Conlon Nancarrow, circa 1946

(unattributed photograph)

‘Tango?’

Conlon Nancarrow (1983)

Performed and recorded on the Ampico Bösendorfer Grand in the possession of Juergen Hocker, which was restored under the supervision of Nancarrow

‘Tango?’

Conlon Nancarrow (1983)

Performed by Cheryl Seltzer in the late 1980s

‘Piece for Ligeti’

Performed and recorded on the Ampico Bösendorfer Grand in the possession of Juergen Hocker, which was restored under the supervision of Nancarrow

‘String Quartet No. 3′

Conlon Nancarrow (Arditti Quartet) [Part One]

‘String Quartet No. 3′

Conlon Nancarrow (Arditti Quartet) [Part Two]

‘A Sense of Place’ (January 1994)

Documentary about Nancarrow by Helen Borten.

Reynolds: Varese said something like that in response to the comment that his motivic and harmonic construction was static. He made an analogy to spatial relationships, that he took a single sound object and turned it around, looked at it metaphorically from different sides. When he used the sirens in Ionization, though, no matter how he insisted it was an abstract sound, it became concrete.

Nancarrow: My use of canon has an analagous motivation. I was interested, the other day, when you discussed the use of sounds in music, and their freedom from representational concepts. I always felt that the sirens were problematic. Of course, this was one of the traps of early (and some later) electronic music. A fart is a fart.

(Reynolds, 1984, 5)

Conlon Nancarrow, Study No. 49c (excerpt)

‘Study for Player Piano No. 37′

Conlon Nancarrow

Performed and recorded on the Ampico Bösendorfer Grand in the possession of Juergen Hocker, which was restored under the supervision of Nancarrow.

Nancarrow: There were no models. I started out more or less feeling my way. The first fifteen or twenty studies were just feeling my way. Also, another thing I had to do was feel my way whilst learning what those player pianos could do: how fast they could repeat a note and how many notes they could hold down at one time. A hundred different things, which took some time to get used to, also. Originally I started out thinking just of polyrhythms with a more or less fixed tempo within that. It was much later that the idea of polytempo started to develop. One thing led to another.

(Duckworth, 1995, 46)

Further resources

An interview with Nancarrow by Bruce Duffie in 1987 – here

Excellent research on Nancarrow in both English and German compiled by Jurgen Hocker – here

Thorough resources about Nancarrow by his assistant Carlos Sandoval – here

Milton Babbitt

(unattributed photograph)

“But getting back to the more crucial issue, when I think about a piece, of course I think in twelve-tone terms. I don’t think about the fact that it’s not fashionable. It never really was. I find that always very funny about Schoenberg. His music was never fashionable and now it’s considered old-fashioned. Honestly I don’t want to seem to be heroic about this, but it never occurs to me whether this is fashionable or not. This is my language. This is what interests me more. This is where I still find things that I’ve never thought of before. And so it’s going to be” 

(Duckworth, 1995, 82-83)

‘Portrait of a serial composer’.

Unfinished documentary about Babbitt by Robert Hilferty.

“But when the chips are down, for me the term “academic” simply suggest the most imaginative disciplined, the most responsibly problematical, the most informedly advanced activity. It is in so many other fields, and that’s what I take it to be in music, too. I’m not going to say I’m noyt an academic composer. I’m an academic composer in the sense that the academy makes it possible for me to write the music I want to. It has never imposed on me in the slightest”

(Duckworth, 1995, 89)

“I had cast longing eyes and ears toward the electronic medium some twenty years earlier, when I attempted to work in the medium of the handwritten soundtrack, which had been developed in the twenties in Europe—mainly in Germany—as the result of an awareness that originated with recording itself: that, unless you are a firm believer in musical ghosts in the talking machine, whatever was recorded of musical instruments, the voice, or any source of sound could be implanted on the disc, or on film, without such acoustical sources. This was accomplished on film by a mixture of drawing and photography; all that was missing were composers who needed the medium sufficiently to apply themselves to mastering a new, refractory instrument. But for most composers it appeared to be only an almost unbelievable possibility, technologically mysterious while providing resources which did not yet correspond to needs. So, the technology did not effect a revolution in music; the revolution in musical thought was yet to demand the technological means.”

