Archives - 1967
Newsweek
May 22, 1967
Electronic Music- "Wiggy" By Howard Junker
The floor of New York's Park Place Gallery was covered with sheets of white paper, partly for the evening's concert audience to sit on, partly to reflect the light. On the ceiling, composer Max Neuhaus had positioned ten photocells to detect interruptions in the light caused by movements in the audience and send these signals through a mess of wires, relays and rectifiers to a tape drum mounted beside the gallery's entrance. The audience actually heard none of Neuhaus's "Bi-Product" during the concert itself. But on leaving, Neuhaus presented each listener with a tape-loop to take home, a bi-product of his participation. "I'm interested in process," says 27-year-old Neuhaus, which is his way of explaining how it is now possible for a musician to use incredibly complex technology and produce nothing audible at all.
If many music lovers remain puzzled, there is no doubt that electronic music has been established as a legitimate, powerful development of Western musical tradition. Electronics has greatly extended the sound resources available to composers and has provided new means to organize these sounds into music. The tape recorder, oscillator, filter, contact microphone and computer have become as familiar in the world of music as the amplified instruments of rock'n' roll.
This year's Pulitzer Prize for music has just gone to Harvard's Leon Kirchner, 48, for his "String Quartet No. 3," which used electronic sound on tape, sometimes as background to the conventional strings, sometimes as a fifth instrument.
Media:
Kirchner, a musical conservative, feels it is the artist's responsibility "to get to know all the media," but he quips that he went electronic "because
everybody else had given it up for dead." Indeed, the frenzy that surrounded the experiments of the '5Os and early '60s has subsided. Electronic music has been around long enough to develop its own cliches. But the most important developments-now that the technological beachhead has been established- are yet
to come. Already the accomplishment is impressive. The University of Toronto's
recent "Bibliography of Electronic Music" lists 1,562 books and articles on the subject. And English critic Hugh Davies has counted at least 150 electronic studios around the world and a total production, in the medium's first twenty years, of more than 4,000 compositions.
Scrounging:
Since Harvard does not have a studio-unlike some 50 other American universities from North Texas State to Smith to Catholic University-Kirchner prepared his material at the studio of a former student, Morton Subotnick, now teaching at New York University. In the early '60s Subotnick had
helped assemble one of the first independent studios, the San Francisco Tape
Music Center. "We scrounged our equipment from fire sales and insurance auctions," remembers Subotnick, who now works with a transistorized modular unit
built by the tape center's Donald Buchla.
The "Buchla Box" is an electronic composer's dream, a studio the size of a suitcase. It replaces the hodgepodge of gear with which the pioneer composers of the '50s played mad scientist. The components of the Buchla module include:
oscillators to generate sine waves, square waves and "white noise"; filters to shape these waves; and controls to specify the pitch, intensity, attack, duration and decay of every tone. Guided by Subotnick, Kirchner produced his tape in three days- with the old equipment it would have taken a year." Efficiency and ease of operation is a major part of electronic music's recent advance.
The technological breakthrough began with the tape recorder in the early '5Os. Experimenters during the '30s had tried drawing sound on optical film tracks. And they had tried manipulating vinyl records-play a 33 at 78 rpm and Caruso becomes Donald Duck. But not until tape did the composer have easy, direct access to a world of new sounds.
The new medium was quickly explored at radio stations in Paris, Cologne
and Milan and at Columbia University. Pierre Schaeffer, an engineer at the French Radio, dubbed his research musique concrete, the opposite of abstract
music since the composer worked directly with sound. Schaeffer insisted that only natural sound, like rain, traffic and violins, be used and that these sounds be transformed by speed, direction changes and editing so that their origins could not be recognized. At the West German Radio, Karlheinz Stockhausen insisted that only electronically generated sound could be used. In 1953 Columbia Professors Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening were commissioned by the Louisville Symphony to do the first piece for orchestra and tape recorder. "Through the '5Os," Ussachevsky recalls, everyone was very isolated. Few people saw the possibilities."
