MSM
CPP Survey
EC
3. Electronic Music I: Roots
Themes:
Continuation of the project of assimilating new sounds into music
Exploration of extreme aesthetic territories
Music as a terrain that grows through invention and research
“The present age, with its fertile agitation, its incredible social injustices, its portentous
scientific development, is perfecting, in electricity, its own organ of expression, its own
voice. This, clarified and matured, will become the legitimate art of our era, the art of
today.” Carlos Chavez, Toward a New Music: Music and Electricity (1937)
Inventors and Inventions
1759 Jean-Baptiste Delabord invents Clavecine Électrique, a type of carillon – a keyboard
activating hanging bells with static electricity.
1867 Matthias Hipp invents Electromechanical Piano, in which the keys activate electromagnets
that activate Dynamos – small electric sound generators.
1897 Thaddeus Cahill invents Telharmonium (aka Dynamophone), a 200 ton, 60 foot long,
$200k instrument that occupied an entire floor at 39th and Broadway for 20 years. 36 notes per
octave (Cahill was a Just Intonation guy). There is no amplification yet, so the only way you
could hear it was over a telephone line. “Cahill hit upon the idea of centrally performing music
and serve it over the phone network to paying subscribers in hotels, railway stations and private
houses; a kind of early Victorian audio internet.” (120years.net) Busoni mentions it in his Sketch
for a New Esthetic of Music
1922 Leon Theremin invents his eponymous instrument.
Clara Rockmore: The Swan
1928 Maurice Mertenot invents the Ondes-Martenot
LH had a button to control volume, and right hand slid a ring along a string (along a
diagram of a keyboard to tell you where you are). 8 different sounds.
Messiaen: Feuillet inedit No. 4
1958 Columbia-Princeton develops RCA MARK II Sound Synthesizer, the first programmable
synth. Ussachevsky, Luening, Babbitt, Wuorinen, Halim El-Dabh, and Mario Davidovsky used it.
Early 60s — the voltage controlled modular synth: Moog vs. Buchla.
1980s — the personal computer.
MSM
CPP Survey
EC
Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), Cologne
Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007)
Studie I (1953)
Gesang der Jünglinge (1955-56)
Kontakte (1958-60) for 4 channel tape, piano and percussion
“In the preparatory work for my composition Kontakte, I found, for the first time, ways to
bring all properties [i.e., timbre, pitch, intensity, and duration] under a single control.”
Stockhausen
Karl Goeyvaerts (1923-1993): process music
Composition No. 4 with Dead Tones (1952)
Ligeti (1923-2006): synthetic language
Artikulation (1958)
“The piece is called 'Artikulation' because in this sense an artificial language is articulated:
question and answer, high and low voices, polyglot speaking and interruptions, impulsive
outbreaks and humor, charring and whispering… First I chose types [of noise, or artificial
phonemes] with various group-characteristics and various types of internal organization,
as: grainy, friable, fibrous, slimy, sticky and compact materials. An investigation of the
relative permeability of these characters indicated which could be mixed and which
resisted mixture.” Ligeti
MSM
CPP Survey
EC
Studio di Fonologia Radio, Milan
Luciano Berio (1925-2003): voice and language
Thema Ommagio a Joyce (1959)
Henri Pousseur (1929-2009): open work
Scambi (1957)
“Scambi is not so much a musical composition as a field of possibilities, an explicit invitation to
exercise choice… the general public would be in a position to develop a private musical
construct of its own and a new collective sensibility in matters of musical presentation and
duration could emerge.” Pousseur
“I find it abominable!” Boulez.
Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (RTF), Paris
From Concrète to Acousmatic
"Acousmatic, adjective: referring to a sound that one hears without seeing the causes
behind it” Pierre Schaeffer.
"The concealment of the causes does not result from a technical imperfection, nor is it an
occasional process of variation: it becomes a precondition, a deliberate placing-incondition of the subject. It is toward it, then, that the question turns around; "what am I
hearing?... What exactly are you hearing" – in the sense that one asks the subject to
describe not the external references of the sound it perceives but the perception itself.”