(Babbitt, 1991)

“Granting to music the position accorded other arts and sciences promises the sole substantial means of survival for the music I have been describing. Admittedly, if this music is not supported, the whistling repertory of the man in the street will be little affected, the concert-going activity of the conspicuous consumer of musical culture will be little disturbed. But music will cease to evolve, and, in that important sense, will cease to live.”

(Babbitt, 1958)

Further resources

‘A Fine Madness’, article about Babbitt by Greg Sandlow – here

An interview with Milton Babbitt on KPFA radio, November 15, 1984 – here

Henri Chopin

(unattributed photograph)

‘Chercher’ (1974)

‘When I put the microphone into the mouth I have simultaneously five sounds: the air and the liquid in the mouth, the respiration in the nose, the air between each tooth and the respiration in the lungs … In 1974 I put into my stomach a very small microphone and it was a discovery – the body is always like a factory! It never stops – there’s no silence!’

(Chopin, 1992)

‘La Civilisation du Papier’ (1963)

Henri Chopin

(unattributed video)

Further resources

Obituary of Henri Chopin published by the Guardian – here

Henri Chopin website (German) – here

Henri Chopin on Ubuweb – here

Igor Stravinsky

(unattributed photograph)

R.C.  Have you any further observations to make about electronic ‘music’?

I.S.  I would still repeat the criticisms I made of it two years ago – namely, I do not see why a medium so rich in sound possibilities should sound so poor; and, though shape and composition are more in evidence and the liaisons more convincing in the newer pieces, the impression of desultoriness is still a main impression. At the same time the newer electronic music has more direction – a fact I attribute to the clearer division between those who are trying to create a new and purely electronic sound and those who are trying to transform existing sounds, instrumental and otherwise; some attractive results have been attained on both sides of this split. Now, however, with the appearance of the R.C.A. synthesizer the whole electronic music experiment set up to the present can only be regarded as a pre-natal stage in its development. 

[...] Perhaps the real future of electronic music is in the theatre. Imagine the ghost scene in Hamlet with electronic ‘white noise’ entering the auditorium from several directions (Berio’s Omaggio a Joyce is perhaps a preview of this kind of thing). But this is very theatricality – which electronicians will object to as more for the effect of another art than for the thing itself – exposes another problem.  ’Concerts’ of electronic music are, in fact, more like seances. With nothing to look at on the stage – no exhibition of orchestra and conductor, but only conduit-speaker boxes and, suspended from the ceiling, mobile reflectors – what is the audience to look at? Surely not anything as arbitrary as the ‘symbolic’ colours and pictures of the San Francisco ‘Vortex’ experiment?

I have uncovered a Diaghilev letter that should be of at least historical interest in the discussion of ‘Futuristic’ music, music concrete, and electronic music. It is dated Rome, 8 March 1915, and was sent to me at the Hotel Victoria, Chateau d’Oex, Switzerland. It is naive, of course, but not more so than the ‘Futuristic’ composers themselves; and it is a good example of Diaghilev’s flair.

[...] dance action must be supported not by music but by sounds, id est,  by filling the ears harmonically. The source of this ‘filling’ should not be recognizable. The changes of these harmonic junctures, or liaisons, must not be remarked by the ear – one sound merely joins or enters another, id est, there is no obvious rhythm whatsoever, because one does not hear either the beginning or end of the sound. The projected instruments are: bells wrapped round with cloth and other material, aeolian harps, guzli, sirens, tops and so on. Of course all this has to be worked out, but for that purpose Marinetti proposes we get together for some days in Milan and discuss it with the leader of their ‘orchestra’, and examine all their instruments. Also he guarantees that at this time he will bring Pratella to Milan so he can show us his newest works which are, according to him formidables. We could do it between the 15th and 20th of March.

