Archives - 1969

Archives Main | 1969

 

Toronto Telegram

January 11, 1969

It's switched-on Bach
By Peter GODDARD

The first fact that had to be faced in 20th century music was Schoenberg's "emancipation of dissonance."
Gone was the comfortable Wagnerian purple musical prose. The next fact was what avant-gardist John Cage called "the emancipation of music from its note". Silence was musical; Sheer noise was musical; even LaMonte Young's work for some thousand equal whacks by a wooden spoon on a cast iron frying pan was musical.
And now; ah, NOW. Music is slowly being emancipated from its aesthetic and history. A sweeping statement this. But after Robert Ashley's Heat, which consists both of throat sounds and electronic wooshes on tape, or Richard Maxfield's Steam, an opus built on steam issuing from a radiator or when David Tudor assaulted a piano with chisel, rubber hammer and bicycle chain, it's a statement that becomes truer with every new oscillator.

That electronic music should explore its own field of sound rather than imitate instrumental or notated music was inevitable. That is, until Columbia Records released Switched-On Bach.

This unabashed compendium of back-to-Bach hits (with some 'misses' included for good measure) is the biggest musical non-event since Tiny Tim. From Sleepers Wake, Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, Air on the G string, the C minor and E-flat major preludes, the Two-Part Inventions in F major and B-flat major to the marvellous madness of the Third Brandenburg Concerto, not a note, inflection or articulation is missing.
The precision is almost inhumanly accurate-in fact, is inhumanly accurate. Performed on a Moog Synthesizer, everything is scientifically computed to a zero point zero accuracy.

An electronic music studio in miniature, the Moog Synthesizer is musicology's equivalent of the portable, transistor radio. Its three-octave, electronic-action keyboard, and umbillical-like system of patch-cords fits neatly into one package.
And from the synthesizer there can come a bizarre array of noise-pure sound without any over-tones (sines waves, square and saw-tooth waves) and complex sound with an infinity of over-tones (white noise). Very complex; but the instrument is designed to simplify matters.

Switched-On Bach becomes a fully realized idea that simply bursts its own boundaries. Here clarity is not the enemy of magic. Each line of Bach countralpuntal obstacle courses can easily be picked out; each note sounds so immaculately placed it is as if it were suspended there on a string.

But the record tries not to be serious, but likeable. Listening to the Inventions and the Preludes and Fugues is exhausting and envigorating in roughly equal proportions: If it is possible to romp fastidiously, this record does it.
Bach's music has long been considered a bunch of bones to be fleshed out by various instruments. Mozart in 1782 took several Bach figures and arranged them for string trio.

And the electronic medium brings its own resources: Bright sonorities, crisp technique, cantilevered dynamics and an ability to create a musical matrix in which every part meshes but remains separate.

Slow moving, long-winded phrases are another matter. And too often those on Air on the G String, Sleepers Wake and Jesu, Joy conjure up visions of an ambulance siren, disappearing around a corner on the way to the infirmary. Now, I like ambulance sirens, - but on ambulances.

Nothing surpasses the record's version of the Third Brandenburg. This out-bleats and out-chugs the now almost mythical achievement by the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. Not that the two performances can be compared.

To some extent a record can be judged by measuring its performance against the original score. But there is nothing against which to measure this Third Brandenburg. And if it was intended as a parody, it parodies nothing but itself.
Between the outer movements of the piece it reaches some sort of climax. Here on two chords, we arrive at a dizzying cadenza. Over a background of electronic gurgles are enough Baroque cliches to fill a treatise; as if a mad musicologist, driven crazy over Pergolesi, wandered down to a deserted calliope and played until dawns.
But the, force behind the record is neither mad nor in musicology - and the record thrives because of it. Walter Carlos, a young American recording engineer and physicist, put the record together piece by piece at home. Previous to this, his only musical endeavor was the supervision of the Schaefer beer commercial.
Assisted by musicologist Benjamin Folkman, Carlos spliced together endless yards of recording tape.
"When I heard the first cut," Robert Moog said, "I didn't know it was going to be an album. I doubt if they did. But when it was done I took the finished tape to a meeting of an audio-engineering society. The reaction was tremendous."
Prior to the release of Switched-On Bach, Moog's 30-man factory in Trumansburg, N.Y. had turned out just over 100 synthesizers. Suddenly, in a classical music market swamped with Satie revivals and Mahler cycles, the record became what is unfashionably known as a best-seller.
And Moog found himself a little less avant-anything. "Previously, about half of our synthesizers were in universities. Twenty-five percent could be found in commercial studios and the rest in the hands of private individuals. Now, we even have an order for one from the Chicago Public Schools.

"But everybody has been trying to build a smaller, more portable unit. Vladimir Ussachevsky (at the Columbia University electronic studio) has worked for years trying to create one; and we are beginning to work on something smaller, something you could carry around as a suitcase."
He talked on of recent developments, of computer-controlled units, of the Syn-Ket designed by Paul Ketoff in Rome which is one step closer to a portable electronic studio.

He thought for a moment: "I think that we will have simplified the synthesizer to the point where it will be ready for concert performance - you
know, one man on stage with the instrument. Think of the possibilities..."
I thought. Already it is being rumored (mostly by Glenn Gould) that Carlos is "musing upon the box-office potential of Massed Synthesizer concerts." And think of the ads. 'No home should be without one.'