitors (Edgard Varèse, Iannis Xenakis). But in addition to this classic material, there are some obscure gems, especially on the first disc, Les visiteurs de la musique concrète, which features rarely heard tape compositions by Pierre Boulez, Darius Milhaud, and Olivier Messiaen.

September 27, 2011, 9:55pm

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Jean Dubuffet: “Prospère, Prolifère”

From the album Expériences Musicales de Jean Dubuffet

Best known as a visual artist whose bold, childlike images are among the most striking and identifiable works of the mid-twentieth century, the French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) was also one of the most fascinating outsider musicians of recent times. His musical output consists solely of a number of recordings made in 1960-61 with the Danish painter Asger Jorn, after which Dubuffet abandoned music in order to devote himself fully to visual art.

Dubuffet’s music was composed through a process of edited improvisation: first he played freely on a number of instruments, both conventional and otherwise, then he listened to the recordings and removed the parts that he found unsatisfactory. Like Pierre Schaeffer, for whom the concept of musique concrète referred less to the nature of the sounds employed than to the starting point of “concrete” sound material which was “composed” only after it had been captured on tape, Dubuffet declares that “all written music is a false music,” and replaces the inscription of musical notation with that of the recording mechanism: “It is impossible to write true music except with a stylus on wax.”

I believe that our western music is an avatar among all the possibilities that were offered to music. Now, by an optical error, one imagines that this is the only music possible, while, in reality, it is only a very specious music among millions of possibilities that were available and, without doubt, will be available tomorrow… In my music I wanted to place myself in the position of a man of fifty thousand years ago, a man who ignores everything about western music and invents a music for himself without any reference, without any discipline, without anything that would prevent him from expressing himself freely and for his own good pleasure.

Jean Dubuffet: Virtual Virtue (1963)

Dubuffet makes a provocative distinction between two kinds of music, both of which he attempts to capture by turns in his own work: first, there is the “music we make,” a kind of “permanent music” expressive of basic human moods and actions and derived from the sonorous environment of everyday life. Second, there is the “music we hear,” a music “completely foreign to us and our natural tendencies,” which “could lead us to hear (or imagine) sounds which would be produced by the elements themselves, independent of human intervention”: 

[These sounds] would be as strange as what we might hear if we were to put our ear to some opening leading to a world other than our own or if we were to suddenly develop a new form of hearing with which we would become aware of a strange tumult that our senses had been unable to pick up and which might come from elements which were supposedly involved in silent action, such as humus decomposing, grass growing or minerals undergoing transformation.

Whatever the nature of his musical material, Dubuffet finds himself drawn to “composite sounds which appear to be formed by a great number of voices calling to mind distant murmurs, communities, hustle and bustle and hives of activity.” He seeks a “music without variations, not structured according to a particular system but unchanging, almost formless, as though the pieces had no beginning and no end but were simply extracts taken haphazardly from a ceaseless and ever-flowing score.”

The title of this album, Expériences Musicales, could be translated either as “Musical Experiences” or “Musical Experiments.” Along with a 1971 record of Dubuffet’s music entitled Musique Brut, it can be downloaded from the ever-resourceful UbuWeb.

Dubuffet in his musical studio

June 23, 2011, 3:57pm

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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

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Jack Ellitt: “Journey #1” (excerpt)

From the album Artefacts of Australian Experimental Music, 1930-1973 (2008)

In the early 1930s, when most of Europe and the United States was still under the deep freeze of neoclassicism, the Australian composer Jack Ellitt created this flabbergasting piece of electronic music, one of the earliest of its kind. Consisting of a rapid barrage of sounds both recognizable and abstract (from birdsong and train whistles to unimaginably chaotic collocations of synthetic tones), “Journey #1” occupies an aesthetic position between the surrealistic audio-documentary of Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend (composed just a few years earlier) and the schizoid sound-collage of John Cage’s first tape piece, the Williams Mix of 1952.

Ellitt was one of many musicians around the world experimenting around 1930 with the compositional possibilities of “drawn sound,” a process in which graphical inscriptions are photoelectrically converted into acoustic waves. According to the historian Hugh Davies, Ellitt first toyed with sound film around 1932, so it seems likely that it was the original medium for this piece, since magnetic tape would not be invented until 1935 and was not widely available until after WWII. This would also explain some of the more bizarre synthetic timbres in the piece, which could have been created by etching abstract shapes onto the film strip.

