"the cries of mallards" (beak music #27)

 

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."

Update: now isolated for your convenience

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.

As is Alice Shields

Alice Shields is still alive! And still active.

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.  

Volti (Dance Piece No. 1), dance piece, tape (1966)

Walking on the Surface of the Sun, tape (1966)

Domino, dance piece, tape (1967)

My Feathers are Growing Longer, dance pieces, tape (1967) [for Loizeaux-Murphy Dance Company]

Dance Piece No. 2, dance piece, tape (1968) [for Mimi Garrard Dance Theatre]

Study for Voice and Tape (1968) [electronic music with Shields’ prerecorded voice on tape, on poem by Shields]

Dance Piece No. 3, dance piece, tape (1969) [for Mimi Garrard Dance Theatre]

The Transformation of Ani, tape (1970)

Farewell to a Hill, tape (1975) [using bells, ducks, and electronic sounds]

Bicycle Music, film score, tape (1977) [for film on sculptor Helene Brandt, using the sounds of Brandt's bicycle sculptures]

Coyote, tape (1980) [using wolf-calls, coyotes, and manipulated human voices; from the opera "Shaman"]

El’s Aria, soprano, flute and tape (1983)

The Black Lake, tenor, cello and tape (1984) [text: Edward Barrett]

Rhapsody (an homage to Brahms), piano and tape (1984)

Voices, computer music (1989) [created on SUN computer]

Icarus and 4-H Club: Two Radio Plays by Sam Shepard, incidental music, [tape?] (1966)

The Witches’ Scenes from "Macbeth", incidental music, tape (1967)

We, incidental music for radio play, tape (1970) [with Vladimir Ussachevsky]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Mallards - well they crop up in electronic music more often than you'd think!

Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Co.

and the depraved scientist character Mallard in Blectum from Blechdom's macabre imaginary saga (first track here is "Rock-A-Mallard")

Pauline cracks wise

This 1977 compilation of works by women electronic composers was recently reissued. 

Interestingly the neutral title - New Music For Electronic and Recorded Media - doesn't draw attention to the femaleness of the contents.

I picked up an original copy many years ago and by coincidence dug it out and gave it another spin not so long ago -  the first time since acquisition. And noticed something about the inner sleeve: 

What's that bloke with the mustache doing amid the array of portraits? 

It's Pauline Oliveros having a little joke - submitting some bow-tied baldie's photo in lieu of a proper portrait.

Something else that caught my eye - how very different Laurie Anderson presented at that time, from her later New Wavey image... 

Is normcore the right word? 

Here's another pic of her from 1977

Her two musical contributions to New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media are fairly different from the United States / "O Superman" / Big Science type stuff....  spoken word elements, but much more naturalistic. 

Pauline O's inclusion is her classic Puccini subversion

Another goodie is Laurie Spiegel's "Appalachian Grove"

Here's the original back cover with liner notes from Charles Amirkhanian, who seems to have instigated the compilation. 

esto era mañana / música electrónica femenina

These tunes appears in a playlist + commentary at The Wire of mind-bending works by Latin-American female electronic composers, among them Vânia Dantas Leite, Beatriz Ferreyra and Nelly Moretto .... the playlist is compilated and annotated by Alejandra Cardenas, co-editor of Switched On: The Dawn of Electronic Sound by Latin American Women.  

Published by Contingent Sounds out of Berlin, the  book represents a double decentering of the received narrative about electronic music history: it focuses on the Latin American contribution, and further focuses on the role of female pioneers such as Graciela Castillo, Hilda Dianda, Jocy de Oliveira, Renée Pietrafesa Bonnet  among many others

Co-edited by Luis Alvarado of Buh Records, a Peruvian label that specialises in reissuing Latin American avant-garde and experimental music, including works by Jacqueline Nova and Oksana Linde

.

Release rationale: 

"The official history of 20th-century avant-garde electronic music has been predominantly narrated from the point of view of Anglo-American and Western European experiences and largely remained focused on its male protagonists. To destabilize this history, this editorial project presents a collection of perspectives, essays, interviews, archival photos, and work reviews centered on the early electronic music production by Latin American female creators, who were active from the 1960s to the 1980s. The book also brings us closer to the work of a new generation of researchers who have focused on offering a non-canonical reading of the history of music and technology in Latin America. The publication is the record of a new vision, an account of the condition of being a woman in the field of music technology at a time when this was a predominantly masculine domain.... 

"The texts that make up this publication are organized spatially and conceptually, rather than following a chronology. The selection of female composers profiled sheds light on a variety of relevant aspects: key musical contexts, experiments with technologies (such as tape, electronic synthesis, the first commercial synthesizers), diverse formats (i.e., radio art, electroacoustic pieces, installation, multimedia, theater, film, etc.), intertwined with themes, such as migration, memory, identity, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, social engagement, the acceptance of electronic music, etc. Moreover, the framework of this editorial project opened a space for intergenerational dialogue and a meeting of aesthetics, as many of the authors gathered as collaborators are composers and sound artists themselves....

