replacing Hardly Baked whose feed is broken for reasons unknown. Original Hardly Baked + archive are here http://hardlybaked.blogspot.com/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good" - Eno
Showing posts with label ELECTRONIC MUSIC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ELECTRONIC MUSIC. Show all posts
Jump to 18.55 for the amazing "Farewell to A Hill" by Alice Shields - "a piece made in mourning for the death of a loved one", whose components include "electronically manipulated harpsichords, the sounds of small bells, and the cries of mallards."
This YouTube upload above is the quadraphonic version of the album (in fact this may be the only version of the album as originally on vinyl).
Which obviously is not going to come through on your or my computer / phone / tablet / whatever, but nonetheless - pretty fuckin' cool.
Look at her holding her own amongst all these besuited ancient blokes at Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center
Although there is another female composer in there - Pril Smiley? (also on the album)
More top tunes from Ms Shields
Having done some beak music on "Farewell To A Hill", she did some muzzle music with "Coyote, For Tape" (1981), which - you guessed it - incorporates the sound of that loping near-lupine, which occasionally can be seen in this very neighborhood of ours here in eastern Los Angeles...
In 1966 she composed a piece called "Wildcat Songs" - not a tape piece, so no actual wildcats involved, but using a text from a Native American shaman.
I dimly recall that someone we met in LA once had a story about a mountain lion settling and sunning itself on the diving board of their swimming pool.
We know several people who've had bears rummaging through their garbage cans of a night.
Actually a good mate of mine, a Brit expat here, just posted a picture of a bear sitting up in a tree - don't recall if it was his own back garden, or while out on a hike, but... let's just say, I for one would not have lingered there brandishing my cellphone and snapping away....
"El's Aria", another early piece, incorporating tape alongside instruments, appears on this unlikely looking release on Opus One, a label not unlike CRI in terms of being a home for modern composers
Among Shields's later works, there are Apocalypse - An Electronic Opera and Shenandoah - Three Electronic Works
Playlist of Alice Shields tunes plus other American female electronic composers
As is too often the case, there is a lot more electronic and tape-based - or electronic/tape inclusive compositions - by Shields that never got released, especially the earlier work.
There's two kinds of early electronic composition and musique concrete type that I really really love, and can't get enough of...
First is the kind I associate with the late '50s and the 1960s, with this echoey, heavy-reverb sound, and a sense of sinister space
This is a later-than-that example, it's actually from the end of the 1970s, so consequently a bit cleaner sounding - less misty - but it does have the quality of sound-blips receding into the recesses of the cosmos
This one from 1964 by the same composer is a bit more like it
As is this, again by Andres Lewin-Richter, but this time in collab with opera singer Anna Ricci
Quite a lot of Radiphonic type stuff has this vibe, also Matsuo Ohno's work, the Dutch chappies at the Philips studio, and some of the Columbia-Princeton lot
With the early stuff, a lot of it is down to plate reverb, I think - vibrations off sheet metal
And the second type of avant-electronic / tape-magic I really dig, can't get enough of?
That is a kind that peaks a little later on, in the 1970s. The soundspace is drier - and brighter (almost shadowless). Hard to describe, but it really feels like a totally new language for music is being invented - yet it's oddly palatable, not grating or dissonant. There's a slippery, trickly way to how sounds distribute themselves in space. The plinks and blips and labial plops, it's like the language of an alien lifeform. Here's a good example - the entire album, tracks by both Bulent Arel and Daria Semegen.
More Semegen crinkletronica
This piece by Iván Patachich also coming from the same place
As is this - actually much earlier (1959) - example by one of the Dutch chappies, Henk Badings. A bit clunkier but has some of the 'alien language' properties and that shadowless sound-stage
Yet another example, more glowing and less clearly contoured (although the Ann Southam I would really like to play here is actually "The Reprieve" - which you can hear here)
And this by Morton Subotnik is kind of in the same zone as Arel / Semegen but more sproingy and percussively agitated
Now this piece by Edgardo Canton has qualities of both "types" - it's foggy, murky, but it also has the trickly alien-language quality
Edgardo Canton, Andres Lewin-Richter, Matsuo Ohno, Iván Patachich, and Arel / Semegen are all in the Creel Pone canon, although Electronic Music For Dance I came across independently, on vinyl, before it got Creeled.
Both types, I seem to have a bottomless appetite for...
Now I wonder if I can distinguish any other strands...
I know what I don't have a bottomless appetite for - and that I find a bit ear-chafing.... It's when composers -including some whose 1960s-1970s work I love - enter the digital age. There's a sort of common sound-palette, an over-arching macro-texture, that every composer seems to succumb to, because of the nature of the technology. Lots of sibilant, wispy, high-frequency sounds. A glassiness too. Too much detail, too much miniaturized motion in the soundscape. Too much to take in. It's exhausting in the same way that CGI and post-Pixar animation is. But mostly it just tickles the ears, all that wispiness - and it feels samey, like everyone has the same basic palette.