Telephone me at Naples, Hotel Vesuvio, if you can come to meet us in Milan. You will see many new Futuristic studios; from there we will go together to Montreux. I urge you very strongly to come – it is very important for the future . I will send you some money for the trip immediately. As for the concert of Prokofiev in Geneva, he can give it as a benefit for the Serbs if he is busy on the 20th. Then, until we meet soon,

je t’embrasse,

SERIOSHA

PS. Compose Noces quickly. I am in love with it.”

(Stravinsky, 1958, 228-230)

Robert Craft comments on a 1949 dinner party and the relationship between Igor Stravinsky and Aldous Huxley:

“That sovereignty of scientific rationalism, the very blueprint of his intellectual heredity, is a planet away from I.S.’s mystagogical view of human existence. I.S. has not followed any science or philosophy of science since his reading of Bergson a half-century ago. It is for this reason, also, that he lives in terror all evening lest Mr. H. dwell on scientific deeds and books of which he has never heard. Yet I think that Mr. H. is as self-conscious of his own limitations in being unable to stem the flow of his thoughts long enough to approach the world of the other from the other’s bias. The two men watch each other like champions of two mutually incomprehensible games, but for basic toeholds rather than for gambits.”

(Craft, 1972, 10)

‘Lullaby and final hymn’ from the ‘Firebird Suite’ (1945)

Igor Stravinsky conducting the New Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall, London (1965)

Further resources

Igor Stravinsky, an autobiography – here

Hugh Le Caine at the Sackbut

Photograph © Canadian Electrical Engineering Division

Alcides Lanza explaining the work of Hugh Le Caine (April 6, 2004).

At the Hugh Le Caine collection, Museum of Science and Technology, Ottawa, Canada.

“Vascillating between music and physics, the former became the all-consuming interest of his life. With the invention of the electronic Sackbut in 1945, Hugh LeCaine opened the era of electronic music (the more widely-accepted advent of this music occurred three years later when the French engineer / composer Pierre Schaeffer recorded street sounds in Paris, combining them in various ways to form his “musique concrete”). The original Sackbut was the earliest form of the slide trumpet derived from the Roman buccina, which afterwards developed into the trombone. Although LeCaine’s work on the instrument began at home, NRC entered the picture in 1954, supporting it as a form of communication between scientists and artists.

“My primary concern,” Hugh once said, “was making an electronic instrument that was musically expressive.” The problem, he felt, lay in the cold, mechanical sounds of available electronic instruments. LeCaine’s answer was the construction of an extremely sensitive instrument which, unlike other keyboard instruments, could slur and slide from note to note, producing continuously variable sounds with an additional capacity for making constant tone, color and pitch adjustments. Musicians who have played it, maintain that its best feature is the way a note can be made louder by pressing a key harder or to waiver with a sideward movement of the finger; and it is adaptable to every kind of music. “

(Rickerd, 1977)

Hugh Le Caine – Dripsody: An Étude for Variable Speed Recorder (1955)

Composed in one night using a recording of a drop of water falling into a bucket, re-recorded at different speeds to produce the pitches of a pentatonic scale.

Hugh Le Caine – Dripsody Demonstration (1958)

A spoken explanation of the techniques used by Le Caine in his most famous piece, ‘Dripsody’.

Hugh Le Caine – Dripsody: An Étude for Variable Speed Recorder (1957)

A longer, stereo version of Le Caine’s previous composition.

Further resources

Gayle Young’s website about Hugh Le Caine - here

Still from Allures (1961), 16mm film by Jordan Belson. © Jordan Belson, courtesy Center for Visual Music

“The legendary Vortex Concerts conducted by Henry Jacobs and Jordan Belson at Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park from 1957 to 1960 were quintessential examples of lumia art integrated with sound in an intermedia environment. By present standards one could not ask for a more perfect setting. “Simply being in that dome was a holy experience,” said Belson. “The entire theatre was like an exquisite instrument.” And Jacobs recalls: “It was such an absurdly perfect situation that we just stopped altogether after we left the planetarium; when you begin with the ultimate there’s nowhere else to go.”