Punched Tape:
While there was no rush to the electronic bandwagon, by 1956 Lejaren Hiller had programed a computer at the University of Illinois to compose a string quartet. And the year before, RCA had unveiled its quarter-million-dollar Synthesizer, a wall-to-wall monster whose oscillators and filters were controlled by punched paper tape. Princeton's Milton Babbitt, 51, the only composer ever to master the Synthesizer, praised the precision and control the machine provided. Babbitt's "Ensembles," he said, could not have been played on
traditional instruments, "so complex are the rhythms, the speeds and successions. In 1959 the Synthesizer became the gem of the nation's first university studio, the joint Princeton-Columbia facility, founded with a $175,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Edgard Varese and John Cage, working independently, also made important early contributions. Both had been calling for the invention of electrical instruments that would, as Cage put it in 1937, "make available for music any and all sounds that can be heard." Varese's "Deserts" (1954) for tape and orchestra remains, with Stockhausen's Song of the Youths" and Babbitt's "Vision and Prayer," one of the few electronic master-works. In 1958 Varese's "Poeme electronique" explored the spatial possibilities offered by loudspeakers- using 400- in the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair.
Fishing: Cage, 54, quickly abandoned tape and began working in what is now called "live electronics." Today he speaks of composing as if it were a "fishing expedition"- the selection of appropriate circuitry. "Sound is vibration and everything on this earth is vibrating. So there is no earthly reason why we can't hear everything."
Indeed, nature is yielding some strange music these days. At Brandeis University, composer Alvin Lucier has applied electrodes to the skull in order to draw music from amplified alpha rhythms in the brain. He has also tuned into those electromagnetic disturbances which scientists call "whistlers," "tweeks" and "bonks" that bounce off the ionosphere and hurry at great speeds between the
poles. Sweden's Karl-Birger Blomdahl had made music from the "birdsong" emanating from satellites and from magnetic storms caused by the sun's activities. Gordon Mumma declares he would like to orchestrate the earth's seismic disturbances. "There is all that wiggy area, like wave periods of the ocean, to go into."
The computer will revolutionize several aspects of music. There are at least 45 projects already under way in the country dealing with everything from computer composition to score printing. Yale musicologist Allen Forte sees computer analysis leading, eventually, to a "metatheory of musical structure. But even thinking about that right now frightens me." The International Federation for Information Processing recently announced a competition for music written by computer. And James Tenney at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn looks to the day when programs of great sophistication will let the composer concentrate on the larger outlines of a piece and ask the computer to fill in the details.
Complexities:
The first musically significant composition using computer-generated sound, J.K. Randall's "Variations for Violin and Computer," premiered in Philadelphia last month. Randall, professor of music at Princeton, uses a refinement of the program originally developed by Bell Telephone Labs' Max Mathews and JR. Pierce in 1959 to assist in communications research. The last two minutes alone of Randall's "Variations"-"a display of the complexities computers make possible"-consumed nine hours of computer time. At a commercial rate of $600 an hour, computer music is therefore terribly expensive, although less complex "scores" can he computed much faster.
So far, computer composers have been handicapped because they don't know precisely what makes sound "interesting." The common criticism, that it all sounds electronic-like colliding spaceships, the rattle of rusty nails or, at worst, the mundane Hammond organ-is partly justified. But, Randall points out, "it's hard to listen to sound for what it is. If an event doesn't sound like anything you've ever heard before, then you're likely to call it electronic or say it came from outer space.
The composer is also hampered in exploring the computer-as-instrument because he cannot play it in real time, the way he plays a piano. He must wait hours or even days for his job to run and be converted. "Imagine trying to learn
the clarinet," suggests Marvin Minsky, head of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Group. "Every time you put it to your mouth, you must wait nine hours to hear what you've played."
Max Mathews has written a program which accepts a "score" written with a light pen and produces sound after a delay of only 50 seconds. "Our effort" reports John Chowning of Stanford University, "is to make the machine accommodate itself to the musician, not the reverse. We would like to develop input techniques that are much more gestural and musical, say, than punching cards."
Modest:
Meanwhile, electronic-music studios are "sprouting up around the country like dandelions in the spring." So says Wayne Barlow, who has convinced the arch-conservative Eastman School of Music that electronics belongs in the curriculum. In 1962 there were only a handful in the country, but the modular units built by Buchla and Robert Moog of Trumansburg, N.Y., make modest studios, with a couple of tape decks, available for an outlay of $10,000 to $15,000.
The popularization of electronics and the proliferation of studios worry some composers. "The new equipment makes it too easy to diddle around," says Ussachevsky. "Never before in history has everybody been able to play the most elementary exercises and pass them off as compositions."
Stirring:
Yale's Mel Powell, 44, at work with tape since 1959, believes the time has come to integrate electronic music into the mainstream of musical history. "We 'veterans' have achieved our technological finesse," he says. "We can say the hell with twirling the dials, let's have something happen. Our problems are still immense, but they are the traditional problems: how to use our resources to make beautiful, stirring music."