Another piece by Ellitt from around this time is his remarkable piano soundtrack for the abstract film Tusalava by New Zealander experimental cinema pioneer (and later kinetic sculpture builder) Len Lye. (There are conflicting accounts as to the fate of Ellitt’s soundtrack for Tusalava; several sources say—in contradiction to the version of the film in my possession—the music was performed live at the first screening but thereafter lost.)

March 12, 2011, 12:00pm

Alwin Nikolais: Noumenon (1953)

From The World of Alwin Nikolais

A truly universal artist, the American Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993) devoted his life to a radical form of staged art he called “dance theater.”  Inspired (perhaps unconsciously) by the experiments of Bauhaus members such as Oskar Schlemmer and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s, Nikolais devised a style of abstract dance that encompassed costumes, stage sets, choreography, lighting, and music, all under his control.

Sound was always an important aspect of Nikolais’ artistic conception.  For his earliest pieces, he used live percussion performed on various ready-to-hand objects, such as children’s toys and automobile parts.  From here he advanced to the use of tape loops, collecting a large sound library and splicing pieces together in the manner of musique concrete.  For his 1963 dance Imago, he used a sound bank sampled from the RCA Mark II synthesizer, housed at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.  This was his first use of purely synthetic sound.

Also in 1963, Nikolais met Robert Moog, who was at the time just starting his business in New York.  He was fascinated by the sounds of Moog’s machines, and with the money provided by a a Guggenheim Fellowship, Nikolais bought the first ever commercially produced Moog synthesizer.  It was the primary sound-source for all of Nikolais’ scores from 1963 to 1975.  The instrument is now housed at the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

A collection of Nikolais’ music was released by CRI in 1993.  It provides a nice sampling of his work, though it emphasizes the less experimental music created for his late dance pieces from the 1980s.

September 17, 2010, 4:14pm

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Hugh Le Caine: Dripsody - An Etude for Variable Speed Recorder (stereo version, 1957)

From the album Compositions Demonstrations 1946-1974

The early composers of musique concrète often sought to focus the development their techniques of manipulation and montage by limiting the sound material with which they worked to a single sound or a set of related sounds from a common source.  This model is apparent in Pierre Schaeffer’s very first efforts in this new form of music, such as his Etude aux chemins de fer (“Railroad Etude”) and Etude aux casseroles or “Study on Pots and Pans” (also known as Etude pathétique) of 1948. The new recording medium of magnetic tape offered composers the ability to capture and explore sounds from an unlimited number of auditory “angles,” opening new perceptual territory for the ear just as the movie camera had for the eye.

The Canadian inventor and composer Hugh Le Caine was experimenting with electronic music in Ottawa even before Schaeffer’s first radio broadcasts of musique concrète in Paris.  His piece Dripsody is a miniature masterpiece of its genre: the entire composition is based on a single recording of a drip of water, which is manipulated on tape to create shimmering cascades of liqueous sound. The original monophonic version was made in 1955; I have posted the slightly longer stereo version, which Le Caine created in 1957.

November 10, 2009, 10:01am

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Michel Chion: “Requiem Aeternam”

From the album Requiem (1973)

Though he is probably better known as an influential theorist of film music, Michel Chion is also a prolific composer of electronic music in the primarily Francophone tradition of musique concrete inaugurated around 1950 by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry.

Chion’s music of the 1970s, along with that of other composers working within the Parisian orbit of the Groupe de recherches musicales such as Francois Bayle and Bernard Parmegiani, represents the blossoming of an as-yet undiscovered golden age of electroacoustic art, in which the sonic experiments of the 50s and 60s gave way to a coherent, almost “classical” compositional style, with all the positive and negative connotations of that term.

This is music of a rare and disturbing programmatic intensity.  The sound of the speaking voice, so often an annoying gesture of pseudo-philosophical depth in electronic music, is here enfolded into the sonic texture in a virtually seamless manner.

June 29, 2009, 1:48pm