Vortex began in May, 1957, as a series of experimental and ethnic music concerts from tapes owned by Jacobs, a poet and composer of electronic music. Within a few weeks, however, he was joined by his friend Belson, and Vortex became an experiment in visual and acoustical space. The sixty-foot dome was surrounded at its perimeter by thirty-six loudspeakers clustered in equally-spaced stations of three speakers each. There were two large bass speakers on either side and one at the zenith of the dome. Speakers were installed in the center of the room, bringing the total close to fifty sound sources. “The acoustics were very unusual,” Belson remarked. “Very hushed, and you could hear any sound no matter how far away, as though it were right behind you, because sound carried over the dome.”

The planetarium engineering staff installed a substantial amount of equipment especially for Vortex, including an audio keyboard with controls for addressing individual speakers or spinning sounds rotationally about the room— thus the title of Vortex. In addition, Belson supervised the installation of special interference-pattern projectors that were added to the hundreds of projection devices already assembled. “One of my greatest pleasures,” said Belson, “was working with the star machine at a point when the entire dome was bathed in a kind of deep red. As the color began to fade away, there was a point when it overlapped with this beautiful starry sky; it was a breathtaking and dramatic moment.

“We could tint the space any color we wanted to. Just being able to control the darkness was very important. We could get it down to jet black, and then take it down another twenty-five degrees lower than that, so you really got that sinking-in feeling. Also we experimented with projecting images that had no motion-picture frame lines; we masked and filtered the light, and used images that didn’t touch the frame lines. It had an uncanny effect: not only was the image free of the frame, but free of space somehow. It just hung there three- dimensionally because there was no frame of reference. I used films— Hy Hirsh’s oscilloscope films, some images James Whitney was working on for Yantra, and some things which later went into Allures— plus strobes, star projectors, rotational sky projectors, kaleidoscope projectors, and four special dome-projectors for interference patterns. We were able to project images over the entire dome, so that things would come pouring down from the center, sliding along the walls. At times the whole place would seem to reel.”

Sound-to-image relationships amounted to counterpoint rather than what Jacobs calls “Mickey Mouse synchronization.” Vortex did not simply project sound into space, but employed dimensionality, direction, aural perspective, and speed of movement as musical resources. “Jordan controlled the performance with parameters of the time an image would begin, the amount of brightness, speed of rotation, and speed of enlargement. I would control the loudness of the sound, the equalization of the sound, and the spatiality of the sound.” Music ranged from Stockhausen, Berio, and Ussachevsky to Balinese and Afro-Cuban polyrhythms, set against the geometrical imagery characterized by Allures. Jacobs and Belson conducted approximately one-hundred Vortex concerts, including two weeks at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. In 1960 the planetarium withdrew its support and Vortex ended without ever realizing its full potential.”

(Youngblood, 1970, 388-390).
‘Expanded Cinema’ by Gene Youngblood, can be downloaded in full, here.

Further resources

For more information about Jordan Belson, including a DVD of his works, please visit the Centre for Visual Music website here.

An excellent post about Belson over at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art blog, by the archivist of the Centre for Visual Music, Cindy Keefer, here.

Harry Bertoia

(unattributed photograph)

‘Harry Bertoia’s Sculpture’ (1965)

Including pieces from the collection of W. Hawkins Ferry and the Federal Aviation Agency Dulles International Airport and Northwest National Life Insurance Company.

Sculpture music by Harry Bertoia

Produced, Directed, Filmed by Clifford B. West

“In the early 1970′s Designer and Sculptor Harry Bertoia and his son Val, made hundreds of sound sculptures. These sculptures represent Harry Bertoia’s formation of Sonambient.

Sonambient was Bertoia’s term to describe the spatial and tonal environment created by these sound sculptures.