But not samey in the way that the Two Types stuff is samey-but-good.
Examples of digi-wispi-tronika
This one especially from about 9 minutes in
This from Bernie P especially from about 12.30 mins in
This too
Here's what I wrote some years ago about the evolution of Parmegiani from the tape-snipping phantasmagorias of his early work to the digital-superpowers phase:
"Some of this Rabelaisian rawness seems to fade as Parmegiani's work enters the digital era. He was among the first at GRM to embrace the new technology, but admits that although the shift from "scissors to mouse" involved huge gains on the time-saving and hassle-reduction fronts, there were also obscure losses.
"Listening to "Sons-Jeux", a piece whose original 1998 version was made to commemorate musique concrete's 50th Anniversary, there are spectacular effects in terms of the transformation of material: insect sounds turn into human voices and a babble of agitated male speech gets whisked into an iridescent foam of voice-cellules
(like molecular gastronomy if human souls were its raw ingredients).
"Yet permeating the seemingly infinite variety of textures is a hard-to-put-your-finger-on homogeneity, like garments that are wildly different in shape yet cut from the identical fabric. For some reason, digital technology seems to exacerbate concrete's already-existing bias towards certain sound-textures--plinky liquidity, slithery sibilance (perhaps because these sorts of sounds least resemble those of acoustic instrumental provenance?).
"Returning to the earlier analogy [with Parmegiani's pre-composer work as photomontagist), you could say that digital sound parallels the advances in animation made by the likes of Pixar (plus all those action thrillers so CGI-riddled they are virtually animations incorporating human actors). Massive increments in terms of mindblowing verging-on-3D effects, microscopic detail and sheer density of simultaneous events are offset by the loss of analogue grain, an insidious seamlessness and sameyness.
"Whereas the Sixties and Seventies Parmegiani regularly provokes the I-can't-believe-my-ears of a true sound-sorcerer in action, some of the latterday pieces approach numbing overload."
"In 1969, with the assistance of a Guggenheim fellowship that he had been awarded in 1967, he began a 10-year residency at the computer-controlled electronic music studio of the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Here, he began working with the GROOVE Computer System, which made it possible have real-time control over both music and lighting effects. With this program, he composed Phosphones (1971), his first collaboration with the Mimi Garrard Dance Company. This established the beginning of a long collaboration that Ghent had with Garrard and her husband, kinetic sculptor James Seawright. The score of Phosphones contained two tracks, a music track and a lighting one, which was an integral part of the composition. Phosphones was the first of five collaborations between Garrard and Ghent that took place between 1971 and 1974. In 1974, he began to create computer programs that would be equipped to make certain choices about pitch and rhythm. The computer came a “co-composer” of sorts." - from this obituary at New Music USA
Dr. Emmanuel Ghent: We were doing all sorts of experimenting with what kinds of sounds we could make and how to control them. I think the first piece I wrote there (at Bell Labs) was using African drumming rhythms. It was called Battery Park. It’s based on standard African rhythms, except that the pitches of the drums are changing. Also, around that time I wrote a piece for violin called Helices. A lot of it was made on a kind of semi-random basis, where you could turn dials and change events within the piece. It was not very well controlled. But to come up to where I began getting the computer to compose, that comes up a few years later.... In 1970 I started working with some electronic circuits that Max [Mathews] had built, which made drumlike sounds. He called them resonants.... I used those to write a piece called Phosphones. At the same time it occurred to me that if we could use the computer to make music, if we had some way of translating the what are called ‘functions of time’, into some way of controlling theatrical lights, we could also control the lighting. Synchronize them. So that’s when Jimmy (Seawright) and I got the idea of “Hey, maybe we could even get the GROOVE program to also punch out paper tape which we could hook up to this old machine over here…” (the coordinome, invented by Ghent, described earlier in the discussion).
There is not a huge amount of Ghentronica readily available in the world but another composition "Hex, an Ellipsis" for trumpet, instruments, and tape can be heard right here
There's this electro-acoustic work, Helices.
"The electronic tape was composed at the Bell Telephone Laboratories with the user of the GROOVE program and a Honeywell DDP 224 computer."
Ghent did the audio to this Lillian Schwartz work from 1971, "UFO's" (which she made with Ghent's Bell Labs colleague Ken Knowlton)
Ghent also contributed to this recording
"released in 1969 in response to the first moon landing"
I stumbled on this motherlode of Ghentronica disguised as a Boosey & Hawkes library record
Emmanuel Ghent, a significant contributor to the development of computer music and a noted psychoanalyst, died on Sunday, March 30. He was 77. His daughter, Valerie Ghent, explained that his death “was very unexpected and we are all still very much in shock.” She went on to describe her father as “an innovator, an inventor, a composer, a programmer, a brilliant analyst, and dearly loved and deeply loving man.”
