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Morton Feldman: Intersection for magnetic tape (1953)

From the album First Recordings: The 1950s

Among the composers of the postwar avant-garde, a dividing line can be drawn between those who saw electronic sound production as an essential aspect of the new music and those who, after some experiments, more or less dismissed it. The former group was likely the larger of the two, including composers such as Cage, Stockhausen, Babbitt, and Xenakis, but the electro-skeptics were a formidable bunch, including in their numbers Berio, Ligeti, and Boulez. (Berio and Ligeti, of course, made substantial contributions to the genre around 1960, but soon moved on; Boulez produced an early Etude, then dismissed electronic music, only to return as an advocate of “live electronics” when he became director of IRCAM in the early 1980s.)

Another major modernist composer of the second half of the century who eschewed electronics was Morton Feldman. Feldman’s lone effort in this domain was created under the influence of John Cage, who initiated a “Project for Magnetic Tape” in 1952. The score for Intersections consisted of eight channels of graphically notated spans of tape length in which a certain number of sound events are directed to take place. The sounds themselves were chosen by Cage and Earle Brown, so the piece can be seen as a kind of collective composition which reflects the aesthetics of the group rather than that of any one person.

Feldman later said he “loathed” the sound of electronic music, and compared it to neon lights and plastic paint, but this piece is an important part of the history of tape-based composition in the so-called New York School in the early 1950s. Along with Cage’s Williams Mix, Christian Wolff’s For Magnetic Tape (both 1952), and Brown’s Octet (1953), Feldman’s foray into electronic music illuminates a distinctive approach to the medium that stands alongside the simultaneous European schools as well as the better-known American efforts of Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky. All the tape compositions produced in the Cage circle have in common a slapdash texture, projecting a flurry of disparate sonic fragments with disorienting, cartoonish rapidity. This is especially striking in light of Feldman’s later music, which would abandon all radical contrast in pursuit of a monolithic and slowly shifting sound-field.

[Note: if you are in the Philadelphia area or within travelling distance, check out American Sublime, a festival of Feldman’s rarely-performed late works taking place in Philly until June 12.]

June 07, 2011, 12:16pm

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The Singing Dogs: “Jingle Bells”

From the album Don Charles Presents The Singing Dogs— A Genuine “Canine Chorus” (1955); re-released on Dr. Demento Presents the Greatest Christmas Novelty CD of All Time (1989)

The story of this charming little piece of holiday tape trickery goes back to the early 1950s, when the Dane Carl Weismann recorded the barking of five different neighborhood dogs with a portable tape recorder.   In his amateur home studio, he cut and spliced the tape to create a remarkably convincing melodic rendition of “Jingle Bells.” Through channels unknown, Weismann’s experiment made it over the Atlantic to the United States, and was released on record by RCA in 1955, along with three additional songs: “Oh! Susanna,” “Pat-a-Cake,” and “Three Blind Mice.” The album sold half a million copies that year and earned a write-up in Life magazine entitled “The Caroling Dogs of Copenhagen.”

Amazingly, that was not the end of the Singing Dogs.  The album was unearthed around 1970 and re-released by RCA the following year, this time with “Oh! Susanna” as the sole B-side.  The record sold another 500,000 units, making Weismann’s Singing Dogs unlikely platinum-selling artists.

Weismann’s little piece is a remarkably early example of “tape music,” and one of the first such compositions created on an entirely amateur basis.  It is also striking for its humor—was Weismann poking fun at the young genre of electronic music, or simply extending its techniques to new forms of expression? In any event, musique concrète inventor Pierre Schaeffer would probably not have appreciated Weismann’s cantabile canines.  In his 1967 Solfège de l’objet sonore (Theory of the Sound Object), Schaeffer dismissed “the apparently logical idea, which was to prove foolish, that music could be produced by anyone or anything.”  As an example of this “foolishness,” Schaeffer presented two recordings: first, a series of unprocessed dog barks, then the same sounds, manipulated to form the pitches of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

Special thanks to Acousmata listener William Weir for making me aware of this gem.

December 21, 2010, 10:29pm

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Henry Flynt: “Violin Strobe” (1978)

From the album New American Ethnic Music Volume 3: Hillbilly Tape Music

The title says it all: American experimental musician and freelance art-theorist Henry Flynt combines Steve Reich-style tape loops with furious virtuoso fiddling in an ecstatic hybridization of the radically disparate.  In fact, the convergence of the extremes of so-called “high” and “low” culture—“the image of the untrained ‘folk creature’ as avant-gardiste,” which Flynt attributes to Ornette Coleman— is at the root of many of the most vital cultural expressions of the 20th century.

“My music is a sophisticated, personal extension of the ethnic music of my native region of the United states.  In all of my experimentation, I assert myself as an autochthon (colloquially, a “native” or “folk creature”)—siding with the emotional experience and the musical languages of the autochthonous communities.  In particular, I assert that the objective sound elements of blues and country music are demonstrably incommensurate with the categorization of sound in European musicology—as for example in the use of an unaccented glissando on the beat as a “note”—and in non-arithmetical division of the beat.”

October 03, 2009, 1:41pm

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Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening: “Incantation for Tape” (1953)

From the album An Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music / Second A-Chronology 1936-2003

Luening and Ussachevsky were two of the primary movers in the New York “tape music” scene, America’s answer to the roughly contemporaneous movements of musique concrète in Paris and elektronische Musik in Cologne.  The American experimenters were less doctrinaire in their choice of sounds than their European counterparts— the French favoring “found sounds” and the Germans insisting on the purity of synthetically generated signals such as white noise and sine waves— but their style is no less distinctive.

The title “Incantation” is appropriate, not only for the vaguely religious mood of the music, with its tolling bells and backwards, chant-like vocals, but also because this piece signals the historical moment at which electronic music as we know it was called into being.  This music quietly announces the age of disembodied sound.

“Incantation” can be found on a superlative collection assembled by Guy-Marc Hinant and released on his Sub Rosa label.  Each of the four two-disc sets contains a fantastic cornucopia of electronic and experimental music, much of which is previously unpublished.

March 18, 2009, 12:17pm