Harry Bertoia created these sculptures of different shapes, length and thickness in order to achieve a range of gentle and sharp sounds. He experimented as a way to seek harmonic balance with the metal, resulting in pure, unique tones.

When touched, struck or brushed, these sculptures became abstractions of sound as they sway and knock against one another. The sounds are organic and mysterious, as tones resonate and flow into each other.

The completed Sonambient also consists of gongs and suspended sonic-bars. Within his renovated barn, Harry made more than 360 magnetic-tape recordings.”

From the Bertoia website, written by Harry Bertoia’s son, Val. More here.

Harry Bertoia – ‘Continuum’

(the A side of the LP ‘Near and Far’ released on Bertoia’s own label, ‘Sonambient’)

“Born in Italy in 1915, Bertoia eventually moved to Michigan, attended Cass Technical High School, where he was introduced to metals, and moved on to the Cranbrook Academy, where he met fellow student Clifford West. Shortly after his marriage in 1943 (West was his best man), Bertoia moved to California at the behest of his friend Charles Eames, and collaborated on the design of the famous ‘Eames Chair’ produced by Knoll Associates.

In the 1950s, he set up his own studio in Bally, Pennsylvania, where he designed the well-known ‘Bertoia Chair’, also for Knoll. Soon, he was experimenting with sculptures of different alloys and patinas, and would create ‘musique concrète’ soundscapes utilizing his sculptures. He died in 1978, a victim, says West, of heavy metal poisoning, acquired as a result of his constant proximity to metals and chemicals. 

 From a cinemagraphic and sound perspective, this is West’s most progressive film, as abstract in filmmaking technique as the sculptures themselves. Opening with the camera slowly moving over what appears to be the surface of the moon, it suddenly falls back to reveal instead the texture of a sculpture. The film is one of constant motion, resulting from the vertiginous movements of West’s camera, or the movement built into the sculptures themselves. The music, played by Bertoia, utilizing various objects alternately hammering or caressing his sculptures, is reminiscent of the work of Xenakis.”

Description from the Academic Film Archive of North America, here.

Further resources

The Harry Bertoia research project here

This post was inspired by this post

György Ligeti

(unattributed photograph)

“When you are accepted in a club, without willing [and] without noticing you take over certain habits [of thinking] what is in and what is out. Tonality was definitely out. To write melodies, even non-tonal melodies, was absolutely taboo. Periodic rhythm, pulsation, was taboo, not possible. Music has to be a priori. … It worked when it was new, but it became stale. Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.”

From a lecture by György Ligeti at the New England Conservatory in 1993, transcribed by Alex Ross, more here.

‘JT: But still, I accept that that is what happened, but you then chose your own path in your own way which would be the path of György Ligeti, rather than the path of any particular musical or intellectual school. 

GL: That’s true, but I never thought in this way. I’m not thinking in general philosophical or ideological methods or patterns or strategies. I have no strategy at all. It’s about writing a composition and then I am concentrating on a composition and I have certain constructive ideas. It’s not only naïve, it has to be consistent – not consistent as mathematics, consistent as a natural language. And this applies for a certain piece and then I am ready with the piece, and then comes the next piece where I revise my working method. I’m not thinking in party politics.’

From John Tulsa’s BBC interview with Gyorgy Ligeti, 06/07/2011, full transcript here.

György Ligeti: Portrait (1993)
Directed by Michel Chillon

György Ligeti - Artikulation (1958)

Further resources

A series of six interviews with Gyorgy Ligeti dating from 1972-1992 presented in Monk Mink Pink Punk zine, issue 9 – here

“Searching for Music’s Outer Limits”. by Alex Ross. New York Times, March 20, 1993 – here

Transcript of Richard Toop discussing Ligeti on ABC Radio National, 17th June 2006 – here

György Ligeti’s score for Poeme Symphonique, for 100 metronomes, 1962 – here

(unattributed photograph)

‘The innovation that distinguished Pierre Schaeffer’s work from earlier experiments was his isolation of the sound event (“l’objet musical”) by means of the recording process. The “compositional” techniques he employed to combine, repeat, transform, and organize his sound objects were a natural outgrowth of his long experience with the equipment of radio broadcasting. With this background, it was natural for him to view the significance of his work from a musical standpoint rather than as an application of technology. The early passages of A la recherche d’une musique concrete reveal Schaeffer’s interest in a “symphony of noises” and a “piano of noises.” The implication is that extra-musical sounds could be treated musically by determining  for them a familial or a scalar ordering, yet allowing them to retain the essence of their noise-like properties.’