Composer and vocalist Joan LaBarbara added: “Manny was more than a musician. For some of us, he was our protector and confessor; he guarded our souls, our demons and our private spaces and took our secrets with him. His gentle smile and quiet wisdom will remain in our hearts.”
Born in Montréal on May 15, 1925, Ghent’s interest in music began when he was 14 years old. He played timpani in the school orchestra and began arranging and composing works for small chamber ensembles. He further developed his talents by taking classes at the McGill Conservatory of Music while he pursued a major in biochemistry at the university. Balancing these two separate passions would define the rest of his dual-career. After receiving his bachelor of science, he attended the McGill University Faculty of Medicine for four years and graduated with highest honors as an M.D. in 1950. The next year, 1951, he moved to New York City, where he studied at the W.A. White Institute. He received his diploma in psychoanalysis in 1956. In 1961, he was hired as a faculty member at New York University and became an American citizen in 1962.
Between 1946 and 1960, very little of Ghent’s time was devoted to composition. He wrote a few chamber pieces including three duos for flutes, a wind quintet, and a string quartet, but it wasn’t until he completed a quartet for winds in 1960 that composition re-entered his life with the same importance it had held for him in high school. At this point, he began private studies in composition with Ralph Shapey. In addition to the influence of Shapey’s own music, Ghent was inspired greatly by the work of Edgard Varèse and Igor Stravinksy. Throughout the 1960s, he primarily composed chamber works that engaged multi-tempo rhythmic relationships and intervallic harmonic/melodic structuring. Often these pieces involved spatial separation between players. In order to help his players stay together in such adverse conditions, he invented the “coordinome,” a tape device that decoded one aggregate signal into individual tracks, which was transmitted to the performers via an earphone, allowing them to each have a personal conductor of sorts and maintain independent tempi and meters. Composer Morton Subotnick was working at the Bell Labs while Ghent was there. “My time with Manny was in the late 60’s, a time of experimentation, change, and excitement,” he remembers. “But, with all the change over the years, some memories remain fixed. Watching Manny work with the musicians wearing headphones and playing to independent click tracks is a memory fixed forever.”
This predilection for inventing new musical technologies attracted Ghent to the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center and in 1969, with the assistance of a Guggenheim fellowship that he had been awarded in 1967, he began a 10-year residency at the computer-controlled electronic music studio of the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Here, he began working with the GROOVE Computer System, which made it possible have real-time control over both music and lighting effects. With this program, he composed Phosphones (1971), his first collaboration with the Mimi Garrard Dance Company. This established the beginning of a long collaboration that Ghent had with Garrard and her husband, kinetic sculptor James Seawright. The score of Phosphones contained two tracks, a music track and a lighting one, which was an integral part of the composition. Phosphones was the first of five collaborations between Garrard and Ghent that took place between 1971 and 1974. In 1974, he began to create computer programs that would be equipped to make certain choices about pitch and rhythm. The computer came a “co-composer” of sorts. He also became interested in amplification of traditional acoustic instruments and often used them in conjunction with his electronic tracks. In the late ’70s, he revitalized his fascination with intervallic relationships and began constructing computer programs that dealt with the realization of intervallic groupings. The programs that he created were integral to the development of computer music and continue to be influential today. Throughout his career he also collaborated with a variety of artists including composers Ben Johnston and Ornette Coleman, sculptor Peter Nicholson, choreographer Gladys Baylin, filmmakers Lillian Schwartz and Ken Knowlton, trumpeter Ronald Anderson, violinist Paul Zukofsky, and violist John Graham.
Recordings of his music are available on Wergo, Capstone, and West Street Records and his music is published by the Oxford University Press and Subito. Shortly before his death, his daughter Valerie, a record producer, vocalist, and keyboardist, released a recording of “Songs for Children and All Their Friends,” a set of 23 songs that Ghent had written on the occasion of the birth of his youngest daughter, Theresa, in 1967. By the end of 2003, the New York Public Library Music Research division plans to make all of Ghent’s works, which he had already had transferred from analog to digital formats, available online.
And while his musical biography seems rich enough to fill up his days, Ghent maintained a part time psychotherapy practice through all of this and was also a Clinical Professor of Psychology at the Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis at NYU. In 1988, he was instrumental founding NYU’s Relational Orientation program in psychoanalytic theory. He was also a < Supervising Analyst at the W.A. White Institute, an associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues: A Journal of Relational Perspectives, and a member of the International Association of Relational Psycholanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP). He is also credited with the creation of the JLIST Computer Program and Database: A Psychoanalytic Journal Bibliographic and Information Retrieval System. According to his daughter Valerie, even at the time of his passing he was still “teaching, writing, supervising, editing, and planning many projects.” He was in the middle of teaching the first semester of a class he had developed called “Psychoanalysis and Buddhism.” He was a practicing Buddhist himself. He was an avid lecturer and writer on both musical and psychoanalytical topics.