Pierre Schaeffer, Treatise on Musical Objects.
Francis Dhomont (*1926): alter the senses
“I was fourteen at the time and there I was, with a sick eye. I was told to stop all visual
activity for the period of one year: leave school, no reading, no cinema, no shows, no sports. I
was supposed to live most of my time in darkness, my eyes protected against the light to avoid
suffering. Not too attractive for a young kid!
In order to be occupied, and as I had always shown some inclination towards music,
my parents thought of buying a piano for our house. I started improvising intuitively on that
MSM
CPP Survey
EC
instrument, “experimenting” with impetuosity, all day long, in darkness, for several months,
using nothing but my ears…
After one year, I had lost my right eye but I had found a vocation.” Dhomont in
conversation with David Leone, musicalkaleidoscope.wordpress.com
Espace/Escape (1989)
Signé Dionysos (1986-91)
“As with any respectful opera, this work has acts, scenes, tableaux. The plot: “A small
Provence lake. After a warm day, the strollers leave, thus returning the lake to its natural
hosts. The frogs return, taking hold of the stage and will ‘perform the opera’. Unheard-of,
surreal, dilated songs. Naturally, after love, the drama will conclude with death…
However, it is only entertainment. But what pleasure to play with this given sonorous
generator of innumerable morphologies and also, once again, with the ambiguous ‘musicof-nature/artifices-of-the-studio.’ Truth or lie? Found, processed or constructed sound? All of
these delusions confound the ear and, as with wine, alter the senses.
This brings us back to Bacchus!” Dhomont, liner notes.
François Bayle (*1932): acousmonium
Grande Polyphonie (1974)
MSM
CPP Survey
EC
“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.”
acousmata.com
Luc Ferrari (1929-2005): memory and place
Presque Rien: Le Lever du Jour au Bord de la Mer (1970)
on spotify playlist as “I. II. III.”
Presque Rien avec Files (1973-74)
Petite Symphoie Intuitive our un Paysage de Printemps (1973-74)
IRCAM
Pierre Boulez (1925-2016)
Dialogue De L’ombre Double (1985) for solo clarinet and 6 loudspeakers
Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012)
Bhakti (1982) for 15 instruments at 4 channel tape
America
John Cage (1912-1992): sound (as/instead of) music
Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) for two turntables, frequency test tones, muted piano,
cymbal
MSM
Rozart Mix (1965) for live tape loops
Cartridge Music (1960)
CPP Survey
EC
MSM
CPP Survey
EC
Edgard Varèse (1883-1965): the “liberation of sound”
“Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical. Music, which should pulsate with life,
needs a new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor…
I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a
whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my
inner rhythm” Varèse (1917)
“I was the first composer to explore, so to speak, musical outer space.” (1962)
Deserts (1954)
“The premiere of the work in December [in Paris] of that year was predictably scandalous,
owing not only to the brutally noisy nature of the music–[Pierre] 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.”
Poème électronique (1958)
Milton Babbitt (1916-2011): the perfection of serialism
Ensembles for Synthesizer (1962-1964)
Philomel (1964)
Morton Subotnick (*1933): return to groove
Silver Apples of the Moon (1967)
Pauline Oliveros (*1932): deep listening
Alien Bog (1967)
MSM
CPP Survey
Daphne Oram (1925-2003): music from pictures
Ascending and Descending Sequences of Varying Nature: Oramics (c. 1959)
Paul Lansky (*1944): synthesizing the voice
Chatter of Pins from Music Box (2006)
Notjustmoreidlechatter from More Than Idle Chatter (1994)
EC
MSM
CPP Survey
EC
Laurie Spiegel (*1945): synthesizer as democracy
Patchwork from The Expanding Universe (1980)
Drums from The Expanding Universe (1980)
“Ultimately, these little computers will make it easier to compose, as well as to play music.
There are far too few people creating their own music compared to the number of people
who really love music. It’s a much worse ratio than amateur painters or writers to consumers
of those media, I suspect, and it’s because until now, there has been only a very difficult
technique for composing.” Laurie Spiegel.