From Electronic Music, 1948-1953 by Lowell Cross, 1968.

‘Bilude’ (1979)

Pierre Schaeffer

‘TH: But what is the exact moment at which something becomes music?

PS: This is a difficult question. If you had the complete answer you’d be a prophet. The traditional testimony is that a musical schema lent itself to being expressed in sound in more than one way. An example is that Bach sometimes composed without specifying the instruments: he wasn’t interested in the sound of his music. That’s music, a schema capable of several realisations in sound. The moment at which music reveals its true nature is contained in the ancient exercise of the theme with variations. The complete mystery of music is explained right there. Thus a second. a third a fourth variation were possible, which all kept the single idea of the theme. This is the evidence that with one musical idea you can have different realisations.’

From an interview with Pierre Schaeffer by Tim Hodgkinson, 2 May 1986
from ReR Quarterly magazine, volume 2, number 1, 1987. Full transcript here.

Pierre Schaeffer – L’Oiseau RAI (1950)

‘Nicolas Cage to Pierre Schaeffer’

Maxwellfan61 on Jan 5, 2009

Pierre Schaeffer working with the phonogene in his studio; taken circa 1948 by French photographer Serge Lido

Further resources

Michel Chion. Guide To Sound Objects. Pierre Schaeffer and Musical Research, English translation by John Dack and Christine North – here

David Tudor with materials for a realization of John Cage’s Cartridge Music at the Capitol Records studio in New York, ca 1962

© Earle Brown Music Foundation, http://www.earle-brown.org/ Photograph by Earle Brown.

An interview with John Cage & David Tudor for KPFA radio, conducted in French and English. This interview was recorded on May 29, 1972, a time at which both John Cage and David Tudor were on a European tour featuring performances in London, Bremen, Paris and other European cities.

David Tudor and John Cage in Japan, 1962. Photographer unknown.

“Being an instrumentalist carries with it the job of making certain physical preparations for the next instant, so I had to learn to put myself in the right frame of mind. I had to learn how to be able to cancel my consciousness of any previous moment in order to be able to produce the next one…”

David Tudor quoted in Kuivila, 1999.

David Tudor’s ‘Reunion’ premiere in 1968.

Marcel Duchamp Teeny Duchamp and John Cage playing chess
© Shigeko Kubota/ courtesy of Maya Stendhal Gallery , New York.

In 1973 I made “Rainforest IV” where the objects that the sounds are sent through are very large so that they have their own presence in space. I mean, they actually sound locally in the space where they are hanging as well as being supplemented by a loudspeaker system. The idea is that if you send sound through materials, the resonant nodes of the materials are released and those can be picked up by contact microphones or phono cartridges and those have a different kind of sound than the object does when you listen to it very close where it’s hanging. It becomes like a reflection and it makes, I thought, quite a harmonious and beautiful atmosphere, because wherever you move in the room, you have reminiscences of something you have heard at some other point in the space. It’s (can be) a large group piece actually, any number of people can participate in it. It’s important that each person makes their own sculpture, decides how to program it, and performs it themselves.

An Interview with David Tudor by Teddy Hultberg in Dusseldorf, May 17-18, 1988

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Sliding Pitches In The Rainforest In The Field: Rainforest Version IV(1973)   (51:58)
an electro-acoustic environment.

Further reading

David Tudor papers and related collections at the Getty Research Institute - here

A biography of David Tudor at the Lovely Music label – here

Presenting David Tudor, a conversation with Bruce Duffie on April 7th, 1986 – here