Edited by: Luis Alvarado and Alejandra Cárdenas

Composers and sound artists featured in this historical account include: 

Alicia Urreta, Beatriz Ferreyra, Elsa Justel, Eulalia Bernard, Graciela Castillo, Hilda Dianda, Ileana Pérez Velázquez, Irina Escalante Chernova, Iris Sagüesa, Jacqueline Nova, Jocy de Oliveira, Leni Alexander, Margarita Paksa, Marietta Veulens, Mónica O’Reilly Viamontes, Nelly Moretto, Oksana Linde, Patricia Belli, Renée Pietrafesa Bonnet, Rocío Sanz Quirós, Teresa Burga, Vania Dantas Leite, among others.

YouTube Playlist 

two kinds of avant-electronic

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."

c'était demain (RIP Francis Dhomont)

Aloysius on Dhomont:

"When he was asked to create a work celebrating musique concrete’s 50th anniversary, Francis Dhomont was uniquely qualified for the job. He’d experimented with a kind of proto-concrete before the term existed, and had been quietly present for all the discoveries and conflicts that arose along the expedition led by Pierre Schaeffer. One of the central recurring motifs in “Cycle of Sound” is a sequence lifted from the opening seconds of Schaeffer’s “Etude in Objects”. What’s striking is how Dhomont takes these sound objects, now rusty ancient museum pieces, and enchants them into a shimmering material which casts unpredictable trails of light in its wake. It’s a beautiful effect which elevates the original sounds to a higher plane. The cycle is dedicated to “musique concrete’s unfortunate creator”, which itself is a quotation… it’s how Schaeffer, the burningly curious yet forever disappointed explorer, once referred to himself. With this context in mind, Dhomont’s magician tricks with Schaeffer’s sounds feel like a touching rebuttal to the latter’s pessimism, a way of saying, “Don't despair! Look how far we’ve come, thanks to the possibilities you opened up!” The work is rich with other allusions, like the spooky recurring presence of medieval choral music (probably related to Dhomont’s contention that musique concrete was the Ars Nova of the 20th century), and a drone passage interrupted by blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flashbacks to classic works of concrete—ephemeral yet potent phantoms. A former student of Nadia Boulenger, Dhomont absorbed both the aesthetics of the “old world” and European modernism through lived experience. While the initial impression that “Cycle of Sound” generates is one of blinding futurism and alienness, the work's inventiveness is inseparable from the cultural erudition and lived memory that went into it."

 

97!

Coiner of the term "Cinéma pour l’oreille" 

French, but sometimes described as Canadian, as he lived and worked in Quebec for a long period

Interestingly, in this 2006 interview with Computer Music Journal, Francis Dhomont says that he independently arrived at musique concrete techniques at the same time as Pierre Schaeffer, quite unawares. And both of them used other methods before adopting tape as the medium: 

"One can produce musique concrete with any medium; despite the fact that it's made with computers, it's still musique concrete. It used to be tape recorders-it was always done with a support medium. Pierre Schaeffer used the flexible disks with needles . .. that was the first thing. I started around the same time as him - without knowing him - but I worked with a Webster sound recorder (an American brand) with a magnetic wire. It was a wire made of very thin steel. I had a roll of it. It sat over at the side, I would pull some out, and then I would record on it. Magnetic wire had been invented a long time prior by Valdemar Poulsen, and this Webster was meant for businesspeople - an early kind of Dictaphone. I found it in the years just after the war; the Americans came over not only with guns but also with recorders! The uncle of one of my friends had one; he worked with an American firm. I experimented a bit with it and thought it quite fantastic. So I started working with one, making musique concrete, without knowing that musique concrete already existed.... It would have been between 1946 and 1948. I would have been 20-22 years old."

So he was doing stuff with wire-recorder at nearly the same time as the chap in Egypt, Halim El-Dabh.  

Fragments from Dhomont's write-up for  “…et autres utopies” –

"these aural mirages...  creatures of illusion... these  aural ‘non-lieux’, these chimeras of perception, resulting from treatments and made from unlikely parts that are losing their identity... are fictional beings born out of a dreamer’s nomadic invention. … attempting to avoid traditional music codes, disregarding their imperatives, and offering a stream of mental images to our psyche.... ”

A literary dude, like so many of these French concrete types, e.g. 

this track, inspired by the "Old Ocean!" section of Lautreamont's Chants du Maldoror!

A detailed fan breakdown / evocation of that album here, with Dhomont quotes

Riedl on Time ( das war morgen series 379 of ????)

 

x

mondmuziek / dit was morgen (Henk you very much for the mindblowing sounds)

 

also 

Wild that this stuff was being done in the late 1950s

And that it's so listenable, and for-want-of-a-better musical, as well as technically groundbreaking 

the Pril of it all

 

There's only a couple of pieces to be found out there by this groovy lady, who was in the thick of the action at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, but both are excellent.