MSM
CPP Survey
EC
3. Electronic Music II: Branches
Homemade Hardware
David Tudor (1926-1996): circuit building
Rainforest IV (1973, realized 2001)
"Instruments, sculpturally constructed from resonant physical materials, are suspended in free
space; each instrument is set into sonic vibration through the use of electromagnetic
transducers . . . The sound materials used to program the instruments are collected from
natural scientific sources and are specific to each instrument, exciting their unique resonant
characteristics. The excited resonances are routed to a conventional audio system by the use
of one or more pick-ups attached to each instrument.” David Tudor, program notes.
Jeff Snyder (*1978)
The Manta
JD-1 Keyboard/Sequencer (“Jesus Keys”)
Electric viols
The Birl
Sunspots (2013-2015)
Exclusive/Or with Sam Pluta
Nearing Stasis
“A sound that does not exist in nature is a stationary sound, a drone.” R. Murray Schaefer
Brian Eno (*1948): ambient
Discreet Music (1975)
"This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music—as part of the ambience of the
environment just as the color of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that
ambience.” Eno.
MSM
CPP Survey
EC
Phil Niblock (*1933): drone
Poure from Touch Strings (2009)
Éliane Radigue (*1932): drone
“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.” http://
acousmata.com/
Kyema (Intermediate States) (1990)
Failure
Christian Marclay: broken records
Night Music
Netural from Records
Record Without a Cover (1985)
Oval: broken cds
Textuell from Systemisch
Glossy from O
Emocor from O
Track 8 from Ovalcommers
William Basinski: broken tapes
The Disintegration Loops (2001)
MSM
CPP Survey
EC
Velocity, or Detail
Aphex Twin
Vordhosbn from Drukqs
Kladfvgbung Micshk from Drukqs
Autechre
Gantz Graf from Gantz Graf (2002)
Fleure from Exai (2013)
irlite (get 0) from Exai
cloudline from Exai
ilanders from Oversteps (2010)
Hear also: Mouse on Mars, Squarepusher
Paul Dolden (*1956)
L’Ivresse de la Vitesse (Intoxicated by Speed) (2000)
Who Has the Biggest Sound (2005-2010)
"Dolden’s apocalyptic hypermodernism so transcends what the 20th century had in mind
that it opens up a whole new realm.” The Village Voice
Illusions
Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009): otoacoustic emissions
Remainder [excerpt] from Music for Merce, Vol. 4
When played at the right sound level, which is quite high and exciting, the tones in this
music will cause your ears to act as neurophonic instruments that emit sounds that will
seem to be issuing directly from your head ... (my audiences) discover they are producing
a tonal dimension of the music which interacts melodically, rhythmically, and spatially with
the tones in the room. Tones 'dance' in the immediate space of their body, around them like
a sonic wrap, cascade inside ears, and out to space in front of their eyes ... Do not be
alarmed! Your ears are not behaving strange or being damaged! ... these virtual tones are
a natural and very real physical aspect of auditory perception, similar to the fusing of two
images resulting in a third three dimensional image in binocular perception ... I want to
release this music which is produced by the listener …[6]
MSM
CPP Survey
Marcus Schmickler (*1968): Shepard tones
New Methodical Limits of Ascension from Palace of Marvels (2010)
Noise
Fennesz
A Year In A Minute from Endless Summer (2001)
Tim Hecker
The Piano Drop from Ravedeath, 1972 (2011)
Merzbow
Plasma Birds from Hybrid Noisebloom (1997)
Fetish
Tristan Perich: 1 bit music
On the Mayflower from 1-Bit Music (2011)
Experimental fun
Matmos
It Seems from Matmos (1997)
Verber: amplified synapse from Matmos (1997)
Lipostudio… And So On from A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure (1997)
EC
MSM
CPP Survey
EC
Pomo Crit
DJ Spooky
Nihilismus Dub from Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1996)
“[My work] deals with the notion of the encoded gesture or the encrypted psychology of
how music affects the whole framework of what the essence of 'humaness' [sic] is... To me
at this point in the 21st century, the notion of the encoded sound is far more of a dynamic
thing, especially when you have these kinds of infodispersion systems running, so I'm
fascinated with the unconscious at this point."
Sound Ecology
R. Murray Schaefer (*1933)
“The soundscape of the world is changing. Modern man is beginning to inhabit a world with
an acoustic environment radically different from any he has hitherto known. These new
sounds… have alerted many researchers to the dangers of an indiscriminate and imperialistic
spread of more and larger sounds into every corner of man’s life. Noise pollution is now a
world problem.”
“Throughout this book I am going to treat the world as a macrocosmic musical composition…
Today all sounds belong to a continuous field of possibilities lying within the comprehensive
domain of music. Behold the new orchestra: the sonic universe! And the musicians: anyone
and anything that sounds!” from the introduction to The Soundscape: our sonic environment
and the tuning of the world. 1994.
String Quartet No. 2: Waves
Hildegard Westerkamp (*1946)
Gently Penetrating Beneath the Sounding Surfaces of Another Place from Into India
“Traffic, carhorns, brakes, sirens, construction noise, pinball machines, the throb of trains,
human voices, a poem, are its "musical instruments." These sounds are used partly as they
occur in reality and partly as sound objects altered in the studio. Thus a continuous flux is
created between real and imaginary soundscapes, between recognizable and transformed
places, between reality and composition. The piece makes audible a phenomenon we all
experience, but of which we are rarely conscious: the fact that the modern city soundscape is
MSM
CPP Survey
EC
formed from our constant perceptual shifting of focus between the acoustically real and the
acoustically imaginary. “ Westerkamp, Inside the Soundscape 2, liner notes.
TWO MORE QUOTES ABOUT TRAFFIC
“The sound experience which i prefer to all others, is the experience of silence. And this
silence, almost anywhere in the world today, is traffic. If you listen to Beethoven, it’s always the
same, but if you listen to traffic, it’s always different.” John Cage
“Surveys show that the number of people who call the police to complain about sound is much
larger than the number of people who call to complain about crime, prostitution, or any other
issue.” R. Murray Schaefer
Annea Lockwood (*1939)
A Sound Map of the Hudson River (1989)
“A Sound Map of the Hudson River is an aural journey from the source of the river, Lake
Tear of the Clouds in the high peak area of the Adirondacks, downstream to the Lower Bay
and the Atlantic. The work was commissioned by the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers,
NY as an installation. It was incorporated into the museum’s permanent, “Riverama,” exhibit
in 2003.
Since 1970 I have recorded rivers in many countries, not to document them, but rather for
the special state of mind and body which the sounds of moving water create when one
listens intently to the complex mesh of rhythms and pitches.
Each stretch of the Hudson has its own sonic texture, formed by the terrain, varying
according to the weather, the season and, downstream, the human environment whose
sounds are intimately woven into the river’s sounds.
By correlating the numbered sites on the map with the information on the reverse, you will
be able to identify which location you are listening to, the date, and the time of day at which
the recording was made.” Annea Lockwood, liner notes.
Artificial Intelligence
David Cope’s Emily Howell
From Darkness, Light (2010)
MSM
CPP Survey
EC
Improvising Systems
George E. Lewis (*1952)
Voyager (1993) http://acousmata.com/post/40785898859/george-lewis-voyager
Plunderphonics
John Oswald (*1953)
Michael Jackson-Dab from Plunderphonic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xIWLG-F0Ag
Microsound
Curtis Roads: Granular Synthesis
Sonal Atoms (1998): granular synthesis
“Beneath the level of the note lies another multilayered stratum, the microsonic hierarchy. Like the quantum world of quarks, leptons, gluons, and bosons, the microsonic hierarchy
was long invisible. Modern tools let us view and manipulate the microsonic layers from
which all acoustic phenomena emerge.” (Curtis Roads, Microsound, p. 3)
Dance music
genre map: http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/
Charanjit Singh: “Raga Madhuvanti”
Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat (1982)